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Minister of Finance Enoch Godongwana’s decision to cancel the R370 a month Social Relief of Distress grant next year despite the economy being forecast to continue growing too slowly to generate jobs spits in the faces of millions of South Africans who did not choose to be poor.

By the State’s own reckoning, the amount of money needed to feed an adult South African, known as the food poverty line, is R796 a month.

Delivering the Medium-Term Budget Policy Statement this week, Godongwana didn’t say how the State expects the 17 million applicants for the SRD in September to feed themselves next year. 

In fact, he didn’t mention in his speech that social grants would be cancelled; this detail appeared in the fine print of the full MTBPS document – perhaps in the hope that nobody would notice it. 

The document argues that “reform and reprioritisation are needed to improve efficiency” and then indicates a substantial reduction in the social wage, and social grants in particular, from R269 billion in the current year to R248 billion in 2025/26.

De-prioritising assistance to millions of unemployed South Africans is an abrogation of the State’s Constitutional responsibility to support citizens unable to support themselves.

Godongwana’s policy statement included a number of good plans to narrow the budget deficit, stabilise debt and support public infrastructure investment. 

But he needed to be bolder. The anaemic growth forecast of 1.8% a year for three years means there’s no magic mountain of money on the horizon; he must find money elsewhere.  

Instead of sticking to the script of budgets past, he could have announced a new approach, zero-based budgeting, in which all State expenses are justified for each new budget period. He could have announced plans to free up money by restructuring State spending, and cutting unnecessary programming, pomp and bloat, including reducing expenditure on the provincial level of government. 

He could have been in the position to invest in social justice by announcing a Basic Income Grant of at least R1000 a month, for which the GOOD Party has been advocating. But what he did was ask the poorest citizens to pay the highest price to maintain the structure of South Africa’s economy of inequality.

South Africa is a tinderbox, the July 2021 riots demonstrated at great cost, because so many people have so little to lose. Criminals stalk the land, quarterly crime statistics show, forcing ever-greater expenditure on policing – and leaving less for social security.

Addressing the basic needs and dignity of the millions who are excluded from the economy is not charity; it is about being fair and just, and it’s a necessity for the nation’s stability.

Issued by Brett Herron, GOOD Secretary-General