The most vulnerable groups in South Africa — the poor, the elderly, the disabled and the abandoned — are being hit hard by burgeoning problems in social security offices across the country, as they struggle to claim their state grants from demoralised, ill-informed and sometimes deceitful civil servants.
This year, the implementation of the new Social Assistance Act and the botched amalgamation of 16 apartheid-defined welfare systems into a single national body has further weakened the system which was already seriously flawed as a result of apartheid administration.
Thousands qualifying for assistance have been forced to wait months this year before receiving their grants and the situation on the ground, according to the Black Sash and sources in the Welfare Department, is getting worse as the backlogs build up.
Particularly hard-hit by the inefficiencies of the combined new and old application and payment systems are pensioners and the disabled, although the picture varies from province to province and is dependent on regional social security offices and how they are coping with restructuring.
A well-placed source in the Welfare Department said this week: “It’s completely chaotic, staff feel demoralised and undermined, and the amalgamation programme which combines the social assistance systems of all 16 of the previous administrations is lagging more than a year behind schedule. … Further, the computer system which is meant to connect up all regional offices is currently not working and so there are huge bottlenecks of angry people building up — people who have been waiting for months for their pay-outs.”
The network which is meant to regulate grant pay-outs nationally was meant to be implemented by March, but Q-data, the company installing it, says it won’t be in place until the end of September because of glitches. This has meant that many qualifying for grants have to wait until the network is working, and their particulars can be entered into the system.
Q-data’s divisional director Assie van Aswegen was defensive: “Some people are spreading bad news … one of our problems is that welfare personnel are leaving so quickly that we find we train up people and then they go and we have to train up more. There were no filing systems in some provincial offices and we have had to track down documents and have them verified before entering data and these things slow us down … there was also a technological difference between systems in different areas … the situation is very fragile.”
Attempts by the Mail & Guardian to speak to the provinces about problems have failed, with the provincial directors silenced by an embargo from Deputy President Thabo Mbeki’s special advisor, Rev Frank Chikane, head of the committee charged with overseeing the national restructuring of social security services. The committee comprises all the provincial health and welfare chief directors and the director general of the Welfare Department, Leila Patel. It has been told not to talk to the press about certain elements of restructuring until the new system is functioning.
The Black Sash has articulated the greatest concern. Workers in their offices say provincial and national welfare departments are not responsive enough to problems and information about changes is not forthcoming.
The situation has been exacerbated by the fact that new regulations governing social assistance were introduced on March 1, along with the implementation of the Social Assistance Act of 1992, and the changes have not been properly explained to the public or to civil servants. The new means test, is, according to sources, causing logistical problems and is being reviewed.
The director of the Grahamstown Black Sash advice office, Rosemary Smith, said there were enormous backlogs of pensioners waiting for their money and the process of application for pensions was painfully slow.
“We monitored one office where one man was filling in forms really slowly in ink and it was said that he only did two a day, while there was a long queue of people filling the room. It was Dickensian … and in another office there were files practically cascading off the shelves … the government offices are really short- staffed and it is worse in the rural areas.”
Smith took a case of maladministration in the Welfare Department to the public protector five months ago, but has still received no response.
The director of the Black Sash office in Port Elizabeth, Laura Best, said queues, day and night, outside social security offices were the norm, with people sleeping under cars to be at the front of the queue in the morning.
“We don’t feel a great responsiveness from the government at Bisho … we have tried at different levels to get meetings with the director but they are always cancelled … and the frustration is definitely mounting up.”
Best said that loansharks — “skoppers” — were thriving, and when the money dried up, they took pensioners’ ID books as surety. It had reached a point, she said, where places for the loan sharks were reserved at the front of the queues so they could claim pensions as the first business of the day.
The director of the Black Sash office in Durban, Seema Naran, said: “Things were always pretty bad, but they seem to have got a lot worse. … in reality on the ground we are dealing with the old apartheid administrations and at the moment they are refusing to talk to each other as there is a power play between them. … Furthermore, the officials are not using the new regulations and are still quoting the old ones as reference … the whole transformation of the department is not trickling down to the bottom.”
Naran also pointed out that fraud was rife, with people going as far as to present clerks with chickens or livestock if they do not have money for bribes. She said an officer investigating pensions fraud had been shot in December and a pensions clerk who was to testify in a fraud case was gunned down in the same month.
The Department of Welfare has responded by saying that most of its problems are inherited, but it is working hard to alleviate them. It estimates 10% of the R12,4-billion allocated for social assistance yearly is absorbed by corruption and inefficiencies.
The department points out that Mpumulanga, Kangwane and Kwandebele have been success stories, and that the restructuring committees, headed by Chikane, will be making recommendations to the minister of welfare, Geraldine Fraser-Moleketi, at the end of the year.