I confirm that REBOSA has issued legal process against the EAAB.
I confirm that the EAAB is defending the matter. We are in the process of preparing our answering affidavit and we have served the notice of intention to oppose the application.
The application is to compel the EAAB to issue FFCs. Our response to this is as follows:
• We note that this is a persons livelihood and as such all compliant FFC applicants deserve to hold their FFCs so they can do business. We are committed to ensuring that every legitimate FFC applicant is able to get his or her certificate in time and is able to operate.
• The issue of delayed production of FFCs has been a problem at EAAB for the past seven to ten years. Despite the historical problems the EAAB in 2020 delivered its best ever performance recording. On 23 December 2020, we had issued over 33000 FFCs. At the time we believed were all the compliant FFCs and met all the requirements.
• There was a further three thousand applications where there were outstanding documents and these applicants were communicated to at various intervals in late 2020 and informed that the FFCs would not be issued until the outstanding documents were presented.
• The application before court relates to 210 agents that allege that they did not received FFCs. We are going through the list and have noted that some have already been issued, some are duplicates, some have outstanding information and with those that that are new we have already issued the FFCs. The FFCs were issued as from Saturday when we first received the list.
• We wish to place on record that we have from October 2020 to date issued over 35000 FFCs. This would mean the ones that are referred to court are less than three (3) per cent of the total number of FFCs issued.
Further we will be registering our concern at court that we have standing meetings with REBOSA where staff of the EAAB meet Staff of REBOSA bi-weekly .The teams met in October 2020 but the list of these outstanding FFCs that is now being presented to court was never presented at that forum where it could have been timeously resolved.
However, I have established a task team that will look into this matter and give a full report and proposal to make sure that this situation does not arise ever again.
Further we are also in the process of overhauling and updating our Information Technology system. The service provider should be in place by the end of March 2021. We believe that the overhaul of the system which has not been changed in the past ten years will immensely improve all areas of our performance in the course of migrating to PPRA.
Date of Issue: 04 February 2021
