The system for providing the Social Relief of Distress Grant (SRD grant) is “broken”, said counsel for the Institute for Economic Justice (IEJ) and #PayTheGrants in the Pretoria high court on Tuesday.
The two organisations were making their case that the current regulations governing the grant breach constitutional rights and make the R370 grant inaccessible to millions of people who need it.
Jason Brickhill, counsel for the two organisations, said their case was about the “most vulnerable members of our society” — people who, by definition, were surviving on less than R1,000 a month. There are approximately 7- to 8-million people currently receiving the SRD grant and a similar number “who are eligible for the grant but are currently not receiving it”.
“This is not an ordinary matter on your lordship’s roll,” he said. There “rests on all of us a solemn responsibility ... to approach this matter with a focus on the rights of the grant beneficiaries, with a focus on how to fix the problems with the system”.
The IEJ and #PayTheGrants have challenged several aspects of the regulations governing the SRD grant: that the application process is online-only and so excludes people with limited access to the internet; that the system uses a bank and government database-verification system leading to millions of people who should be receiving the grant being wrongly excluded; that the process for appealing against exclusion does not allow people to bring new information when they appeal.
An example given by Brickhill was an applicant who was refused the grant because his name was found on the NSFAS database. But while he applied for NSFAS funding, he never received it. If he had been allowed to bring his letter from NSFAS declining his application for student funding, he would have succeeded on appeal, but this was not allowed by the system because it was “new information”.
Brickhill said the government’s response was to “seek to make it the problem of the beneficiaries” — saying beneficiaries should ensure their information is up to date. But this was not good enough, he said. Government “cannot sit back and reject, wrongly, millions of people; then say it’s their fault”.
The bank verification system was “a blunt instrument”, said Brickhill. As soon as more than R624 entered into a person’s account bank account, they got rejected in that month. The “brokenness of the system” became even more apparent when only about 1% of appeals were successful, he said.
The IEJ and #PayTheGrants also challenged the way Sassa and the department of social development interpreted the meaning of “income” and “financial support” in the law to mean that any money “from anywhere” that came into a person’s bank account — even if it was a one-off donation from a friend or due to a shared bank account.
They have asked the court to make a declaration that “income” means money received on a regular basis from formal or informal employment, business activities or investments, and “financial support” mean regular amounts received on the basis of a legal right. Their suggested meaning was a “constructive, sensible” one, said Brickhill. But he invited the National Treasury, the department of social development and Sassa to propose their own wording.
The two organisations also argue that the value of the grant has not increased — except for a recent R20 rise this year — and, unlike all the other social grants, has not kept up with inflation. The same applies to the income threshold. This was a “retrogression” in the delivery of the constitutional right to social assistance, Brickhill argued.
The two organisations have asked the court to order that the minister of social development has a duty to devise and implement a plan to address this retrogression. While the government claimed this was far-reaching, Brickhill said what they were asking from the court was modest. “The relief [the court order they want] is only a plan, m’lord,” he said.
Then there was the fact that over a million beneficiaries who had been approved to receive grants were not receiving them. The IEJ and #PayTheGrants second counsel, Michael Mbikiwa, argued that the number of approved beneficiaries not getting their grants had been increasing. At the time the case was launched, in May 2023, 84% of beneficiaries had been paid — 16% had not. In September 2023, Sassa’s statistics said that 1.2-million approved beneficiaries were not paid.
Mbikiwa referred to individual affidavits from 13 people to show the “dire human impact” this had. He said the department of social development had not responded to these affidavits individually. They were “worse than ignored. They are treated disdainfully,” he said.
Even though these affidavits were submitted to court alongside statistical evidence, the response from the department was to say that a small number of affidavits could not be representative of the whole, said Mbikiwa.
Brickhill also addressed the argument made in court papers by the National Treasury that what was sought by his clients was unaffordable, and that they were seeking to draw the court into making budgetary decisions for the government. He said budgetary decisions were about the weighting of priorities — there was no specific tax for social assistance that created a finite pot of money to be spent on the SRD grant.
The Treasury’s defence on affordability was “effectively a generic one”.
“It could, m’lord, be copied and pasted into any other social rights case — to say that ‘we cannot afford to fix pit latrines on rural primary schools’, ‘we cannot afford to employ more nurses’ ... The only relevant question is whether there is an absolute barrier in providing an increase in the SRD grant that shows not a single cent can be spent.”
He said his argument was supported by the fact that the National Treasury had first claimed in court papers that an increase was out of the question, only to give a R20 increase this year. Also, there had been consistent underspending over the last few budget cycles on the SRD grant, leading to a cut in the SRD budget.
On Wednesday the court will hear argument from the National Treasury, the minister of social development and Sassa.
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