(Debate in parliament on statement by Minister on socio-economic interventions to mitigate the impact of Covid-19)
After a seemingly endless series of broken promises, ordinary poverty-stricken South Africans are expected to survive on an utterly inadequate social relief grant of just R350. Although the interventions seem noble at first glance, the long-term impact still has to be felt.
The time has come for the Department of Social Development to be honest with South Africans about the aid that they are supposed to be receiving to help them through the Covid-19 crisis.
The grant of R350 was announced with great fanfare and it was promised that payments will be made as from the middle of May – these were empty promises right from the start. Only ten people benefited from the promised payment on the 15th of May.
The promise that applications that were submitted in May will be paid out by the end of that month also did not realise. Not a single one out of six million applications and three million approvals has been paid out.
And then the promise that the outstanding May-applications will be paid out in June also did not realise as the system that was supposed to assess the applications was flawed.
After that, a promise was made that the outstanding payments for May and June will be paid out together, but that was incorrectly reported and misunderstood.
After backtracking and saying that the grant of R350 will not be fully paid out, the problems were again blamed on incorrect reporting and another misunderstanding. And now, apparently, double payments are being made, but only at post offices.
In the Freedom Charter, the ANC alleges that socio-economic development is a birth right of all South Africans. But the people who are not black enough to receive aid for their small business enterprises, who are not poor enough to receive grants or who do not have friends in the ANC so that they can qualify for UIF TERS grants are being marginalised. They are not entitled to that birth right which the ANC says they are. The ANC has forsaken its own Freedom Charter.
Although these grants are meagre, the FF Plus demands to know how the government plans to prevent it from becoming a permanent arrangement and if these grants are terminated, how does the government expect the poor beneficiaries to survive without them?
It will come as no surprise if the government announces in October that these grants are now a permanent fixture in the welfare landscape. Taxpayers will once again be expected to pay for a politically motivated grant which is designed to persuade voters to vote for the ANC.
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