Frances Kinghorn
The commemoration of International Day of Disabled Persons this year will be bitter-sweet when the Disabled People of South Africa (DPSA) present a memorandum on disability grants to Deputy President Jacob Zuma in Port Elizabeth on Monday.
The memorandum is expected to express concern over government expenditure on social grants for people with disabilities. It is likely to ask Zuma to raise in the Cabinet a request for disability plans and budgets.
In August the country’s first class-action suit under the Constitution reinstated thousands of disabled people illegally removed from the social grant system in the Eastern Cape and set a precedent for similar suits nationwide.
DPSA Eastern Cape chairperson Zingisile Kweta says people with disabilities still face unacceptable social and economic exclusion. “We are still not treated as fully and equally human. Disabled people are disproportionately among the poorest of the poor. We are more likely than our able-bodied peers to be uneducated, unemployed or under-employed.”
He says people with disabilities will continue to demand empowerment.
The DPSA calls for an integrated disability development approach that links prevention, rehabilitation and social safety nets with empowerment strategies and changes in attitudes as in the 1997 White Paper on an Integrated National Disability Strategy.
The organisation also calls for the social grant system and the delivery of public services to disabled people to be transformed, in terms of administration and distribution and within a wider poverty-eradication and disability empowerment strategy.
Statistics indicate that about 7,5% of the South African population consists of work-seekers with disabilities. Yet 99% of people with disabilities are unemployed.
The DPSA recently called for employers to remove barriers to employment equity for disabled people and give them priority in affirmative action and economic empowerment. This followed the release of a study indicating that disability equity continues to be neglected.
A report on employment equity in the private sector by Global Business Solutions found that disabled people made up 0,93% of the total workforce, down 0,09% on last year. Representation of disabled people at management and professional levels has decreased since October last year and only 0,35% of new appointments appear to be of people with disabilities.
In terms of skills and education more than 70% of disabled children do not receive a formal education, while those who do face enormous barriers in terms of accessible environments and learning.
“Government will be urged to introduce more appropriate strategies that take into account the needs of persons with disabilities. National, provincial and local government will also be called upon to review existing delivery systems and to ensure that disabled people do not suffer unfair denial of their basic human rights or access to services and benefits to which they are entitled,” says DPSA secretary general Mzolisi Ka Toni.
Sebenzile Matsebula, a director in the Office on the Status of Disabled Persons in the Presidency, says the events [on International Day of Disabled Persons] will heighten public awareness of advances in disability rights and what remains to be done in creating an inclusive society.
“Our participation in the occasion intends to reaffirm the status of people with disabilities within the framework of the government. It also aims to revive the mandate that has been given to government by people with disabilities.”