The Post Office's learning and development centre in Midrand. (Photo: Gallo Images / Foto24 / Felix Dlangamandla) One of the great differences between our generation and that of most of our children, is that you and I can probably remember the first time we went into a post office.
I was with my Dutch Opa, a tall, often formally dressed man who was doing the best thing he could for his young and often rather loud and unkempt grandson.
He was taking me to the post office to start a savings book.
And in that book he was placing money, money that would be saved and added to, so that over time, his grandson (never good with maths) would finally understand the magic of compound interest.
It was a formal building somewhere in Rondebosch or Mowbray in Cape Town. I have no idea if the building still exists, but as the SA Post Office is still the organisation with the biggest property network in the country, it might.
And I suspect it might be worth a lot more now than it was in about 1981.
My friend Mthunzi tells me that his first memory of a post office was in the same year, in Emondlo, KwaZulu-Natal. It was the township right next to Vryheid, shorn of its status of the rather short-lived “Nieuwe Republiek” (Fun fact: It was once recognised by both Germany and Portugal).
He went there with his parents to arrange a conference call, a regular moment when his mom would speak to her family and siblings in Vryheid and Meadowlands.
This was not a Zoom call. This was through a switchboard, which had an operator who had to do all of the connections for you (and probably listened to everything you said).
The only people who don’t have such memories are our children. I don’t think they could imagine a situation where someone would go to a place to send another person a piece of paper. I mean, this is a generation whose first experience of phone calls involved them being shown off to relatives through a five-megapixel, front-facing camera.
My later memories of the post office – such as the time I went to four separate branches one Christmas Eve trying to get a car licence disc about four years ago – I’ve tried to put out of my mind.
But I still felt a slight twinge when I saw that the business rescue practitioners at the SA Post Office felt they had to spell out the consequences of what closing it down would be.
And those consequences would be awful: the forced sale of hundreds of properties, workers losing their jobs and families, their livelihoods, and some communities would have no way of doing things that they are doing now.
I do think, if you live in an urban area, you might find there is no need for a post office. You just don’t ever go to one. Why would you?
But there are other ways this could go.
Dr Kameshnee Naidoo is a visiting adjunct professor at the Wits Southern Centre for Inequality and has studied post offices for the United Nations.
She [recently told The Money Show](https://omny.fm/shows/the-money-show/reimagining-sapo-unlocking-a-developmental-state-through-inclusion-and-connectivity) that a post office in a rural area is a vital piece of “common social infrastructure. It’s a place where people can meet and do their business.”
And she points out that “for people in outlying areas, the Post Office with its branch network gives them access to digital infrastructure, which provides an easy on-ramp for South Africans to enter the new era”.
Crucially, post offices are also used to transport medicines to some rural areas. You can imagine the consequences of cutting that off for thousands of people.
It’s a compelling vision, and you could easily make a case that this is the kind of thing the government should subsidise.
But for the business rescue practitioners currently running it, their knocks on the door of National Treasury have been consistently rebuffed.
Last year, they did what many government entities do and campaigned for money before the Budget. This year, they did the same, asking for R3.8-billion.
And no, they obviously didn’t get it.
You can see why Finance Minister Enoch Godongwana would say no. There are so many other demands, and previous bailouts for the damn thing have failed.
But in the great scheme of things, R3.8-billion is not that much. I mean, the City of Joburg must easily waste that much every week, and no one stops them.
I think for the Post Office to survive, it needs a champion. Someone willing to fight for it, but who also sketches a vision that is so wonderful that no one can argue against it.
And it might need the government to give up some control of it, perhaps some kind of private sector involvement to really get it going, but with a subsidy.
It may be too late for my children to ever have their first memory of a post office.
But perhaps, I too one day will be formally dressed, as I take a slightly unkempt and hopefully loud grandchild by the hand and walk them into a post office to prepare for their future. DM