Rampant fraud and corruption in the administration of the special Covid-19 social relief of distress (SRD) grant and recent budget cuts contributed to the overhaul of its eligibility criteria, according to the social development department.
The disbursement of the R350 grant, which was introduced in 2020 as part of the state’s support to individuals who lost their income as a result of the pandemic, has been plagued by mismanagement, with more than 25,000 people, including 5,812 government employees, having fraudulently received the grant, costing the country more than R8.78m.
The Treasury has allocated R44bn for the grant’s 12-month extension covering 10.5-million eligible people. The extension of the grant to March 2023 was widely praised because mass job losses, triggered by the flagging pandemic-hit economy, threatened to plunge large segments of the population deeper into poverty.
However, the new criteria for eligibility, including lowering the threshold to people who receive less than R350 a month in income (from R640 a month previously) have raised concern among civil society organisations that previous recipients who relied on the grant to sustain them will be left without a source of income.
The other condition is that the recipient must not have received any other state assistance.
This is amid the rising cost of living in SA spurred by global supply shortages and Covid-19-related disruptions to global transport networks.
Social development minister Lindiwe Zulu said the changes in the eligibility criteria of the SRD grant are to ensure that those who “deserve” the grant get it.
Some people who returned to work “are still getting the R350 and it is a problem for us. It’s a question of us fixing our system so that such people who are still in the system who are not supposed to be in the system [are excluded],” Zulu told parliament’s select committee on health and social services.
“We had to be responsible because the auditor-general is sitting on our case about people who get the money who are not supposed to get the money.”
Previously the grant was administered under the national state of disaster, which has been lifted. The regulations are now governed under the Social Assistance Act, which regulates the state’s social grant programmes.
Chief director at the social development department Brenda Khunoane told the committee: “In addition to changing the regulations and putting it under the Social Assistance Act, we also had to obtain concurrence from the ministry of finance in order for us to implement the new grant.
“We had to also ensure that we stay within the allocation that we had been given ... so now we had to come up with criteria that is quite similar but there are some additional things that we had to add to the criteria to ensure that we had to render the grant to all of the new people but also have to stay with the R44bn allocation.”
Moving the administration of the grant to a new legislative framework means that grant recipients will now have to reapply digitally before the 15 of every month.
Civil society organisations including the Black Sash, #PayTheGrants, the Social Policy Initiative and the Institute for Economic Justice (IEJ) have raised concerns, saying that wiping the slate clean of previously approved grant obligations has put in jeopardy April SRD grants for millions of South Africans.
Kelle Howson, senior research associate for social security and workers’ rights at the IEJ says “the grant has not increased with inflation so it does not go as far as it did last year”.
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