The Ministry of Finance has urged people to be patient with the slow Emergency Income Grant (EIG) application process, attributing it to the high volume of applications.
A media statement issued on Saturday by the ministry’s public relations officer, Tonateni Shidhudhu, said the ministry has taken note of complaints that the text line for the applications of the grant is unable to reply to some people.
He said this is because the system is congested by the large number of applications that have congested it as a lot of people try to send SMSes at the same time.
“To mitigate this issue MTC is redeveloping the application to handle more applications and this will take 84 hours. It is thus anticipated to be up and running to handle more applications by Monday afternoon,” said Shidhudhu, adding that the ministry has managed to process some applications that are currently being verified by other partners, and the ministry is hopeful to start payouts by Tuesday afternoon.
“We are urging the public to be calm as we are improving the system, and we are confident that by Monday afternoon we will be able to handle more applications at one go,” he said.
Minister of Finance Iipumbu Shiimi launched the grant last week to help people in the informal sector who have lost income due to the lockdown necessitated by the state of emergency to combat the Coronavirus pandemic.
Source: The Namibian
