Craig Bishop
`My neighbours still believe in it, but the politicians are destroying the spirit of ubuntu.”
Arthritic and near-destitute, Sindiswa Frans does not think she will vote African National Congress next year. Many of the estimated
635 000 pensioners in the province who have not received their pension cheques for December and January may be feeling the same way.
Her family is owed more than R2 380 in welfare for the last two months, including her R470 pension grant, a R250 maintenance grant for her three granddaughters and R470 a month disability grant for her 49-year- old epileptic son. Without this money she is unable to feed, clothe or protect her extended family.
She is fed up with empty promises and crocodile tears which she feels camouflage interdepartmental confusion and bureaucratic ineptitude. She has a point.
Dire predictions as early as July last year showing that the Eastern Cape welfare department’s social security budget would face a R1,4-billion deficit by December 1997 went unheeded at national and provincial levels.
Back from the Christmas break, Bisho and Pretoria began 1998 by bickering over the exact number of pensioners in the country’s Cinderella province. Bisho claimed there were around 632 000. Until this week, Pretoria insisted there were closer to 400 000.
The lack of reliable data and the legacy of an apartheid policy designed to keep the region down were made worse by the failure of Welfare MEC Mandisa Marasha’s department to address the crisis.
Plans to draft a Green Paper on provincial social welfare before the end of 1997 never materialised. Mechanisms to improve client services and complaints have failed. To exorcise “ghost” pensioners, the department is planning to wipe many potential pensioners off databases for failing to register in time.
Marasha’s department’s latest excuse was that it had run out of cheque books. But, according to Oscar Levendal, Minister of Welfare and Population Development Geraldine Fraser-Moleketi’s private assistant, most pensioners in the Eastern Cape receive money in cash payments anyway.
Meanwhile, Frans says she cannot trust empty rhetoric any longer.
“I am so frustrated and depressed. What makes it saddest is the fact that people still trust the political promises. I have had no supper for several nights except what my neighbours can afford to let me have.”
The right to social security is protected under the new Constitution by the Social Security Act 59 of 1992, and Fraser- Moleketi is quick to admit that she is “committed to meeting her statutory obligations”.
But, for struggling pensioners like Frans, these are “paper rights” stained with gravy.
“I am worse off now than before the so- called transformation. There is no direction from Bisho. All I see is politicians driving expensive cars while I cannot even buy a slice of bread.”
In Duncan Village, East London, Elizabeth Rasmen and her 25-year-old blind daughter Kimish have been surviving on a disability pension of R470 a month.
But January has been particularly bleak because Kimish Rasmen’s R470 pension did not arrive. Elizabeth Rasmen applied for her old-age pension in August, but has not yet heard when she will receive her first payment.
“We manage, but it’s very, very hard. No one seems to care about us at all,” Rasmen said.
Head of Rhodes University’s politics department, Professor Roger Southall says that the pension crisis will have an impact on votes in the province, but that the AN will still “clean up in the province.
“It is a wider reflection of the lack of credible political opposition for the ordinary person, who in the Eastern Cape has always had a historical distrust of other parties.”