Mail & Guardian reporters
The Department of Welfare and Population Development’s Director General Leila Patel is set to resign her post after clashes with welfare minister Geraldine Fraser- Moleketi came to a head in the past fortnight.
The two have not met regularly or worked closely together for a year, as a minister and director general should. And this week Patel was said to be negotiating a final package. She is considering options in the private sector.
Neither the welfare ministry nor its department would comment on the pending resignation of the director general, but one of the chief reasons she is leaving is because Fraser-Moleketi attempted to take too strong a hand in the running of the department. This turf war appears to be the result of increased pressure from Cabinet on ministers to deliver.
Patel has survived two National Party ministers – Abie Williams and Patrick McKenzie – and is seen as the driving force behind efforts to drag welfare into the 20th century. She wrote the welfare department’s white paper, which shifts social security away from a maze of apartheid state handouts to a more coherent policy that attempts to transfer skills and provide more security for those in need.
But implementation of these policies is only just starting and many believe that Patel’s departure could stymie the new plans, leaving Fraser-Moleketi with a political hot potato. The welfare department plays a crucial role in catching the fallout from the belt-tightening which the government’s Growth, Employment and Redistribution strategy demands.
Problems arose last year around the Lund proposals – the controversial plan to increase the number of welfare grant recipients, but radically trim state pay- outs to them. Patel and Fraser-Moleketi agreed on the principles, but differed on the implementation of the system.
The draft law, largely Patel’s brainchild, is set to be promulgated by Parliament early in the new year, with implementation later in 1998. It aims to provide social grants to three million poor children up to the age of five.
Putting the new system in place was largely Patel’s baby. The proposals that were first unveiled earlier this year met with condemnation because they will slash existing grants.
Patel cut her activist teeth in the Western Cape and has carved a name as one of this country’s most highly qualified welfare brains. Prior to her appointment as director general, she was instrumental in designing post-apartheid welfare policy and has also acted as a consultant to the World Bank and the United Nations agency, Unicef.