The R350 social relief of distress grant (SRD) is a “temporary measure” for people in financial distress and whose circumstances may change at any time, the department of social development said in court papers on Monday.
It was not a basic income grant, said the department, explaining why recipients would not get their R350 in a given month, if their bank picked up a balance above R624.
The department’s chief director of legal services, Nkosinathi Dladla, was responding to the court case brought by the Institute for Economic Justice (IEF) and #PayTheGrants, which have challenged the constitutionality of the regulations implementing the latest version of the SRD — for the 2023/24 year.
The SRD grant was first introduced as a temporary measure during the Covid-19 lockdown then extended as the financial impact of the pandemic continued to bite. Praised for taking the edge off the crippling poverty faced by millions of people in South Africa, new iterations of it have been promulgated for the past two years.
The two organisations, represented in court by the Socio-Economic Rights Institute, have challenged the latest regulations on several grounds, saying there are significant differences to previous versions of the grant. They say the net result of these legal and constitutional defects is that only half of about 16-million people who should be eligible to receive the grants are accessing them. In court papers, Dladla said that “only around 8-million individuals met the qualifying criteria”.
One of the grounds challenged by the IEJ and #PayTheGrants was the way the regulations determined whether a person qualifies for the monthly R350 payment. The regulations refer to “insufficient means”, which is defined as a person not in receipt of “income” or “financial support”.
In a founding affidavit, the IEJ’s Gilad Isaacs said that a constitutional reading of the regulations would mean that income and financial support “only cover payments which give a person the ability to support themselves”.
“These include regular payments to which the recipient is legally entitled,” Isaacs added.
The terms should not cover payments that enable a person to meet their needs in a given month, “but which are paid on an ad hoc discretionary or even one-off basis”, said Isaacs.
The SRD grant was aimed at assisting people who were employable and who were temporarily in financial distress with no financial means from any source whatsoever.
— Nkosinathi Dladla, department of social development’s chief director of legal services
The IEJ and #PayTheGrant have included in their application, affidavits from people whose applications were rejected because Sassa’s bank verification system — one of the new measures introduced in the latest regulations — had picked up “small and inconsistent donations from family members”, and money that belonged to a relative but registered because they were sharing a bank account.
But Dladla said Isaacs has misconstrued the purpose of the SRD grant. It was aimed at assisting people who were employable and who were “temporarily in financial distress with no financial means from any source whatsoever”.
If an individual was getting support from family or friends “or have other financial means to survive above the poverty line, that individual will not qualify for that month as they would have financial means to survive in that particular month”, he said.
This did not mean the person would be permanently disqualified, he said. “The verification is conducted every month to check on whether the same individual’s financial means have changed and if [they have changed], and they do not have any source of income in that month, they may qualify for that month and receive the R350,” he said.
Dladla said the normal means test, used with other social grants, could not be used with the SRD, because it would be “an onerous system to implement” and less people would qualify. It would take longer, result in delays — defeating the whole purpose of the SRD, which was to provide immediate relief.
Dladla said the bank verification system was “one of the most effective and accurate mechanisms” to retrieve applicants’ financial means for a given month. Child support grant money is not counted in determining the R624 threshold, he said.
He said that the allegation that SRD applicants came from households where members shared bank accounts was “hypothetical”, “highly improbable” and “far-fetched”. The targeted people were of working age and were actively seeking employment. Once employed, they would need their own bank account, he said.
In these circumstances, the government’s interpretation was constitutional, says Dladla.
Another aspect of the regulations challenged by the IEJ and #PayTheGrant was that the application process was exclusively online, with no possibility for an in-person application at the Sassa offices. Isaacs said that for some applicants, this presented an “insuperable barrier”, as they did not have access to internet, digital devices or may lack digital literacy.
But Dladla defended this too, saying the online application was “not complicated at all” and applicants could go to their family members and neighbours for assistance. One phone may be used for five applications, he said.
“It should also be highlighted that the provision is temporary and set to expire on March 31 2024 and therefore, there is no justification to employ new resources with no guarantee that it will be a permanent feature, taking into consideration the fiscal constraints,” said Dladla.
The minister of finance has also applied to intervene in the application and is expected, in court papers, to address the fiscal implications of the litigation.
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