The South African Post Office is trying to leave business rescue without a single committed private sector partner, without guaranteed government funding and with an unresolved statutory creditor claim that two funds are now using to oppose its exit.

That was the picture that emerged on Tuesday when the Post Office, its business rescue practitioners and its newly appointed board briefed parliament’s portfolio committee on communications & digital technologies on the transition “from business rescue to a sustainable public enterprise”.

Joint business rescue practitioner Anoosh Rooplal told the committee that partnerships had been “an important feature of the plan” and had received serious attention “from day one”, he said, but “there was no partner willing to put money into the business” while the entity remained in rescue. He described it as “a bit of a chicken and egg” situation, arguing that exiting rescue would itself remove the uncertainty that had kept investors away. Post Office acting CEO Fathima Gany made the same argument to TechCentral in July.

TechCentral reported in December that government had opened the Post Office up to private sector partners to help rebuild the business. Committee chair Khusela Diko noted at the outset of Tuesday’s meeting that the invitation to the private sector had gone out “in December or so of last year”, that “we’re nine months down the line” and that there was “still no indication … whether there is progress”.

Communications minister Solly Malatsi acknowledged the process had “moved much slower than we had all anticipated”. No binding deal has been signed.

Sustainable? ‘The answer is no’

Gany was candid on Tuesday about where that leaves the institution, telling the committee: “Business rescue preserved and stabilised the Post Office. It did not complete the recovery of the institution. These are two different things,” she told MPs. “If the question is whether the Post Office is sustainable today, the answer is no.”

She argued there was “no single intervention” that would carry the company from recoverability to sustainability, and that partnerships were “a strategic pillar of sustainability … not a substitute for the sustainability strategy”. The strategy, she said, would also require appropriate funding of the public mandate, earned revenue, modernisation and commercialisation of the Post Office’s property and infrastructure.

Read: The Post Office has fixed its books but not its business

On what has actually been achieved, the business rescue practitioners pointed to a request-for-information process that drew 95 responses covering 129 opportunities across six clusters. The Development Bank of Southern Africa has come on board as transaction adviser, and a related request for proposals was issued on 17 July and closed on 7 August. Live, revenue-earning initiatives so far include an e-registered mail service, tower, mast and rooftop leasing, and a national lottery distribution arrangement. None of that amounts to the anchor investment the rescue plan envisaged.

The practitioners filed their application to end business rescue in the high court Pretoria on 12 June, but a court date has not yet been granted, in part because the exit is being opposed.

More than 99% of the 12c-in-the-rand compromise owed to creditors under the adopted rescue plan has been paid. What remains outstanding is the 18c contingent statutory creditor compromise, which relates to the South African Revenue Service, the Post Office Retirement Fund and the Medipos medical scheme. It was the retirement fund and Medipos that filed to oppose the practitioners’ application, and the Post Office has been engaging both parties to reach a commercial settlement.

Gany told the committee that the Post Office “can close historical debt once the 18c is dealt with”. The R3.8-billion government tranche, to which the 18c top-up dividend was a condition, was never released, and the matter has been carried into the company’s medium-term expenditure framework submission to the fiscus. Deputy communications minister Mondli Gungubele warned that if the opposition succeeded it “risks taking us back where we don’t want to go”, to the negative position of March 2023.

The handover to the new board is not clean. The board, chaired by Regina Sizakele Madlala, was appointed on 5 June and inaugurated on 22 June, but until the rescue process is formally terminated, the practitioners remain the accounting authority and the board reports to them.

Madlala was frank to the committee about the constraint that creates. Her board’s committees were “not yet functional given the dependency on the business rescue practitioner company secretary services”, she said, and the board “has not been able to exercise an oversight” role. In some instances, she added, only the practitioners honour a board meeting invitation. A formal induction is expected in September and the annual general meeting is scheduled for 11 September.

Books fixed, business not

Malatsi confirmed that the business rescue practitioners “are still in charge of running” the Post Office for now. Every senior executive role except one was being filled in an acting capacity when the practitioners took over, and the board has been directed to fill the permanent CEO, chief financial officer, chief operating officer and chief audit executive posts as its first priority.

The briefing opened on the Post Office’s first unqualified audit opinion in six years, but the numbers underneath remain fragile. Acting CFO Lenny Govender confirmed the auditor-general had flagged a material uncertainty related to going concern, tied to a monthly cash-flow deficit in which spending still exceeds revenue.

The presentation put the company’s net asset value at a positive R751-million while its current ratio sits at just 0.66, meaning current liabilities exceed current assets. That is below the positive R840-million the practitioners reported in June for the year to 31 March 2026, a difference the presentation did not explain.

That is set against a 2023 low point of a provisional liquidation order, liabilities exceeding assets by R7.5-billion and a net loss of about R2.2-billion. Some 4 342 staff were retrenched and the branch network was cut from more than a thousand outlets to 657.

MPs were unconvinced that the worst is truly behind the Post Office. The DA’s Tsholofelo Bodlani called it “worrying” that the practitioners were exiting “with no solid private partnerships”, leaving the company vulnerable to its creditors once the litigation moratorium lifts. Business rescue shields a company from legal proceedings, and that protection falls away when the rescue ends.

Read: How the Post Office plans to rise from the dead

The MK Party’s Adil Nchabeleng asked who had been held accountable for the original failure and what self-sustaining revenue management expected without further capital injections. The DA’s Sbongiseni Vilakazi welcomed Gany’s refusal to “sugarcoat” the position but said it was hard to see how an outsider could be more positive than the Post Office’s own leadership.

Diko asked the Post Office to return with “a road map to sustainability” carrying clear timelines and a defined partnership pathway, and reiterated that the committee was not calling for privatisation. The general sentiment, she said, was that the Post Office is “not out of the woods yet”, but “all things being equal, we are further than we were before”. – © 2026 NewsCentral Media