I was born in East London, a small, scenic town found along the South African coast of the Eastern Cape. A beautiful, sometimes wild place.
I grew up in the suburb of Berea, and not far from where I lived, there was a post office. As a youngster, I have very fond memories of taking walks hand in hand with my Gran to that post office. There were no such things as emails in the 1960s, only letters and of course the post office. I felt so important when I was trusted to carry that letter for Gran, it felt like there was a purpose and that I was on an important mission!
Outside this post office, there was of course the obligatory big old post box with a slot high up through which letters were posted. The post box was exactly like you would imagine it to be, an old English mailbox. Tall, solid, and red. This was the same cast-iron mailbox that I’m sure is still found across the United Kingdom but has today become few and far between. When you posted a letter then, you got the feeling that once that letter dropped in through the slot, it was safe, secure, and would be delivered to come hell or high water safely to where it needed to be.
What a great adventure to accompany Gran. The mystery and wonder of a little boy when posting that well-sealed, addressed letter with its postage stamp set neatly on the top right-hand corner of the envelope. How important it felt.
Time passes and things change; we grow up, and we learn how the world actually works. In recent times, when I think back about this fond memory, I come to the stark realisation that it has come to an end. In South Africa, where these post offices once stood in the main street of communities offering their service for a couple of cents to get your message to wherever, is now simply gone.
For many who have been around a bit longer than the average person, what remains now is only a vague remnant of the past that has been broken, looted, and slipped into irreversible uselessness.
It’s crucial to remember that the post office has been a vital part of society for centuries. It’s played a key role in communities who relied on the service for basic communication. Mail connected remote areas and farming communities to cities and the world, allowing people to feel part of the greater whole and belonging to something bigger.
If you understand Africa as I doo, you will know what the vastness of the continent means when you discuss its insurmountable remoteness. It is expected that this remoteness could be bridged by digital innovation, but sadly this only works when there is reliable infrastructure in place with electricity, which in many remote areas of Africa remains only a promise. Without this ability to communicate digitally across the modern world, the post offices with their ‘analog’ services remain relevant and still needed in these communities.
South Africa, in this changing environment, even with all the social problems, remains one of the most modern of the African countries. In an African context, it’s not surprising that these pre-digital, analogue postal services and the management of the infrastructure have survived since the digital electronic revolution of the 2000s.
Historically, the South African Post Office had stood out in the minds’ eye of the public for most of its existence as a model of institutional reach and reliability. It was never flashy, but it was dependable, consistent, and trusted to perform day after day. It was an essential, immovable service, and those solid red post boxes made a statement.
The Post Office ran a successful network of roughly 1,300 branches stretching into every corner of the country, even the most remote areas imaginable. It was employing a workforce that gave it a physical presence few other institutions could match. That scale was the point: a post office in a remote town meant a government had reach, services such as pension payments could be collected, a letter could find its recipient.
It was never a profitable business, as branches that did make a profit ended up subsidising branches that did not, and while most of these branches would never make a profit, their communities needed them, so they stayed open.
In the last 10 years or so, even though these branches were needed and served communities with their services, they collapsed with striking speed. The Post Office was forced through circumstances to close a third of all branches, and the workforce was cut from roughly 11,000 to around 6,000–6,400 staff by 2024.
A simple review today will tell you the story that the closures and staff reductions were due to financial failure, and it was this that eventually would cause the death of the Post Office in South Africa. But this does not tell the whole story. It explains what the symptoms of the disease were that caused this death, and that’s it.
Financial analysis from publicly available information found in the media explains that by 2023 the Post Office’s liabilities had climbed to R12.5 billion (USD677 million) against only R4.5 billion (USD244 million) in assets, leaving the organisation R7.9 billion (USD428 million) underwater. An institution once defined by its presence in nearly every community became defined by its absence.
Sensible arguments are made about the Post Office’s failure and diminished footprint being due to technological advances and the world moving on while the Post Office stayed behind. This may well be a contributing cause, but it is not the cause of the diminished profitability and eventual financial collapse.
The story is more complicated.
The truth is, the Post Office’s financial dependency on the state predates any obvious disruption brought about by new, innovative digital communication. In 1997, the Post Office was drawing subsidies from the State to fund unsustainable but necessary businesses. It was not profitable or sustainable; the State eventually took steps to legislate monopoly rights in favour of the Post Office. This legislation protected the Post Office from market competition, giving it protection and the sole right to earn income from the most profitable segments of the market. It solved the immediate problem.
The Post Office effectively went on losing money for decades. This structural decline began in earnest around the mid-2000s, and it just kept going.
Even though all these financial numbers were being bandied around the media, this was never just about a financial failure. Poor governance and leadership failure were reflected in an ongoing pattern of CEO and executive turnover. This all accumulated over time and predating the effective collapse of the Post Office in 2023.
Since as far back as 2004, the then-CEO was charged with fraud and tender irregularities. His successor, also eventually, faced allegations of receiving kickbacks linked to tender contracts. These controversies happened at a time when the organisation should have been focused on preparing for the challenges of a rapidly changing international and domestic communications landscape.
Email had crossed from novelty to default for business correspondence. Letter volumes were declining, and so was the revenue earned. Internet banking and the ATM network were beginning to erode the Post Office payments infrastructure role, particularly in rural areas, and the private courier market was consolidating as it captured higher-margin business from the Post Office.
Effectively, the leadership of the Post Office was not paying attention.
In 2016, the Public Protector released a damning report titled ‘Postponed Delivery’, exposing extensive governance failure. The investigation found over-billing, false billing, misuse of public funds, and untold business practices tainted by corruption. Senior executives soon left due to governance breaches and corruption allegations being made public.
By 2019, the Post Office had suffered from a leadership vacuum for years. Operating without a permanent CEO during a period of worsening financial distress was nonsensical. The absence of stable leadership had effectively undermined almost every effort to reverse its financial decline. The country was concerned that the postal service would collapse and disappear if drastic steps were not taken.
A significant turning point came about only in 2023 when the South African High Court placed the Post Office into business rescue. The board was dissolved, and subsequently, with drastic steps being taken as alluded to above with the closure of branches and reduced staffing, there were steady improvements. This also included improvements in oversight, accountability, governance, and compliance.
The reforms introduced were effective at addressing some of the worst operational weaknesses that had contributed to the business’s long-term decline.
If the collapse had been averted, where does the Post Office find itself today? Well, it’s not all a bad story. Some good has survived, even if the red postbox that I knew is no longer standing there on the pavement.
An application has been made to a local court in June 2026 to end the business rescue, which is a positive step. A new board was appointed to steer the Post Office into the future, but the branch network of post offices is sadly now only 657 and will likely reduce further.
The easiest defence of what happened to the Post Office in South Africa is also the least honest: that digital disruption made the outcome unavoidable. It didn’t. This disruption was the condition, and what actually happened inside the Post Office was the cause.
This was never a technology story; it was always a poor governance story.
The Post Office of the 1960s did not die because the internet arrived. It died because the people entrusted by South Africans with the duty of managing it chose, repeatedly, not to manage it. This makes me feel sad, and I sometimes wonder what my Gran would think about all of this.
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