MEDIA STATEMENT
BY THE
INKATHA FREEDOM PARTY
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Inkatha Freedom Party Statement By:
27 September 2007 A recent newspaper article and a Special Assignment documentary once again highlighted the serious challenges poor South Africans face, on a daily basis, in trying to access any form of social assistance from government. For many families child support grants have become a meal ticket, but accessing these grants is a huge problem to many who desperately need them (like child-headed households), mainly because parents or caregivers do not have the green bar-coded ID documents. It's estimated that up to 12 million children in South Africa are living in extreme poverty and many of these children are suffering from malnutrition and HIV/Aids. Millions of rands that could feed the hungry lay untouched in government's coffers, because to some, it is impossible to access these life-saving grants. The question we, the Inkatha Freedom Party, want to raise is the following: thirteen years since the dawn of democracy government is still struggling to successfully roll out grants to children who need them and for thirteen years now they have been struggling to root out corruption relating to these grants. Has the situation not become so critical now that government has to look at a new approach to social grants? The IFP feels that we need alternatives to this problem and we can not wait another thirteen years. It is now time for government to acknowledge the problems they face and take the hands of civil society to look at ways of successfully rolling out child grants to the needy. Research has shown that 44% of children who are entitled to grants are not receiving them because they don't have the correct documents. Therefore, the IFP wants to express our support to the Alliance for Children's Entitlement to Social Security (Acess) who are challenging government regulations for the provision of grants. Acess wants the Pretoria High Court to rule that any needy child who does not have a bar-coded identity document or birth certificate can use alternative forms of identifications, as a temporary measure. These initiatives from children's rights organisations will already go a long way in forcing government to revise their policies and make it easier to access social assistance. The IFP hopes that government will urgently realise the need for a new approach to social grants.
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