Grant extension welcomed but concerns remain

WHILE the R350 Social Relief of Distress Grant has been extended until March 2024, civil society remains concerned and has called for it to be turned into a Universal Basic Income Grant.

Civil organisations are also concerned about the recurring challenges plaguing the disbursement of the grant. Millions of applicants still await approval while some beneficiaries are waiting for payouts.

The civil society organisations said while the SRD grant provided a mere pittance, the hoops that applicants had been required to jump through to access it have been well documented and resulted in millions of unjust exclusions.

The organisation reiterated its call for the grant to be extended by writing it into the Social Assistance Act as a permanent social assistance grant before March 2023, with an initial value indexed to the Food Poverty Line.

They demanded interventions to be made to ensure that the full SRD grant budget for 2022/23 be spent and also an increased budget allocation to allow for a streamlined system to apply for the extended and improved SRD Grant from March 2023.

The organisations further demanded that the means-test amount be raised to at least the upper-bound poverty line and the use of databases containing outdated and false data for verification be dropped.

Cosatu parliamentary co-ordinator Matthew Parks said that while they were pleased that the government had agreed to the federation’s demand for the extension of the grant, they were worried that the national Treasury failed to pay attention to the SRD’s administrative challenges including the underspending.

“The failure to commit to an increase in the funding for the Presidential Employment Stimulus is a let-down to the millions of unemployed young people. This also applies to the Treasury’s failure to intervene with the banks to resolve the impediments that have led to less than 2% of the Bounce Back Scheme funds allocated to SMMEs,” he said.

One of the applicants, Yasmin Scheepers, said she was failed by Sassa and had been appealing her applications since April. She said the extension of the grant meant nothing to those who were marginalised by the qualifying criteria.

Sassa said R10 billion had been spent so far, which is 23% of the budget during the first six months of the programme. The agency said it was unlikely that the full budget would be spent unless the underlying legislation was amended again to enable more people to qualify.

Spokesperson Paseka Litsatsi said due to the delays in finalising the criteria for the grant, assessments only started late in June. He said Sassa had been attempting to do two months’ worth of assessments monthly since then to catch up but said this had not been possible.

Letsati said there were some technical issues affecting a small group of people that still needed to be ironed out.

“Once the system is current and running smoothly for the majority of people, dedicated efforts will be made to deal with these groups,” he said.