The Western Cape government this week scuppered a court application that would have transferred responsibility for paying social grants from provinces — some of them notoriously inefficient — to the central government.
Millions of South Africans receive social grants, which include pensions, disability grants and child support. Often it is a family’s only income. But provincial inefficiencies and budgetary shortfalls have meant that many have been arbitrarily denied this lifeline.
Muzamani Mashavha, a Limpopo recipient of a disability grant, was ready to celebrate a court victory on Tuesday that would have struck down a 1996 presidential proclamation that ”assigned” to provinces the responsibility to pay grants. That was before the Western Cape’s last-minute intervention.
Mashavha’s victory would have been monumental: at stake is an R18-billion yearly budget the national Treasury divides among the provinces to pay the grants, but which is neither ring-fenced to ensure funds are not diverted to other purposes by provinces with more ”pressing” priorities, nor always enough to ensure provinces can fulfil their obligations.
Mashavha, assisted by the non-profit Legal Resources Centre (LRC), said in papers prepared for his Pretoria High Court application: ”But for the fact that the administration of my grant has been assigned to [Limpopo province], it would have been approved and paid within a reasonable period after my date of application and I would have been paid the arrears due to me.”
A former car washer who walks with a crutch and does not have the full use of his right hand after an accident, Mashavha applied for a disability grant in 2000. He was declared medically unfit to work and told to start collecting his grant after three months.
”I duly reported, and have done so each month thereafter when payments are made, but was always told that there was no money for me.”
Mashavha finally started getting R570 monthly payments this year after the LRC’s intervention, but he has not received full arrears. His case is not unique. Grant payments in the poorer provinces — notably KwaZulu- Natal, the Eastern Cape, Limpopo and the North West — have been hit by mass suspensions.
Among more extreme examples, 94 000 grants were suspended in Limpopo in February 1998, in some cases reportedly for up to a year. Late last year 150 000 child-support grants and 14 000 old-age grants were reportedly suspended in the same province.
Reasons typically given by provinces were that their records were not in order, and that compulsory re-registration of claimants was needed to weed out fraud.
However, financial incapacity and a drive for savings are seen as the key motives. Mashavha’s application argues that the 1996 proclamation is unconstitutional, centrally on grounds that social assistance requires equitable treatment of all beneficiaries nationwide, and was not intended to be part of the welfare function over which the interim constitution gave the provinces powers.
Until Tuesday, when the matter was set down to be heard, it seemed that the application would have gone unopposed by the national government and the provinces, meaning the court would automatically have granted Mashavha’s plea.
Department of Social Development Deputy Director General Fezile Makiwane this week confirmed that his minister, Zola Skweyiya, had felt the application should not be opposed because the national government wanted to achieve the same effect.
”A Cabinet decision [to centralise the function] was taken some years back; it was not a new decision. The department has been working on how to implement that.”
Makiwane also confirmed that Skweyiya’s provincial counterparts had been ”told” of the decision not to oppose. A source well acquainted with the case said he understood Skweyiya had effectively ordered his provincial counterparts not to oppose the action.
So what changed? Makiwane said he had been caught unaware by the Western Cape government’s decision to oppose the application, in the name of Marius Fransman, its MEC for Social Services. Fransman is an African National Congress member like Skweyiya.
The effect of Fransman’s action, which was communicated to the LRC late on Monday, is a potentially lengthy postponement. Fransman now has until the end of the month to prepare opposing court papers, after which a new court date will have to be found. That could take months.
Skweyiya’s endorsement of centralisation is understood to have hit fierce resistance from six of the nine welfare MECs at the last session of the welfare ”Minmec”, which brings the minister and his provincial counterparts together. Provinces’ loss of control over large chunks of budgets they have grown used to could have played a role in that resistance.
But the Western Cape says it has no problem with the ”principle” that grant payment reverts to the national government.
Riaan Aucamp, spokesperson for Premier Marthinus van Schalkwyk, would say only that an ”important Minmec meeting” was scheduled for August 13 and that the intention was not to oppose the reassignment of responsibility but to achieve a postponement pending that meeting.
A source close to Fransman said: ”We’re perfectly at ease with the idea of centralisation.” But he said that there was concern a court order merely striking down the old arrangement would leave a void without new systems in place.
”In as much as I can get an order of court for the sun not to rise tomorrow, how do I implement it?”
There is some speculation that the national government is intent on streamlining the existing grants system to stave off demands for a basic income grant. The finance department, in particular, is known to oppose the grant as unsustainable, requiring damaging changes to the tax system.