Pensioners in the Eastern Cape are up in arms over chaos in the Welfare Department
Peter Dickson
Pensioners have rampaged through the Transkei, assaulting provincial Department of Welfare pay-out officials and taking others hostage, after the department quietly removed 20E000 welfare grant beneficiaries from the provincial register. The violent protests took place in Qumbu, Mqanduli and Elliotdale.
The protest took place after the publication of a report by the Eastern Cape legislature into the state of welfare services in the province, following a public hearing process that was told of the problems of thousands of beneficiaries who had been removed from the provincial register without any explanations.
The report found that an additional 20E000 beneficiaries had been scrapped off the register, after the 1996 registration and 1997 review processes into the issuing of welfare grants.
The report found welfare clerks to be “often drunk”; “do not investigate queries and problems but just send people from pillar to post”; “poorly informed about policies and often appear to make up their own rules, especially about child care grants”; and “do not assist if they have paid money to the wrong person and make no attempt to help the correct beneficiaries to obtain their money”, even though it was the officials’ fault.
The latest removal of welfare beneficiaries from the provincial list was uncovered by Operation Hunger worker and campaigner for the disabled Karin Claydon.
Claydon raised the matter, telephonically, with Minister of Welfare and Population Development Zola Skweyiya on May 23, and the minister demanded she keep the matter to herself, and not report it to the media.
Bisho is now working on the reinstatement of 30E000 disability grants terminated during the 1996 registration and 1997 review processes, after the MEC for Welfare, Ncumisa Kondlo, made the announcement last week.
Kondlo said the reinstatement process was at an “advanced stage” and that the government has resorted to outsourcing welfare payment to reduce fraud and corruption and improve services.
Kondlo told a sitting of the National Council of Provinces on the welfare budget debate that her department had a staff complement of 465 officials to handle the social grant payments. About 60% of some 600E000 beneficiaries were paid by cheque.
However welfare campaigners in the Eastern Cape remain sceptical. They argue that the reinstatement of the 30E000, who are also expecting the backdating of their grants, was bluntly scotched by Skweyiya this week when he indicated the Eastern Cape could expect no national financial bail-out, as this would swallow one-quarter of the already overstretched provincial welfare budget.
Claydon said the 20E000 people, many of whom have been receiving grants for 10 to 20 years, were quietly taken off the welfare register last month. This would save the province about R118-million a month, whereas the reinstatement of the 30E000 this month will cost R161-million a month. Bisho will still have a shortfall of R109-million if forced to reinstate all terminated grants.
It could be crippled if forced to pay out an estimated R1,6-billion if a class action suit being brought in the Grahamstown High Court by the Legal Resources Centre succeeds.
Claydon fears that Bisho, which simply does not have the money or the “right budget and right administration to fulfil the welfare department’s new motto of paying the right people at the right time”, will again run out of money as it did in 1998 and could not pay welfare grants.
Even though the Eastern Cape has the most disabled people in South Africa and the Transkei was “virtually a welfare state”, Claydon says Bisho is forced to apply a national formula that falls far short of the province’s pressing welfare needs.
“They are just juggling the grants to stay in budget,” she says, while Skweyiya had “clearly backtracked this week in saying the Eastern Cape must look at the problem on its own and by bluntly rejecting any backpay” for the 30E000.
Claydon says Skweyiya told her: “I don’t know what to do – it’s a legislative nightmare.”
She said Kondlo’s subsequent announcement – publicly backed by Skweyiya, who said last Friday the African National Congress “leadership is concerned about the problem in the Eastern Cape” and that it would be “decisively resolved” – was “political damage control”.
Instead of the “smokescreen of lies and cover-ups”, Claydon says the government should simply admit it does not have the money to pay all beneficiaries – while she has also writen to Skweyiya and suggested he fire Kondlo and order a thorough overhaul of the provincial welfare department. “The MEC and the minister are seen as the enemy of the poor” in the Eastern Cape where most rural people survive on welfare grants, Claydon said.
Skweyiya had been scheduled to visit Bisho on Wednesday last week to crack the whip, but the trip was cancelled and Claydon was informed by officials that the matter was better left to “simply a political management of the situation – in other words, damage control”.
Meanwhile, Kondlo’s department has been given one month by the legislature to produce a plan and timeframe for identifying and reinstating beneficiaries wrongly removed from the register.
But Claydon says this will be impossible. The ethos among district level officials, she says from responses to her own inquiries at East London government offices where disability grant applicants are medically assessed, is already entrenched.