The problem is that poverty or poverty, while it may be suffering, is not suffering as defined by this law. If you are poor, you are not suffering, you are poor. And in such conditions there is no income support.
Many may have forgotten the tireless and dedicated efforts since 1994, when hundreds of apartheid statutes were interrogated and rewritten in line with our Constitution. New democratic institutions were introduced and others were revamped, with varying degrees of success.
We enter the sixth administration of this young country with the guarantee that the inequalities of immigration controls, group areas and immoral behavior will never be known to our children. Nor are the detentions, bans, and killings carried out to destroy opposition to racially exploitative capitalist apartheid projects. Tragically, however, that was not the case with the Social Security Act.
And as a result of these historic apartheid inequalities (and exacerbated by some of the current choices made by our country's leaders), South Africa's inequalities are staggering. Our country ranks as the most unequal country in the world. period. We are not without money, and we are proud to be an upper middle income country, but the way we distribute money continues to earn us this inequality ranking.
Official poverty statistics show that one in four South Africans lives below the food poverty line. According to the World Health Organization, the food poverty line is the amount needed to buy enough food to survive. More than half of South Africans are poor. And 1% of South Africans own 70% of that wealth.
Since 1994, many laws and policies have been adopted aimed at eradicating past injustices. While successive budgets have allocated funds to social wages such as education, health care and housing in ways unthinkable 26 years ago, the worrying problem is that policymakers have not yet realized the poverty and disparity that exists. It is a feeling that we do not understand the depth of the fear of equality. Beyond the colorful cocoon of sufficiency, abundance, and perverted luxury that dominates the democratic perspective.
A prime example is Social Security, or the distribution of Social Security, which is well known to those who need to know about Social Security. The right to social income is guaranteed to everyone by the constitution, as are the rights to health care, housing, water and food. However, this law is based on the premise that apartheid policy effectively guarantees full employment for white male breadwinners, given that the law has no impact on the social income of poor working-age people. There is no legal provision for access (the possibility of short-term unemployment is dependent on funding). Employment Insurance Fund).
We often hear the argument that social subsidies discourage people from working and create dependence. This in itself is a bit strange because last time I checked, children and pensioners were not meant to work. But what these naysayers mean is that if you give subsidies to (poor) working-age people, they will obviously choose to live on the subsidy income rather than work. In other words, the naysayers believe that the reason people are currently unemployed is not because they are lazy or enjoy starvation.
People aren't working because there aren't enough jobs for them. In effect, approximately 25 million people in the labor force (ages 15 to 59) are unemployed or employed in the precarious informal economy. And here's the problem.
The deliberate destruction of farmers in South Africa under colonialism and apartheid is well documented. Black people's survival and income-generating assets were targeted in order to make young people dependent on wage labor through taxes and dog taxes to ensure cheap labor for newly industrialized South Africa.
Colonial and apartheid governments were very deliberate and brutal in depriving people of their land and livelihoods and criminalizing people's attempts to accumulate assets. In short, the only income-generating asset left for the majority of people was labor power, the ability to earn wages through physical and mental labor. Nevertheless, the country denies them the ability to do this, given the current unemployment rate.
Now, back to the issue of suffering and poverty and ghosts of the past. The Social Assistance Act, built on the certainty of full employment for white men, provides access to temporary social cash grants known as Social Relief of Distress (SROD) grants. This is often confused (understandably) with the emergency aid provided by state governments to survivors of fires and floods of the same name, but it is different because it has national rather than state funding.
SROD provides assistance for three months, which may be extended for a further three months in extreme cases. Its purpose is to meet the survival needs of people who are in distress and are unable to meet these needs on their own. But the problem is that destitution and poverty, while they may be suffering, are not suffering as defined by this law.
This may seem like an interesting twist on semantics, but in essence, destitution is the result of the breadwinner (or her) losing their job or being incarcerated. This is when you no longer have access to bread. In other words, the distress must be the result of a specific event that causes the source of income to stop or be interrupted. If you don't have a source of income, you don't qualify. If you are poor, you are not suffering, you are poor. And in such conditions there is no income support.
Of immediate interest is the budget document released a few hours ago, which states that SROD accounts for just 0.3% of total social assistance spending, and that SROD spending has fallen by -0.2% over the current three-year period after social assistance spending. This indicates that it is predicted to increase. Spending growth in the previous medium-term spending framework period was -0.2%. As poverty deepens and unemployment rises, will the budget for the only social assistance program for poor working-age people decline, even temporarily?
Our perspective can distract from the real challenges facing governments, but it shouldn't. A new government can and should overcome this and address structural poverty and inequality.
The easiest way to do this is to guarantee a monthly cash subsidy, or basic income subsidy. Universal basic income subsidies are being piloted in many countries that are not in the same poverty and inequality crisis that we are. Providing cash to people who cannot earn it themselves stimulates local demand.
This is the essence of what Oxfam suggests in its 2019 Inequality Report, recently launched at Davos. It is an immediate effort to reduce poverty and inequality in our country.
That's the right thing to do. DM
Isabel Fry is executive director of the Institute for the Study of Poverty and Inequality, a member of the Budget Justice Coalition.
