“Letters should go with the regularity of the sun.” This was the motto of 19th-century English novelist Anthony Trollope, who, in addition to his prolific writing, spent 33 years working for the General Post Office (GPO). He created many of its delivery routes and systems, including the invention of the red pillar postbox. He believed a postal service was only as good as its reliability, and delays were a failure of trust.
Trollope also believed the GPO should be a conscious servant of democracy. He wrote that “the Post Office is bound to deal out its services with the strictest equity”, regardless of rank or wealth, and that all parts of the country should be served equally, from London to the remotest Irish hamlet.
In 1877, in his retirement, Trollope visited all the territories of Southern Africa, taking a professional interest in postal arrangements. “One cannot post a letter,” he wrote in his book South Africa (1878), “with the assurance that it will arrive, or arrive in time, or be answered within any calculable period.”
He might have been writing about the South African Post Office (Sapo) in 2025. It is frozen in a state of business rescue, in a death spiral of deteriorating service, vanishing customers and steadily falling revenue. It could be the first national postal service to disappear.
Of course it has not always been so. Sapo was formed in 1910 from the four separate postal systems of Natal, the Cape, the Free State and Transvaal. It was soon firmly established nationally on the British model, with standardised rates, efficient rail transport and a footprint that covered the entire country. For a century it provided an economical and mostly reliable service to all.
Like its global peers, Sapo in the 21st century has had to face ever fiercer headwinds from digitised competition. But unlike its global peers, Sapo failed to adapt its business model and ignored potential rescue through partial privatisation or a public-private partnership (PPP).
It failed to understand the potential synergies between the post office network and Postbank, a partnership that Mark Barnes, CEO from 2016 to 2019, regarded as essential for Sapo to survive and thrive. When the government insisted on splitting the two, Barnes resigned. It was a golden opportunity missed, not least to relieve taxpayers of subsidising Sapo by the billions.
There was another opportunity. After Barnes resigned, as this week’s cover story explains, he put together a consortium that offered to buy Sapo’s assets for an estimated R5.2bn, with the state retaining a share and Sapo able to maintain and extend its social role, using what Barnes describes as its “commercially irreplaceable footprint”.
And there were precedents to draw on, close to home. Landline telephone operator Telkom was split from the Post Office in 1991, partly privatised in 1997 and listed on the JSE in 2002. The government retains a direct stake of about 40%. Even after listing, Telkom was still legally required to provide telecom services to underserved and rural areas, even when these were not commercially viable. Sapo could easily have followed this route.
So there was no shortage of ideas and realistic options. Whether these were resisted because of ideological rigidities, ignorance or corrupt impulses is impossible to say. Resisted they were, and it is now hard to see how a once-great national service will be able to do anything but sound the last post.
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