The South African Civil Society Information Service

Planning for Prosperity?
By Isobel Frye · 21 Jan 2010

Picture credit: Alex Kadis

“It happens that you see it is better that the little ones eat and you can stay as you are, and there is nothing that you can do, and when the children ask why is it that mommy is not eating, you will say that you will eat after them.

My son eats tea and the crusts of the pap, he is 28 years old and he has tried to get work and vacancies are scarce.  The biggest problem is that he does not have matric and I can see when I look at him that he longs to eat like other people, but all that I can do is love him and motivate him and say that in a while it will get better but then you can see that it is hard. And then Sunday you can see he wants to have Sunday food but there is nothing you can do.”

Vosloorus Focus Group, October 2009.

Hunger has its own appetite and eats from within.  Childhood hunger stunts physical and mental growth, marking the child’s future from its cradle.

Poverty appears to be too stubborn in South Africa to ever disappear.  Too many people are living in absolute survivalist mode, spending their days searching for sufficient food and water to survive for the next day.  What policies have we adopted to really bring an end to this, and are they appropriate?  It makes little sense to someone in this situation, to people living in communities that lack disposable income, to be told that they should defeat their own destitution by becoming small business entrepreneurs?

But, alarmingly, it seems as if we, as a country, are completely okay with the fact that half of South African citizens live in poverty, with another quarter pretty much still struggling to survive. Being ranked one of the most unequal countries in the world should surely motivate people to ask what we can do to change this.

There are those that hold that education and health care are the best ways of enabling people to work their way out of poverty.  For people that are starving in the here and how, that is scant help.

So, what else can be done?

We can and must begin to accept the positive benefit and value of social grants in addressing the very basic needs of poor people as well as in providing the bedrock for development of recipients by injecting cash into poor households. For millions of people, grants are currently the only source of income providing a little relief on some days from the cruel grind of destitution. There are, however, a number of problems about grants.  

Firstly, they are not available to unemployed working age people like the son mentioned by his mother above.  This means that in the absence of available work, adults have to depend on old people and young children, which inverts social norms and undermines the very sense of self-agency required for growth and development.

Another problem linked to grants is that middle class people don’t like grants.  Grants and poor people are both blamed, often subconsciously, for the existing levels of unemployment and poverty. In considering the high levels of unemployed people living in households that receive grants, one economist claimed that this supported his theory that if someone in a house got a grant, others would give up their jobs and be lazy. Qualitative research suggests that unemployed family members gather around the granny that has the grant hoping to be able to receive some relief from her money.

But a more structural problem is that we have failed to link up our social and economic policies to enable us to multiply the returns on the state spending on social grants. Independent economists valued the discounted rate of return on a R240 monthly child support grant at between 160% and 230%. If policy makers were able to link in better school feeding for all children this would immediately improve the investment and the returns. Again, if we provide working age people with a small monthly income and get them to register for skills assessments and subsequent training and job placement, we could begin to turn the tide against the cripplingly high numbers of unskilled and destitute young people whom we have failed.

Intelligent policymaking is urgently needed. Plans need to address both immediate, medium and long-term goals. Getting the country to where we want to be will take a couple of generations, but if we don’t start now we may never get there.

Read more articles by Isobel Frye.

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