Only four of the 54 children who qualified for child support grants in Mount Frere in the Eastern Cape received them, according to research among malnourished youngsters admitted to hospital. And none of the 17 caregivers eligible for foster care grants received them.
The research was conducted by the Programme for Land and Agrarian Studies (Plaas) at the University of the Western Cape.
“The worse off you were, the less likely you were actually to receive grants … The existing allocation of grants is arbitrary,” Cobus de Swardt, a senior researcher and lecturer for Plaas, told this week’s parliamentary portfolio committee public hearings on the Taylor committee’s proposals for a comprehensive social security system.
MPs at the two-day hearings were consistently outnumbered by child-rights lobby groups, trade unions, NGOs and civil organisations.
There were many messages, but one was repeated again and again: the government must, at least, extend the childcare grant to children up to 18 years of age and make it available to child-headed households.
Last year the government agreed to pay the grant to children younger than 14 in a programme that will be phased in over three years.
Mount Frere is part of a poverty research study by Plaas. Other areas are Ceres in the Western Cape and the township sprawl of Khayelitsha and Nyanga in Cape Town.
Each of these areas respectively represents a typically poor South African setting: a rural, subsistence econ- omy; a rural commercial farming community and an urban setting.
Social security grants are crucial to Mount Frere: 60% of households receive grants, which make up two-thirds of income. Without grants “many of these households would slide into total destitution”, according to Swardt.
The poorest 25% of households live on R150 a month without social grants, but R560 with grants. About 81% of income in the poorest households was spent on food. In the slightly better-off homes, 80% went towards food, debt repayments, health and education.
Swardt told the committee he had been sceptical about the basic income grant (BIG) proposed by the Taylor committee of inquiry into a comprehensive social security system. But his research into chronic poverty changed his mind — as long as administrative obstacles to the efficient implementation of the BIG were resolved.
The divide between those favouring the BIG and those opposed to it must be set aside. “It [poverty] is too serious [for us] to ostracise each other … if we don’t [set our differences aside] … we blind ourselves to the realities on the ground,” he said.
According to the research, the BIG would “dramatically reduce poverty” among the bottom third of households, lifting them into a situation where economic activity or subsistence farming becomes a possibility.
The poorest third of households in Mount Frere live on R32 a person, or R234 a household a month. Income would be boosted to R974 a household with a R100 universal BIG for each household resident.
In Khayelitsha and Nyanga the introduction of a universal R100 grant would have a similar positive effect: the bottom third of households have a monthly income of R39 a person or R180 a household. With the BIG granted to each household resident, this would increase to R640 a home.
The committee heard that economists and researchers had already costed the BIG at between R20-billion to R23-billion a year. It expects to table its report by month end so that Minister of Social Development Zola Skweyiya can raise it at the July Cabinet lekgotla, though the government appears to have made up its mind about the BIG.
The government has been extremely sceptical of the grant since the Taylor committee submitted its recommendation to the Cabinet in January last year. The government has proposed an extensive public works programme as a model to reduce unemployment and poverty. It maintains that anything else would create dependency on government handouts.
Charles Meth, a research fellow at the University of Natal who was a member of the Taylor committee, cautioned that it was wrong to believe that grants would create a dependency syndrome among the poor.
“We must get rid of a few red herrings like dependency [on handouts],” he told the committee.
Public works programmes also created dependency on the projects in their areas, he said.
Last week’s Growth and Development Summit was disappointing because it focused on public works programmes to reduce unemployment.
Recent research by the Southern African labour and development research unit at the University of Cape Town finds that the success of such public works programmes remains unclear.
Of the 12 000 jobs created through community-based programmes in the first six months of the 2002/2003 financial year, only 167 are permanent.
In the 2001/2002 financial year, 25 000 jobs were created, of which 530 were permanent. Last year an initiative by the Ministry of Public Works created about 30 000 temporary jobs.
What is wanted:
Taylor committee of inquiry
Its recommendations include:
A nationally funded health insurance and price control of medicine
A national retirement savings fund, particularly for workers excluded from formal retirement funds; the removal of tax distinctions among pensions, retirement annuities and provident funds
Extension of the child support grant to all under-18s, with a simplified application procedure and the inclusion of child-headed households
The phasing in of a universal basic income grant (BIG) for all South Africans and the establishment of
efficient administration
Unemployment Insurance Fund (UIF) benefits to be extended
Public works programme to run in addition to other social measures because they “do not offer long-term viable employment for the unskilled structurally unemployed”
Business South Africa
Extension of the child grant to age 18, but with a means test to avoid a culture of entitlement
Supports public works programmes to expand the productive sector
Supports the abolition of distinctions between retirement funds and a national retirement savings scheme in the long term
Congress of South African Trade Unions/ National Education, Health and Allied Workers’ Union
Supports the extension of the child grant to 18 along with the abolition of the means test, leading to the BIG; proposes “youth brigades” who will have jobs created for them in public works programmes
Supports national health insurance, but not the proposed system as it would continue government’s subsidy of private health care
Supports the extension of UIF benefits
Human Rights Commission
Supports a comprehensive social security system to progressively realise socio-economic rights
Supports BIG in principle and fully supports extending the child grant to 18 and UIF benefits
Calls for benchmarks to monitor progress in poverty alleviation
Aids law Project/Treatment Action Campaign
Supports the extension of the child grant to 18, without a means test, and to child-headed households, without regard to
nationality, as a first step to BIG
HIV/Aids should be listed as a chronic disease to allow people living with HIV to access the disability grant; those looking after HIV-positive children should be eligible for care-dependency grants
Supports public works programmes in addition to social grants, with a particular focus on improving health and education infrastructure
Black Sash
Supports the extension of the child grant to 18, without a means test, and to child-headed households ahead of the introduction of the BIG by 2006
Supports a public works programme in addition to BIG alongside skills training initiatives and emergency support like food parcels
Calls for the rapid implementation of smart cards to facilitate social security payments