South Africa’s Social Development Minister Zola Skweyiya has stuck by his call for a basic income grant in South Africa but he declined to attach a monthly figure that would apply.
Asked at a briefing whether he was personally thinking of a R100-a-month grant across the board, he joked that the media wanted to crucify him.
But he said that it was his personal view that such a grant should be paid out by the state but it would have to be discussed at the national conference of the ruling African National Congress (ANC) at the end of next year. It would also have to be canvassed with the ANC alliance partners, the Congress of South African Trade Unions — which has always backed such a grant — and the South African Communist Party.
He said he understood and sympathised with the point of view of people who said that the grant, aimed at the poor, should be given immediately.
Skweyiya recently said in Parliament that he was in favour of such a grant.
It is generally envisaged that this grant would be paid out to all adult South Africans — and then retrieved from taxpayers. It has been strongly opposed by Finance Minister Trevor Manuel in the past.
But Skweyiya said on Monday: “I personally hope that we will come out with a clear-cut policy in December.”
He was referring to the national conference of the ANC scheduled to take place in Limpopo in December 2007.
Meanwhile briefing notes indicated that South Africa now paid out child-support grants to 7,6-million children. The report said that four million children on the programme were under seven years’ old and 3,6-million children were between seven and 14 years’ old.
Four years ago the government extended the child-support grant to children between the ages of seven and 14 — with a target of 3,2-million. “This has now been exceeded by 400Â 000,” said the minister.
He reported that the Social Development and Home Affairs departments were working on ensuring that all eligible children “have the requisite documents to ensure that they access the child-support grant”.
Meanwhile, about 400Â 000 recipients of social-welfare grants, the bulk of them recipients of child-care grants, were being investigated for alleged fraud and the vast majority of the people involved were not state employees, Skweyiya noted.
The minister noted that this figure included the 45Â 000 public servants who were being probed for misuse of the grants.
Most of the fraud detected so far was the alleged misuse of child-care grants where the recipients held other jobs or sources of income. The grant is earmarked for the poorest of the poor.
It was explained that the South African Revenue Service was not able to provide the social development department with the names on their database.
However, the department could provide the South African Revenue Service with information on the recipients of the grants which could be checked against their database.
Asked about the amount of money allegedly involved in the grant fraud, it was stressed that the 400Â 000 figure still had to be verified but a rough average figure for one grant — an average of the various grants paid out by the state — was about R430 a month. This translated into R172-million a month.
The Scorpions and the security services had been asked to investigate the alleged fraud. – I-Net Bridge