Ferial Haffajee
In KwaZulu-Natal a community of women risk getting eaten by crocodiles and bitten by snakes. It’s the peril they face on their daily trek to collect water.
Other women told the poverty hearings in other provinces that they are raped or harassed as they make their way to watering holes. Water provision is one of the feathers in the government’s cap, yet the poverty hearings show that a million taps are not enough.
The co-ordinator of the hearings, Jacquie Boulle, says one of the more disturbing testimonies has been that “it was better in the old days”.
Many people have made their way to the poverty hearings being held around the country to complain of being stripped of their old-age pensions, and their disability and state maintenance grants.
Some have been caught in the cracks, like the squatter mother of five who had many children because the old system paid out per child. Now that system’s been replaced by one whereby the state will pay R100 per child and will not pay for more than two children.
Others say the identity documents they now need to secure their grants are impossible to get out of the Department of Home Affairs. Some provinces have ceased all payments as they audit and clean out their welfare rolls.
“Stopping grant payments is incredibly inhumane,” says Boulle, adding that people are speaking the language of the forgotten and the neglected.
“Around the country there is evidence of a big pool of people caught in the middle who have absolutely nothing.” That’s the group falling right through the social net, like the Northern Province mother who told the hearings she was about to put her children in foster care because she couldn’t find work. She is too young for an old-age pension and her children are too old for the child-support grants which stop when children are seven.
While it is the changes in welfare policies that have been most acutely felt, the end of the homeland trade incentives has also wrought devastation. In the North West and other provinces, factories have shut down, swelling the numbers of jobless.
ENDS