KwaZulu-Natal social welfare and population development minister Nyanga Ngubane’s bid to avoid personally paying the legal costs of thousands of social grant applicants struggling for pensions and grants was thwarted by the Supreme Court of Appeal in Bloemfontein last week.
Ngubane’s attempt to overturn a special costs order last year by Judge Jan Combrink in the Pietermaritzburg Supreme Court was struck from the roll by Judge M Maya, with four judges concurring.
The ruling means Ngubane is vulnerable to further costs orders if the issue is resurrected and the minister is unable to prove his department acted competently in handling the province’s grants backlog, its constitutional obligations or its duties under the Social Assistance Act.
Judge Combrink’s order stemmed from frustration over the burden on the judicial system created by thousands of individual litigation cases against the KwaZulu-Natal department of social welfare and population development.
The various applications enrolled for hearing in the Pietermaritzburg High Court on January 20 last year were considered as a group rather than individually because, as the supreme court judgement noted, ”the court’s specific intention was to devise a means by which the apparent, long-standing crisis could finally be resolved”.
In his ruling, Judge Combrink acknowledged that Ngubane had inherited a department in disarray, but found that the department and its functions were being grossly mismanaged and incompetence was rife.
Issuing the personal costs order against the minister, the judge suspended it for four months, allowing him an opportunity to persuade the court that his department’s work backlog had been reduced.
Ngubane then successfully applied for leave to appeal, while filing affidavits detailing improvements that had been made. These included the appointment of an ad hoc appeal board, the hiring of additional staff and the processing and finalisation of thousands of applications within days.
However, the appeal court judgement reinforced the picture of a department unable to carry out its duties and which behaves callously towards the aged, disabled and orphaned.
The court noted that the Durban and Pietermaritzburg high courts had been ”inundated with a massive and ever-increasing volume of litigation by thousands of indigent applicants seeking social relief”.
More than 26 000 applications had been filed in these courts between the beginning of 2000 and March 8 last year. Only one of those adjudicated was opposed, while the rest were settled in favour of the applicants, with Ngubane’s department paying out millions of rands of taxpayers’ money in legal costs because it had no defence.
As of January 20 last year, 18 000 cases had been lodged in Pietermaritzburg and Durban high courts in the previous year and were awaiting enrolment.
This litigation related to the welfare department’s failure to process applications and appeals, its failure to pay approved grants and the ”arbitrary cancellation of grants without notice or explanation”.
Those seeking redress included a deaf-mute woman whose application for a disability grant was lodged in 1999. It was never processed despite numerous written inquiries to the department that went unacknowledged and unanswered.
Another matter involved an elderly woman whose old-age pension was cancelled without notice after she had been a beneficiary for several years. The department did not respond to numerous inquiries.
The supreme court ruling noted that the ”applicants in other matters told similar stories of hardship and frustration suffered at the hands of the department. They all approached the court because of the department’s inaction after exhausting every possible remedy.”