Daily Dispatch
Welfare funding for rural areas
ON Monday our report on the budgets of several Eastern Cape welfare organisations being slashed by up to 80% sent shock waves through the community – the welfare sector and good hearted citizens in particular.
A copy of the department of social development’s 2017-18 budget showed several nonprofit organisations providing support to vulnerable children and adults in the urban areas to be hardest hit.
Included were Child Welfare in East London and King William’s Town which were down from R2.2-million to R253 118 and R997 053 to R253 118 respectively.
East London Child Welfare provides counselling and has safe houses in Buffalo City Metro, handling about 3 000 cases a year and serving 20 residential areas.
Also affected is Christian Social Services in East London, down from R2-million to R253 118.
Sanca Eastern Cape, which handles around 1 500 cases of drug and alcohol abuse cases a year, also confirmed budget cuts.
Staff, including social workers, are likely to lose their jobs as a result and the effect of such brutal cuts on needy children, disabled people, the elderly and those with HIV hardly needs spelling out.
With good reason the cuts have been criticised and an explanation demanded.
In the face of the uproar one would expect MEC Nancy Sihlawayi’s department to have been quick to provide answers, particularly since these were first requested by the DA in the Bhisho legislature on March 28.
More recently, for a full week before we ran our report, our reporter tried to get an explanation out of social development. But the department seemed utterly paralysed. So we ran our report, hoping for a response. By the time of writing this editorial one had still not come.
The void considered, we will attempt to do what the department has yet to do – interpret its own budget allocations for 2017-18.
According to our reading, 24 new support providers have come online and are receiving funding this year. These were not listed in 2016.
Of these 11 are in Joe Gqabi (Aliwal North, Sterkspruit, Mount Fletcher and Barkly East); four are in Alfred Nzo (Matatiele, Mzimvubu, Mbizana and Ntabankulu); three are in O R Tambo (Lusikisiki and Tsolo); one is in Sarah Baartman (Grahamstown) and five are in Nelson Mandela Bay.
We may be not be entirely correct in our assessment, but it does seem fairly safe to conclude that the money is not being siphoned off dubiously. Rather, it seems that the department has expanded its reach into the rural areas.
This cannot be faulted. Social services are barely existent in the urban areas, let alone readily available in the vast and desperately needy rural parts of the province.
What is problematic however, is the massive knock-on effect on those non-profit organisations doing stellar and much needed work in the urban areas.
But social development in the province does not deserve the blame for this. Yes, its knuckles should be rapped for its tardiness in explaining, but it only gets so much funding to work with.
The exemption from blame does not however, apply to the supposedly pro-poor government in its entirety. Particularly not when every effort has gone into grotesquely enriching one man’s child – President Jacob Zuma’s son, Duduzane.