The need for social security nets in SA cannot be disputed. Apartheid’s artificial schisms and racially weighted policies created enormous poverty and development lags.
After more than three decades of democracy, much should have been achieved to address this. Instead, everything from access to education, health care and meaningful development remains skewed and the gap between rich and poor is now a chasm.
Ironically, SA became the most unequal society on earth during its democratic rather than apartheid years.
The ANC government’s habit of throwing money at poverty does nothing to address its root causes; nor does it allow people to break out of the poverty cycle.
In the Eastern Cape, government departments have budgeted R2bn to address “child poverty, malnutrition and food insecurity”.
It is an essential intervention. It is horrific that in 2025 there are still children in this province who are, quite literally, starving to death.
Of the R2bn, the school nutrition programme gets R1.8bn — the bulk of the total budget. The programme provides each schoolchild with one meal a day. For too many, it will be their only meal.
But providing one meal a day does not address child poverty and food insecurity in the long term. It is simply applying a band aid to a gaping wound.
President Cyril Ramaphosa bragged last year that 28-million people (47% of the population) relied on social grants.
While the state must take care of its most vulnerable, it cannot claim that having half the population reliant on it for social grants is poverty eradication.
In the Eastern Cape, 65% of households do so. Ramaphosa said the ANC could be proud of these efforts to reduce poverty.
It is a contradiction in terms for the president to measure the ANC’s success in reducing poverty in terms of the increasing number of people relying on state handouts to survive.
And while the ANC and its budget allies in parliament give to the poor with one hand, they take away with the other.
The recent VAT increase of 0.5 percentage points in 2025/2026 (and a further 0.5 percentage points in 2026/2027) will hit vulnerable communities hard.
Every household’s basic grocery basket will cost more and when combined with the 12.7% electricity price hike, it is likely to place many people under unbearable financial strain.
While the state must take care of its most vulnerable, it cannot claim that having half the population reliant on it for social grants is “poverty eradication”.
Instead, the government should be doing everything in its power to facilitate job creation.
It should be creating a policy and practical environment in which education is universal and where investment and industry can flourish, where the economy can grow and where jobs abound.
In an ideal world we should have an educated and largely self-reliant citizenry with social security nets in place to catch the vulnerable who fall through the cracks.
Only then can it claim that poverty is being meaningfully addressed.
Daily Dispatch
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