Few experiences have touched Zola Skweyiya as much as a visit to a remote village, Masoyi in Mpumalanga, where he found a whole community openly discriminating against three children who were suspected of being HIV-positive.
The parents of the children (aged three, four and 12) had died of Aids-related diseases. “The children were staying by themselves because no one wanted to be seen near them,” Skweyiya told the Mail & Guardian. “The eldest went to school during the day because the chief’s law was that every child in his village should be at school. The result was the younger children starved during the day while the sister was away.
“But I understand that some villagers who knew their parents would sometimes place a piece of pap at the gate. And the children, like dogs, would come out, take the food and rush back into their house.”
His deep and real concern about the children and their poverty perhaps explains why Skweyiya is generally viewed as the best man for the job of South Africa’s social development minister — he is passionate about improving the quality of life of South Africa’s poor.
Skweyiya is in charge of the Department of Social Development, which has to deal with the burgeoning problem of child-headed families — those orphaned by Aids — as well as trying to help millions of poverty-stricken people across the country, people who have to struggle to find food every day.
As such, he is the government’s — and the African National Congress’s — point man in the fight against poverty in South Africa, a key position in an election year in a country where unemployment and poverty dominate the national political agenda.
And he has enough weight in the government and the ANC to be a success in the position. A senior provincial social welfare official says Skweyiya was one of the more out-spoken ministers at the Cabinet meeting where the government decided, finally, to provide anti-retroviral treatment for people living with HIV/Aids — something long resisted by President Thabo Mbeki, among others.
“Skweyiya was very vocal because of his face-to-face confrontation with Aids when he travelled the country,” said the official.
Skweyiya’s department is also one of the best-funded by the National Treasury. It has a budget of more than R34-billion for social grants, which it disburses at a rate of R2,9-billion a month. The Treasury has indicated that this amount will grow at more than 8% a year in the medium term.
Skweyiya believes, emphatically, that the battle against poverty is being won. He rattles off statistics about nearly four million children receiving a child support grant, when only 60 000 did so in 1999. Around 99% of old people who are eligible for old-age grants are now receiving them.
It is only foster-care grants, which are provided to 179 000 children, that he feels are moving too slowly because of bureaucratic tangles in the Department of Justice and Constitutional Development, where parents have to apply for foster care.
Eight million South Africans receive some form of grant from government every month, he calculates. “It is almost one in every five people, and they are mostly the weakest of the poor.”
Skweyiya dismisses complaints that the department is encouraging young people to have children by paying them a child-support grant. “It is not the first time that young people have become pregnant,” he said. He plans to extend the grant to more children in the coming years.
Provincial governments and NGOs have praised Skweyiya for the promulgation of the National Social Security Agency, which will take pension-grant payments away from provinces and centralise them. This will enable provinces to focus on developmental and socio-economic concerns such as child abuse, drug abuse and other welfare issues.
“Most welfare services are suffering because they are crowded by these pensions. The agency will function well in three to four years, but already some provinces are begging us to take away that responsibility,” the minister said.
Skweyiya’s other big headache is fraud in the social grants system, which he says costs the department between R1,5-billion and R2-billion every year. The fraud is perpetrated mostly by illegal immigrants who are trying to access the grants earmarked for South Africans. They gain access by bribing public servants. The other major type of fraud is that of the “ghost recipients” — where people who are dead mysteriously continue to receive grants, which in truth line the pockets of public servants. “Ghost” fraud is prevalent mostly in former Bantustans, where people still use old forms of identification.
The minister said he was concerned that social workers, who performed most services in his department, were scarce — and that those who were there were underpaid.
“The problem is that social workers are not as vociferous as teachers and nurses, because they are not organised separately,” he said.
But, he added, he and the Minister of Public Service and Administration, Geraldine Fraser-Moleketi, and the National Treasury had agreed on new packages for social workers and were now waiting for social workers to respond in the bargaining chamber.
Skweyiya hailed the work done by most NGOs to help alleviate poverty, but expressed some reservations.
“The community-based NGOs have helped us a lot, especially in providing care in HIV/Aids-related matters. We have faith in NGOs and we see them as our arm in delivery and in deepening democracy. Unfortunately, we are worried about the state of disorganisation that is currently facing the South African NGO Coalition.
“The only strong NGOs appear to be the elitist ones — such as the Institute for Democracy in South Africa, which do not deal with the grassroots and do not handle issues affecting people on the ground.
“They do not understand their role. They think it is to theorise about democracy, like before 1994. They should be helping in strengthening democracy and helping with service delivery to the poor. The voices of the poorest NGOs are not articulated because they cannot travel to Bonn, London or the United States,” he said.
Skweyiya came under fire from children’s rights organisations for trying to fast-track the Children’s Bill through Parliament. NGOs say the Bill does not do enough to ensure that the most vulnerable children are protected and that they have access to government grants and services.
The minister insists the Bill does all that is practically and financially possible, but he has nonetheless urged organisations to take their concerns to the parliamentary committee dealing with the Children’s Bill.
While boasting that no organisations had raised the issue of poverty on the international stage as much as the ANC and the South African government, Skweyiya said he felt communities could do more to fight poverty.
“Our people are no longer ploughing their fields,” he said. “We know that apartheid encouraged people to leave their homes and go to the mines to earn money. But I am worried that even the little 13% of land [left to black people] that we complained about to the apartheid government is no longer being utilised fruitfully. Rich land like in KwaZulu-Natal lies fallow while people have nothing to eat.”