Media Statement: Adjusted Budget Confirms Government's Failure to Implement the New Social Grant
26 June 2020
The South African government has reneged on its promise to assist those who have been further pushed into hunger and destitution due to the lockdown. The state’s announcement that they would provide a caregiver grant and create a new Covid-19 Social Relief of Distress (SRD) grant of R350 provided some relief. However, our worst fears around failure to implement have been realised. President Ramaphosa’s stimulus package promised R50 billion for grants but according to the Adjusted Budget, announced on Wednesday 24 June 2020, it has been decreased to R41 billion. To put this into context: the adjusted amount is only R26 billion more than what the state would already spend on grants. In a once-in-a-lifetime humanitarian crisis, a time when the whole world has been encouraged to commit to social relief efforts, these cuts prove the state’s failure to coordinate basic and urgent provisions to the most marginalised.
The budget indicates no movement towards inclusive growth or progressive taxation needed to reduce our high levels of inequality and what raises alarm bells is that health, the primary concern in a pandemic, has only R2.9 billion of net additional funding for the entire health sector. This is less than half of the new funding allocated to the SANDF and SAPS, while police brutality has been put on the spotlight globally through the #BlackLivesMatter movement. With increased unrest expected, as people struggle to survive, this choice to repress rather than to serve is extremely calculated. Furthermore, the budget was centred on debt reduction, and while we can acknowledge that our debt to GDP ratio is far too high, this moment requires increased spending on life and livelihood saving measures. It is callous - at the least - to obsess about balancing budgets when people are starving to death. There is an increase in unemployment and in the number of people who would qualify for the grant and yet the government has now cut the budget allocation by R9 billion: how will this see us through the promised 6-month timeframe? The cuts have been justified by a ‘low Covid-19 SRD grant uptake’, implying that there is less of a need than the government initially anticipated. This is clearly not the case, the slow uptake has been engineered as such, it is a result of: application criteria that exclude some of the most precarious, poor communication, reliance on technologies to which many do not have access, exclusionary verification conditions, and slow payment systems on the part of SASSA. It is prudent to note that 90% of those who were promised the grant have instead had no income for a second month running.
1. We demand clear communication on the state of relief measures in general and in particular on the Covid-19 SRD grant
Celebrating this low take-up of grants as fiscal savings ignores the structural barriers to accessing the grant - exacerbated by the conditionalities for application. According to their latest report, SASSA has only accepted 3.2 million applicants, out of at least 10 million (but up to 15 million) eligible. Worse, it has only paid out a third of those accepted. Some who applied in April have still not received any feedback on the status of their applications. Even when applications are approved, sometimes the applicant does not receive a verification code. Furthermore, details around back-pay remain unclear: will Sassa ensure that all those eligible and verified will receive the full six months worth of grant payments? A new appeals process has been created but this process is ironically still an online one, this presents serious limitations in our context. Millions have been relying on (the promise of) this grant for survival and with such high numbers of rejection, if one were to appeal and get the grant, would one be eligible for back pay? These questions remain unanswered as communication with applicants has been dismally poor.