The time has come for government to stop making big gifts to the rich and to start making basic income grants (BIG) to the poor, says the Basic Income Grant Coalition.
During a media conference held at Parliament on Thursday, the coalition endorsed the Taylor committee’s call for a comprehensive social protection package that addresses poverty as well as special needs.
The report of the Taylor committee — the government-appointed Committee of Inquiry into a Comprehensive Social Security System for South Africa — was released by Social Development Minister Zola Skweyiya two weeks ago.
Coalition representative Doug Tilton, of the South African Council of Churches, said the success of the country’s transition to democracy would ultimately be judged by ”our capacity to address apartheid’s legacies of poverty, inequality, and underdevelopment”.
The publication of the Taylor committee’s report represented the ”most revolutionary event in the life of our nation since the first democratic elections in 1994”, he said.
”It marks the commencement of the second phase of the humanisation of South African society.
”Having completed much of the legislative reform necessary to ensure that all South Africans have the right to be free, we must now make certain that everyone has the means to be free.”
Tilton said the coalition agreed with the committee that the ”patchwork of social grants inherited from the apartheid era is inadequate to meet the challenge of stamping out extreme poverty”, and that ”means-testing is an ineffective way of targeting social grants”.
There were enormous gaps in the grants system, and means-tested grants typically created ”welfare traps” by penalising efforts to find employment.
A welfare system premised on the notion of ”tiding people over” until they found employment was inappropriate and poorly suited to reducing poverty.
Because of the enormous disparities created in the past, South Africa was in the unique situation of having both an acute need for a comprehensive social protection package and sufficient resources to finance it.
Thus, the committee recommended the introduction of a universal basic income grant of R100 per person per month.
Analysis indicated that such a grant had the potential, more than any other possible social protection intervention, to reduce poverty and promote human development and sustainable livelihoods.
South Africa could afford a basic income grant, and current estimates indicated the net cost to government would be around R20- to R24-billion a year, ”before implementation of a solidarity tax”, Tilton said.
”Over the past five years, the government has approved tax cuts resulting in the loss to the fiscus of close to R50-billion per year.
”It is time to stop making big gifts to the rich and to start making BIG grants to the poor. The national debate on social security should no longer be focused on whether we implement a basic income grant, but rather on how we do so,” he said. – Sapa