SASSA and the Failure of Grant Payments

The South African Social Security Agency has achieved something noteworthy.  It has made payments of social grants early for the Christmas season, but then withdrawn those payments that were not collected earlier than usual, leaving 35 000 recipients destitute for the month.  Noting that the number of persons who would not receive their grants for December was “only 35 000” out of a total of 11 000 000, the spokesman for SASSA stated that, in his opinion, that was not a bad result!  He also pointed out that SASSA had notified grant recipients of the early payment date by advertisements in newspapers.

Perhaps it is time for a reality check.

The grant provides an absolute minimum amount of money for a single person to buy food for a month.  When the Minister of Finance smugly announced an increase in the grant amount by R50 per month in 2013, on the same day the price of a two litre bottle of milk increased at Pick n Pay by fifty-six cents.  Let us assume that a pensioner uses for litres of milk per week – probably an underestimate.  That means that the cost of milk alone increased on that day by R4-82 per month, representing an increase of 9,6% of the grant increase, for one item in the shopping basket!  And that assumes that the grant recipient is supporting just himself.  The hard truth is that the average grant recipient is supporting at least another two persons.

In order for our grant recipient to see the notification about the early payment of the grants, that recipient would have to buy at least one newspaper per week – say a cost of R25 per week, or R107 per month – another 7,4% of his grant!  And that assumes that the recipient is able to read, which is certainly not a given!

To impose a rule that the grant has to be collected within a certain number of days also fails to take into account the fact that many of the recipients have to walk for many kilometres to reach a point where they can make the withdrawal.  Many of these people make arrangements to reach the collection point using the goodwill of others, and those arrangements can often not be altered merely to suit the whim of an unthinking SASSA official.  The penalty for being too poor to own a car to collect the parlous amount that SASSA so generously pays is starvation for the month!  A brief visit to any of the State hospitals around the country will show queues of hundreds of people waiting for up to twelve hours to see a doctor.  Most of those will be grant recipients – they have to be desperate to submit themselves to the incompetence and arrogance of the State medical service!  Many of those recipients will be constrained by their state of health in the outings they make to the nearest ATM to check whether the payment of the grant has yet been made.  They rely on it being available to them at the normal time.  In many cases, illness prevents them being able to collect the grant at all for the duration of the illness.

The SASSA official stated that, if the recipient missed the December grant payment window, SASSA would make a food parcel available to them, with a warning that the value of that food parcel would be deducted from the amount of the grant paid to them in January!  Does that man live in the real world?  The grant is not enough to live on, so how would making an advance payment of next month’s grant amount help, other than to postpone starvation for a month?  Of course, getting the food parcel entails a trip to a SASSA office, usually a much more time consuming and costly exercise than a trip to an ATM, and a wait there for up to ten hours to see the official concerned.

The statement that “only 35 000” recipients would not receive payment of their grants tells any intelligent observer that SASSA is a heartless organisation, with no understanding of the plight of the people they are there to serve.  “Only 35 000” is a huge number of people!  One is reminded of the comment by the Eastern Cape MEC for Economic Development, that the rate of unemployment in the Eastern Cape is “only 69%!” and therefore did not warrant any particular effort to correct the problem!

One wonders how well the top officials would respond to having their December salaries withheld for a month, because they did not spot a particular announcement in a newspaper!  It might be an interesting exercise to withhold a randomly-selected 2% of SASSA salaries each month, to gain an insight into the effects of this rather arrogant rule. 

What hardship would it cause to SASSA or to the ANC Government to leave the uncollected grant payments in the accounts of the recipients for at least a month, or preferably six weeks after the payment is made, to allow for the very real difficulties experienced by the poverty-stricken recipients in collecting this money?

Perhaps even more interesting will be the response to the unfeeling actions of SASSA at the next election, when the large number of ANC-voting poor have the chance to express their anger.