DEBATE ON THE SOCIAL WELFARE AND POPULATION DEVELOPMENT REPORT

BY BS MOHLAKA MPP
TAKING PARLIAMENT TO THE PEOPLE


 

Msinga 29 May 2007  

Honourable Speaker

The IFP found it encouraging to hear the MEC for Social Welfare and Population Development remark that the cost of paying social grants, currently estimated at roughly R50-billion a year, has to be accompanied by the creation of sustainable community development programmes which, in turn, would progressively wean the beneficiaries off the social grants.

This, of course, is a noble ambition. But the goal of eventually weaning beneficiaries off social grants may not necessarily be the logical conclusion in the MEC's line of thought. As most social grant schemes stand today, we are running a massive risk of creating a dependency culture instead of a culture of progressive community development.

We have a lot to learn from many Western countries which, under tremendous pressure, are working hard to ease their welfare systems due to their increasing unsustainability. The most prominent lesson is that social assistance - if it is to be a genuine stop-gap solution to poverty alleviation in the long run - must be tied, more comprehensively and more convincingly than it is today in South Africa, to community development.

We in the IFP have never questioned the fundamentals behind the social grants. Take child support grants. South Africa has a duty to all its children and most of all, to those who are vulnerable due to their circumstances.

Vulnerable children need dedicated help and guidance to ensure that they are protected from harm, assisted during and after trauma, and given opportunities to develop.

In exploring the opportunities for child and youth development worldwide, the focus is steadily shifting from the mere provision of social assistance grants towards assisted social development. This trend is well-supported by research, advocacy and policy development. In practice, the shift has coincided with the emergence of education and training vouchers and programmes with a conditional tie between the social grant and a social development outcome.

Honourable Speaker, one obvious advantage of vouchers and tied assistance is that they are, by default, less open to corruption and fraud than straight cash payments. They are also a great deal more personalised to fit the individual needs of specific beneficiaries as opposed to the anonymous and one-size-fits-all character of child support grants as we known them today.

Another advantage of assisted development is its far social reach. While children are the primary focus of assisted social development, it is important to recognise that they form part of families and communities. Their rights and needs cannot be understood in isolation and outside of the context of socio-economic development of communities, both traditional and urban.

In fact, social development programmes are more familiar to us than we might think. The kind of social welfare services, that entail aspects of assisted social development, include children's courts, children's homes, adoption services, services to provide assistance to children living and/or working on the street, foster care placement and care for children affected by HIV/Aids and children heading households.

Yet many of these social services, in their current shape and form, are open to the same kind of attack as the welfare system once spawned by apartheid. They are largely unresponsive to the needs of the majority of South Africans who require them. This is due to the complexity of the challenges these services are tackling: extensive structural unemployment in communities, entrenched poverty, domestic violence, social disintegration, and the spread of HIV/Aids.

Honourable Speaker, an ideal system of assisted social development would have to address all these challenges but, at the same time, restrict the role of the government in trying to tackle the challenges by mere, high-handed intervention. In other words, education ather social assistance tied to development outcomes must allow for client choice on the part of parents, guardians, social workers and, to some extent, children themselves.

It is the partnership of all these stakeholders that must fuel the creation of sustainable community development the MEC has been talking about. Only then will the system of social grants prevent a fully-fledged emergence of dependency culture and, in time, wean the current beneficiaries off their entitlements.

I thank you.

Contact: BS Mohlaka, 072 282 4651