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# The South African Post Office wants its rescue declared over, but it's still losing money
- URL: https://www.businessbagel.com/post-office-business-rescue-exit-high-care/
- Published: 2026-08-18T03:45:00.000Z
- Updated: 2026-08-18T03:44:59.000Z
- Description: Three years of court-supervised rescue repaired the balance sheet, cost 4,342 jobs and 366 branches, and left the business still losing money.
- Author: Christian Maidman
- Tags: Companies, Business Bagel News, #big

The people who have run the South African Post Office for the last three years would like to hand it back. On 12 June its business rescue practitioners, Anoosh Rooplal and Juanito Damons, asked the high court in Pretoria to declare the plan substantially implemented and end the process. Ten days later they handed the organisation to a new board as a business that can keep trading, however a judge still has to agree.

Business rescue is a debt procedure. The Post Office went into it in July 2023 to stop itself being liquidated, and what it does is hold creditors off while somebody restructures what is owed. That narrow test has gone well, but what rescue cannot do is make anyone post a letter.

The Post Office owed its creditors about R8.7bn when it went in. They have since been paid 12 cents for every rand they were owed, which sounds pretty rough until you see the alternative: liquidation was expected to return about 4 cents. Nearly all of it was paid by August 2024\. What is still owing today is R440m.

## 4,342 jobs and 366 branches

The bill was paid in people and buildings. A retrenchment process cut 4,342 employees by April 2024 and took the monthly wage bill from R211.9m to R115m. Of the branches, 366 closed for good and 657 are still open, some kept because they are the only post office a rural community has.

None of that made the Post Office a better business. Revenue for the year to March 2026 came in at R1.54bn, up R2m on the year before, or about a tenth of a percent. The loss narrowed to R71m from R514m, the smallest in years. But it is still a loss, after the debt has been cleared and the wage bill nearly halved. Acting chief executive Fathima Gany calls the next phase high care, the hospital ward after intensive care. She says the Post Office is at its tipping point, where cutting further would mean shutting it down.

## The R3.8bn that never came

Government put in R2.4bn. A second instalment of R3.8bn written into the plan has never been paid, Business Day reports, and in February parliament's own legal advisers said it was not a binding commitment. Without it, the practitioners say, parts of the plan could not be done. The IT and broadband upgrades it was meant to fund now sit with the communications department and the new board.

Gany's answer to what a national post office is for now is access: logistics, moving money and government services for people that commercial arithmetic does not reach. It is also still South Africa's designated postal operator, obliged to deliver basic post to everyone regardless of where they live or what they earn. That obligation does not lapse when the rescue does. No date has been set to hear the application.