Honourable Speaker

We welcome the Honourable President's announcement that the Social Relief of Distress grant will be extended, while other grants will also be increased.

It would even be more welcome if the grant payment system used to process and distribute grants was not so dysfunctional. If grant applicants were able to speak to a living person when they contact the SASSA call centre and SASSA offices throughout the country.

If people, whose grant applications are approved were paid on time – and did not have to wait for months – to receive the grant that was meant to be an emergency grant and meant to stave off hunger. Regarding the increase in other grant types, the announcement would provide much-needed relief and hope to recipients of elderly, disabled, and child grants if they did not have to wait for days or weeks before receiving their promised grants.

Since November 2022, millions of grants have repeatedly not been paid on time. This caused people to pay multiple expensive transport fares to access their grants and buy expensive food while attempting to receive a grant, which was rightfully theirs – and which ought to be a seamless process. Grant payment system flaws, combined with a lack of effective communication with grant recipients, have resulted in total chaos and mayhem that have reached crisis proportions.

In addition, a system that pays grants to non-eligible applicants while declining the unemployed, makes it difficult to believe that the extensions and increases of grant budgets will make the difference it is meant to make. Between November 2022 and February 2023, hundreds of thousands - if not millions - of grant beneficiaries have waited for long periods, due to what we are told are 'system glitches'.

This Honourable Speaker affects people who are already struggling, who cannot afford to struggle for another day, let alone battle on for weeks for unpaid grants. Even the most resilient break under these circumstances. Honourable Speaker, these are not gripes from an opposition party but the lived reality, the day-to-day, month-to-month dire straits experienced by millions of South Africans, trapped in poverty, and food insecurity caused by a government that stopped caring about its poor 29 years ago.

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