A long queue of pensioners stand outside a shopping centre, not a chair in sight. Their only explanation for an hours-long delay in receiving their social grant is that the money has not yet arrived. It is a pattern that will be repeated in the days that follow.
Across town, a post office that was once a hub of activity and informal trading now stands abandoned. Those who once distributed social relief of distress grants now join the line to collect them themselves.
In a room down the road, someone is unemployed and struggling to put food on the table but is unable to access even R350 that could help feed their child.
This is a picture repeated across the country, as the minister of social development sits “wondering” why many of those who need the grant are ignored by those with the power to help.
Minister Lindiwe Zulu recently asked the South African Social Security Agency (Sassa) to investigate a significant decrease in the number of people receiving the R350 social relief of distress funding.
She may find the answer in the decisions made about grants over the past few months, all under her watch.
When the R350 grant was first implemented as a relief measure to help those most devastated by the Covid-19 pandemic and its effects on the economy, it was hailed by many here and abroad.
Its relief to nearly seven-and-a-half million South Africans every month was applauded as a rare success story and gave SA its first real glimpse that a basic income grant might be possible.
Many experts have weighed in on whether the country can afford its current spending on social grants, but for all the country’s money problems it is already morally bankrupt if it turns its back on the most vulnerable.
But as the applications kept flooding in and the scale of need became more apparent, government became increasingly tight-fisted.
Soon Zulu was responding to pleas for assistance by standing by as water cannons sprayed those applying for temporary disability grants, and tinkered with a R350 grant distribution channel that was already fragile and plagued by empty promises.
A decision was made to no longer pay R350 grants at post office branches, instead moving payments to supermarkets across the country, and to change the threshold to receive the R350 grant.
While it was paraded as streamlining the distribution channel, all it did was drive traffic to private sector retailers and disempower those working to escape poverty.
Many experts have weighed in on whether the country can afford its current spending on social grants, but for all the country’s money problems it is already morally bankrupt if it turns its back on the most vulnerable.
By changing the rules that anyone who earns more than R350 a month does not qualify for the grant, Zulu’s department was creating a dependency state that punished those who were using their R350 grant to help fund their plans and ambitions to earn more.
Though Zulu later U-turned on the decision and increased the threshold to R624, the fact that fewer people are applying and qualifying for the grant tells the story of a department working against itself.
By cutting out the post office as the R350 grant collection point, it was giving retailers a piece of government’s pie rather than using the existing resources government has, and often had to bail out. Such a move did not relieve the “pressure” on post office branches but closed many of them down once and for all.
Instead of trying to understand the struggles of recipients and how to fit the R350 grant into a larger work or social upliftment programme, Zulu has chosen to take a page out of the Ramaphosa book of shock and task teams.
If the minister and her department do not properly address the issues of grants in SA, including assisting those who are eligible and allowing those in need to be eligible, they may soon find themselves standing among those in the unemployment queue.
