If it were not for the efforts of a group of hardy community volunteers, social grant beneficiaries, scraping a living below the poverty line in the North West province might well have been in for a rough winter.
”Paying the right social grant, to the right person, at the right time and place” boasts the motto of the new South African Social Security Agency (Sassa). The agency was launched to administer social grants and remove this massive bureaucratic burden from the department of social welfare.
This year Sassa will pay out R60-billion in social grants and the running of the agency will cost the taxpayer R4,1-billion. But volunteers in the North West province say Sassa can’t get the right people to the right place without the assistance of unpaid community workers.
Last week, 60 recipients of grants were registered with Cash Paymaster Services (CPS), Sassa’s new service provider, which has taken over from the Post Office in the North West. This might seem like a modest achievement, but it took three weeks and at least 40 phone calls from community activists to ensure that the Rietfontein library was turned into a one-stop shop, with the police there to certify ID books and CPS to register beneficiaries. Without it, Rietfonteins’s most vulnerable people might well have gone without their grants for May.
The confusion began early last month when the Post Office’s contract to provide cash payments to grant beneficiaries in the province expired and Sassa decided to transfer all beneficiaries to CPS. Community activist Dorothea Zeffert says officials initially told people they needed to travel to Marikana to get their ID books certified by the police and to Thlabani to register with CPS. Thlabani and Marikana are settlements around Rustenburg and transport is too expensive for beneficiaries, who are mainly pensioners and single mothers. It was also unclear whether a local, accessible pay point would be set up for beneficiaries.
Zeffert, who has helped community members access social assistance for the past eight years, says that officials only told her about the proposed changes a month before the cut-off date for registering beneficiaries with CPS.
”They don’t say anything, they just demand and we do it because we are poor and we don’t have enough,” says Giniva Khomola, a grant beneficiary, who says she is tired of being treated with disrespect by officials. ”It would be better if they came here and gave us enough time,” she continues, ”also for officials to come and see what it’s like for us.”
Sassa has since extended the registration period and people can still collect grants from the post office until further notice. ”I want to emphasise that no one beneficiary will not be paid,” says Denver Van Heerden of Sassa. Zeffert says Sassa has also promised to create CPS pay points at two local stores in Rietfontein to ensure that people will not have to travel great distances to access their grants.
”In my experience,” Zeffert says, ”if we have a problem in this little area, it will be an issue elsewhere. This is a failure of service provision; these things are too easily glossed over in the rural areas. Rural people are treated very badly — they are treated like imbeciles, regardless of who they are.” Zeffert began doing this volunteer work after an employee attempted suicide three times because he could not obtain an ID book.
Earlier this year the Black Sash raised concerns about Sassa in a submission to the portfolio committee on social development. It claimed that Sassa spends over half its R4,1-billion budget paying independent service providers, such as CPS, to disburse grants. Deon Ruiters, national advocacy manager of the Black Sash, says that Sassa has yet to show clear strategies for solving service delivery problems, especially in rural areas.
Sassa says that it ran an information campaign from February about the need to register with CPS. Sassa officials in the North West were unable to provide the Mail & Guardian with details about the campaign. Residents say they were unaware of any such initiative.
