Minister of Social Development Zola Skweyiya frankly admitted in his budget vote speech this week that the government does not have the human resources capacity to “adequately exercise oversight of the work” of the newly formed South African Social Security Agency.
This confirms the views of leading NGOs that the agency may not be a panacea for the corruption and mismanagement that has crippled the social grant system over the past decade.
Although 3 500 new staff have been trained in the past two years to run the new agency, which came into effect on April 1, Skweyiya said: “Even if all the current staff [responsible for the disbursement of grants in the provinces and nationally] were transferred to the agency there would still not be enough capacity to … deliver and monitor social security.”
Skweyiya’s comments followed his announcement in Parliament on Tuesday that 37 000 civil servants suspected of fraudulently claimed grants are being probed by the Special Investigating Unit. Corruption in the social grant system costs the government R1,5-billion a year.
Skweyiya said that a study into whether his department “has the necessary capacity, qualitatively and quantitatively, to discharge its mandate,” would be completed by June.
The Black Sash, which has been at the cutting edge of monitoring the social grant system, has consistently attacked the establishment of the social security agency, arguing that it will “replicate the existing dysfunctions of the system”. These include human resource incapacity, inadequate infrastructure and information technology support systems, and a failure to provide sufficient public education about social grants.
Erika Wessels, the head of the Black Sash’s legal division, insisted it was premature to establish an agency to take over the administration and payment of social grants without assessing the impact of removing this responsibility from provinces. She added that the Sash have received no clear answers from the government, despite repeated questions about how the new system would be rolled out in the provinces.
The establishment of the agency adopted a “one-size-fits-all” approach to the provinces with the aim of standardising management, budgeting and information technology systems, she said.
The Social Security Agency Act vests Skweyiya with statutory control over social assistance, while the agency’s CEO — to be appointed in the next two weeks — will account to the minister. Regional managers will be appointed in each province, and they will employ staff “after careful screening”, said Selwyn Jehoma, the department’s chief director of grant systems. About R60-million has been allocated to the agency for this financial year and a further R133-million over the medium term.
However, the Black Sash argues that the new system overlooks the political, social and technological nuances in each province. For example, some provinces had streamlined management structures and computing systems, while in other provinces the employees disbursing grants “still count the ages of people on their fingers”, said Wessels.
“We are dealing with an agency which is about to be implemented, but which relies on infrastructure that does not really exist,” she said.
“Even though the agency will be based in Pretoria, there will be very little difference in the way in which the grants are disbursed at provincial level. It’s at the pay points that you find the fraud and mismanagement, and the agency will not have control over these.”
Mary Turok, a former MP who sat on Parliament’s social development committee, said “there is simply no alternative” to the agency, given the rot in the current system.
Jehoma said the agency’s priority was to restore the integrity of the grant system. “There is no limit to the amount we will invest to plug corruption,” he said. About R20-million had been set aside to investigate the 37 000 suspects, but “this is only the beginning of unearthing people”.
A new software system called Statistical Analysis Software, which cost the department R9-million, was used to bust the fraudsters. The government’s personnel databases were compared with the recipients of government salaries and pensions, and with grant beneficiaries.
Jehoma said most of the corrupt civil servants were in the KwaZulu-Natal health and education departments.