Protests to extend distress grant after deadline

THE plight of domestic workers, farmworkers and informal traders, was raised in calls for an extension of the Covid-19 Social Relief of Distress (SRD) grant, proven to be a lifeline during the pandemic.

The Black Sash and #PayTheGrants hosted a virtual press conference yesterday concerning the SRD grant coming to an end today.

The special R350 grant was one of the major Covid-19 mitigating measures put in place as the country entered into a hard lockdown, later extended into 2021.

Countrywide protests are expected to take place today. #PayTheGrants Gauteng co-ordinator General Alfred Moyo said protests would start at 11am at several South African Social Security Agency and post offices.

#PayTheGrants’ Shaeera Kalla said the conditions the grants were meant to ameliorate had not changed.

Kalla and those present called for the grant to be extended, expanded and increased.

Faith-based organisations and several workers’ unions lent their support. Bishop Victor Phalana said the grant was also used to start small income-generating initiatives in townships and villages.

South African Domestic Service and Allied Workers Union general secretary Myrtle Witbooi said many domestic workers did not have the resources to access and apply for the grants.

Women on Farms Project (WOFP ) director Colette Solomon said female seasonal farmworkers, who make up the majority of farmworkers, are employed from October to March, and rendered unemployed with no other form of income apart from the child support grant in some households.

“In research that Women on Farms undertook with UWC in 2019, we found that 88% of female seasonal farmworkers in the Northern Cape experience severe food insecurity during the off-season from April until till October when not employed, and that was pre-Covid-19, so it’s a chronic situation of food insecurity, food shortages that farmworkers experience.”

WOFP also joined others in calling for the grant to be increased to R585 – the food poverty line.

Black Sash national advocacy manager Hoodah Abrahams-Fayker said: “It is now just over a year later, the disaster still exists and the situation has worsened where the need for income support has increased, so there’s no rationale for the grant to end.”