We need to keep poverty at bay

THE true impact of Covid-19 might well not have been the number of people infected by the virus but the number of people affected by it in South Africa.

We seem to have done remarkably well in successfully negotiating the peak of the first wave, if our survival rates are anything to go by, but what of those uninfected but unable to eat?

Last week, in the run-up to yesterday’s World Food Day, the Pietermaritzburg Economic Justice & Dignity Group (PEJDG) released its October 2020 Household Affordability Index.

For those earning the national minimum wage of R3653.76 a month, there’s no way a family can actually eat without getting into serious debt.

That’s, of course, ignoring the need for transport to get to work, rent, water, electricity and services – or even a cellphone.

By the end of the year almost half of our country will be unemployed – dependent on grants, paid for by a government that is finding it increasingly difficult to balance its own books without having to borrow money.

This week, President Cyril Ramaphosa announced plans to create more than 800000 new jobs – and extend the special unemployment grant for another three months. We need more.

Food prices have rocketed, in some cases by 10% year-on-year, at a time when inflation has tracked inexorably downwards while the economy was shuttered.

Retailers have to do what they can to control prices, but equally, the government needs to continue paying the top-ups to the Old Age Grant, the Special Covid Relief Grant and the Child Support Grant because, as the PEJDG notes, families eat out of the same pot.

If we are to rebuild this country – saving it from the opportunists and the fascists who would burn it to the ground and starve its people for their own ends – we have to keep poverty and hunger at bay.