NATAL academic Francie Lund thought she was bringing good and bad news when she presented a report in Parliament last week, bearing internationally acclaimed proposals for a new system of child welfare.
But the headlines have screamed only the bad: “Shock to single mums”; “Plans to slash child grants”.
“I am bemused,” Lund said. “I understand that political parties could get some mileage out of the report but it undermines the whole transformation process if new ideas are going to be judged with the old mental tools.”
Lund, who heads a committee commissioned by the Welfare Ministry to investigate maintenance payment to mothers and grandmothers for family care, believes the recommendations in her report lay the basis for a new system of child welfare which will improve the lot of the poorest children, although in the short term it will rob the coloured and Indian poor to give to the poorest, which in most cases are black.
“We had a think-tank at the Itala Game Reserve and brought in top South African and international experts – people who have had hands-on experience of development programmes and reforming social security systems and they were extremely excited about these recommendations. In fact, it was said as we left: `This is the most exciting thing happening in social security in the world right now,’ ” she said.
The experts who complimented the report included the World Bank’s Nicholas Barr who had participated in the reform of the former Soviet Union’s social security system and Richard Morgan of the United Nations International Children’s Emergency Fund, East Africa.
But the media have all but ignored the better recommendations. The Lund Report recommends that a flat-rate benefit for children be paid to the child’s care-giver, according to a simple means test. A condition for the grant would be that the child is registered at birth. Another recommendation is that the grant be paid to the care-giver through a bank or post office account, rather than over a counter. This aspect is seen to be particularly novel in South Africa.
“This is part of an international trend of encouraging poorer, marginalised people to be drawn into large financial institutions,” Lund said.
`It’s really positive because through this the people can learn about banking and saving and about interest rates, they can use the maintenance deposit as a tiny bit of collateral in other ventures, and this could lead hopefully to better money management,” she added.
Another novel recommendation is to tie the state’s payment to a commitment by the grant’s receiver to certain health practices such as immunisation and growth monitoring. This activity would complement the Health Department’s programme for free public health-care for mothers and children under six, and is expected to reduce levels of infant mortality.
Sources in government indicate that the Lund Report will be looked on favourably when it is discussed in Cabinet. The Justice Department has already set up a taskgroup to implement the report’s recommendations on the private maintenance system which works through the courts.
However, there is some nervousness about what impact it will have on the African National Congress’s political battle against the National Party in the Western Cape. The NP could use the recommendations as fodder to win more coloured votes, because the recommendations mean many coloured and Indian women who are currently claiming maintenance will no longer be able to do so and will be pushed below the bread-line.
But the ANC also has to remember its election promises of a ” better life for all” and it knows it has to target the black population for the 1999 elections, and to fulfil the constitutional requirements of the Bill of Rights.
To bring equity to the system would mean extra government spending of between R5- billion and R20-billion. With the current belt-tightening, this would be impossible. In the 1995/1996 fiscal year, the state paid over R1-billion in grants for maintenance, which is 12% of the social security budget.