According to Rhodes University’s Public Service Accountability Monitor (PSAM), the Eastern Cape social development department has spent R52-million over the past four years defending lawsuits by applicants demanding their social grants.
The figure is contained in a damning report by the PSAM highlighting the department’s inability to fulfil one of its primary functions, the distribution of social grants. ”These costs are incurred because the department appears to be using the courts to allow it more time to process social grants. It appears the department has to be brought to court in order to process grants, rather than attending to them in the ordinary course of its day-to-day functions as it is constitutionally mandated to.”
Between August and September this year, the Port Elizabeth High Court heard 1 090 cases involving the department. Most went in favour of the applicants at a conservative cost estimate of R5 000 a case, says the report.
The money spent on litigation is not budgeted for and comes from the department’s core programmes.
The department has had a 50% staff vacancy for four years. This year, it has had three different provincial ministers and three acting heads of department. The national government’s South African Social Security Agency will take over the administration of social grants from provinces next April, but the PSAM suggests little will change if staff shortages and infrastructure backlogs are not addressed.
Also concerning is how the department responds to legal action against it. In most cases where applicants approach the high court seeking payment, the department files notices of opposition. Yet, when the high court sits to consider cases, the department withdraws its opposition, allowing orders to be handed down unopposed.
Dismissing an appeal by the department in the Supreme Court of Appeal, Judge Edwin Cameron said the provincial department had displayed ”a contempt for people and process that does not befit an organ of government under our constitutional dispensation”.