The Justice Department has finally decided that, instead of people having to join queues at the Magistrates’ Court each month to get their maintenance, they will be implementing a project whereby those same people are paid by EFT. It is amazing that for so long in fact such a staff intensive method of paying people has been utilised and that payments by EFT’s have not been the norm all this time.

It must be stressed that these are typically matters involving smaller maintenance amounts – in fact the Minister gave an example of a lady who has been waiting for her R300,00 monthly maintenance, but most private matters, where the people are represented by private attorneys, obviously result in direct payments between the parties as opposed to needing the intervention of the Court. Certainly, it will give some staff at the Maintenance Court a chance to get on to other work, rather than having to each month pay the same R300,00 to the same person after that poor person has had to stand in a queue half of the day.