Decision to cancel the SRD grant is wrong and reckless
1 November 2024
Minister of Finance Enoch Godongwana’s decision to cancel the R370 a month Social Relief of Distress grant next year despite the economy being forecast to continue growing too slowly to generate jobs spits in the faces of millions of South Africans who did not choose to be poor.
By the State’s own reckoning, the amount of money needed to feed an adult South African, known as the food poverty line, is R796 a month.
Delivering the Medium-Term Budget Policy Statement this week, Godongwana didn’t say how the State expects the 17 million applicants for the SRD in September to feed themselves next year.
In fact, he didn’t mention in his speech that social grants would be cancelled; this detail appeared in the fine print of the full MTBPS document – perhaps in the hope that nobody would notice it.