Why 150 000 child grants are suspended

Isa da Gama from Eldorado Park says she will have to send her children to school barefoot when the term begins next week. She is one of tens of thousands of recipients who have not received their child support grant for January.

The grants of over 150 000 people were suspended at the start of January, the SA Social Security Agency (Sassa) revealed on Wednesday – denying suggestions a technical problem caused grants to be mistakenly suspended.

A total of 13 million people receive the R510 monthly child support grant, which is about 65% of all children in the country .

Sassa spokesperson Paseka Letsatsi insisted in a Radio 702 interview on Wednesday that the suspensions were due to “fraudulent activities” detected by the agency as part of its monthly verification processes.

He is also quoted by News24 as saying that flooding in some areas could have caused people to relocate, which led them to fail the verification processes.

But this does not appear to match the reality on the ground.

GroundUp reported this week that child support grants have been suspended for seemingly little or no reason. At offices in Cape Town and Kariega on Tuesday, recipients queued to reapply for their grants which were suspended without notice.

Da Gama said grants for her four children had been paid into her bank account in 2023 without any issue. But when she checked on Friday, the payment day for the grant, there was no money.

When she went to the Sassa office on Monday morning, she was told there was a problem with the initials on her bank statement and she must reapply. She called her bank, who said there was no discrepancy on her statements.

She returned on Wednesday, waking up at 4am to stand in the line. She took all her supporting documents, but was told to bring her children’s report cards to prove they were in school.

It was the first time she had been asked to do so. “My children will have to go to school without shoes next week. They’re stealing my children’s money.”

She has started asking neighbours to donate food to feed her children.

Another grant recipient said she had been told by a Sassa official on the phone that her grant had been suspended due to a “technical problem”.

Letsatsi confirmed that January saw higher than usual numbers of suspect grants, but maintained that grants were suspended as part of the verification process.

“All clients will in the end receive their money,” he said.