Election promises are loud and enticing, particularly when they involve doubling the value of social grants.
With local elections approaching, politicians know that promises of bigger grants resonate. They speak directly to the everyday realities of older people struggling to put food on the table, pay electricity bills and support their families.
The promise to double the Older Persons Grant (OPG) to R4,500 a month is therefore likely to find a receptive audience. Older people are angry. They are struggling. And over the past few weeks, pensioners across the country have taken to the streets, demanding an increase in the grant.
Their frustration is entirely understandable.
But we need to be able to see the wood from the trees.
The problem facing older South Africans is not simply that the OPG is too small. It is that we have increasingly come to rely on the grant to do the work of an entire social protection and care system.
Our research on family caregiving, which includes 100 detailed monthly budgets from pensioner households, shows how this happens. The OPG is intended to support an older person, not an entire household. Yet in practice, it frequently pays for food, electricity and other basic household costs for several generations.
This is not surprising. Women receive the OPG around three times more frequently than men, and older women are particularly likely to live in large, multigenerational households. When working-age adults cannot find employment, the pension becomes an important source of income for everyone. The alternative income available to many households is hardly sufficient. The Social Relief of Distress grant is just R375 a month.
So yes, older people need more money.
But giving more money to the OPG is not the same thing as investing in elder care.
The numbers tell an important story. Spending on the Older Persons Grant now accounts for approximately 98.5% of state funding directed towards elder care. The grant reaches 4.16 million people, compared with around 2.2 million in 2006/07. In nominal terms, expenditure has increased almost fivefold, from R21.9 billion to R106.8 billion. That sounds like a substantial expansion of support. But adjust those figures for inflation and a different picture emerges. The real annual value of the grant per person has remained remarkably stable: approximately R25,640 in 2024/25 compared with around R25,400 in 2006/07, in equivalent terms.
The system has therefore expanded in scale, but not in depth. More older people receive the grant, but the grant provides little more purchasing power to each recipient than it did two decades ago. And the number of recipients will continue to grow as South Africa's population ages. This should force us to ask a more fundamental question: what kind of support will older South Africans need, beyond income? The Grant in Aid is designed for people receiving the OPG who require regular assistance because of their care needs. Yet it remains remarkably underused.
Our research suggests that only around 6% of OPG beneficiaries, approximately 252,000 people, receive the Grant in Aid, despite our estimates suggesting that the number of people who could require significant assistance is closer to 1.5 million.
The Grant in Aid is not a solution to the country's long-term care crisis. It is too small to fund substantial care dependency. But it is an important mechanism for putting additional resources into households that face the extra costs associated with disability and care.
If politicians want a targeted and credible election promise, expanding access to the Grant in Aid would be a good place to start.
But even this is not enough.
The bigger problem is what is happening to care services. While expenditure on the OPG has expanded, provincial spending on community-based care for older people has fallen by approximately 26% over the past two decades.
This is a deeply troubling development in a country that increasingly pro-motes ageing in place, the idea that older people should be able to remain in their homes and communities rather than being forced into institutions. Ageing in place sounds attractive. But ageing in place requires somewhere to age well.
It requires home-based care. It requires transport. It requires respite services for family caregivers. It requires day centres, rehabilitation and support for people living with disabilities. It requires people who can help older people with the everyday tasks that become difficult as they age.
An additional R1,000 or R2,000 in an older person's pocket cannot create any of these services if they simply do not exist.
This is the fundamental problem with treating social grants as a sub-stitute for care. Some things can be bought individually. Care infrastructure cannot.
An older person cannot individually purchase an accessible public transport system. They cannot establish a community day centre. They cannot employ a network of homebased carers at a sustainable scale. They cannot create a respite-care service for their daughter who has been caring for them every day for five years.
These require collective investment.
We also need to ask where older people are ageing. Support for services are also deeply uneven across the country with rural and informal areas obtaining less support.
Across South Africa there are densely populated, poorly serviced communities with substantial and growing older populations. Many informal settlements have inadequate sanitation, poor transport and limited access to health and social services. Access to residential, respite and day care is even more limited.
Khayelitsha provides a striking example. Approximately 20,000 older person grant beneficiaries live there, yet only now is the first residential care facility being established to serve this population.
This is not something that an individual grant can solve. It requires the state to recognise where ageing is happening and invest accordingly.
The same principle should apply to home-based care, accessible transport and community-based services. We need to identify our ageing hotspots and invest in the infrastructure that will allow older people to remain safely and with dignity in their communities.
The answer is not that politicians should stop talking about the OPG. Older people clearly need greater income security.
The current value of the grant does not adequately meet the cost of living, particularly when older people are supporting entire households.
But a bigger pension is not a long-term care policy. The political debate needs to move beyond the size of the monthly payment and ask what kind of society we want to build for an ageing population. That means asking whether older people can get the care they need when they become frail. Whether their families can receive support. Whether someone who has had a stroke can access rehabilitation and home-based care. Whether an older person living alone can get to a clinic. Whether caregivers can take a break. Whether communities have places where older people can socialise, receive support and remain connected.
These are the infrastructure of an ageing society.
So, as politicians compete to promise bigger grants in the run-up to the elections, we should welcome commitments to improving income security, but we should also ask some harder questions.
Where are the commitments to home-based care? Where are the investments in respite care? Where is the accessible transport? Where are the community services? And what will be done to ensure that the Grant in Aid reaches the millions of older people who need additional support? South Africa is not simply facing a social grant challenge. We are facing an ageing and care challenge.
If we respond only by putting more money into the OPG, we may reach more people without actually providing the support they need.
We need an ageing system that provides both income security and care.
Professor Elena Moore is a professor of sociology in the Department of Sociology at the University of Cape Town.