People protest for the R350 grants outside Sassa office in Bellville, Cape Town, in April. Picture: Gallo Images
The Gauteng High Court in Pretoria heard arguments regarding the Social Relief of Distress (SRD) grant on Tuesday.
The Institute for Economic Justice (IEJ) and advocacy group #PayTheGrants are contesting the constitutionality of the SRD grant.
The applicants want the government to relook at the social grant’s current regulations.
In their founding affidavit, the organisations contended that at least 16 million individuals were eligible for the SRD grant.
ALSO READ: Sassa refutes claims of receiving 17 million SRD grant applications in one month
Although 14 million people applied for the grant, only 8.3 million applications were approved in March 2023.
The applicants have argued that bureaucratic hurdles and stringent criteria rendered the grant inaccessible to millions of South Africans.
The South African Social Security Agency (Sassa), the Minister of Social Development, and the Minister of Finance are the respondents in the case.
During Tuesday’s proceedings, Advocate Jason Brickhill, representing IEJ and #PayTheGrants, clarified that the applicants were not requesting the court to assess the value of the grant or to establish the qualifying criteria.
“The third question that this case is not about; that is not required to be decided on is how much government can or should budget for the Social Relief of Distress grant, an issue that National Treasury devotes a great deal of attention to,” he said.
Brickhill argued that the case did not aim to undermine the functions of government departments.
Rather, it focused on affirming the constitutional rights of South Africans, many of whom are excluded from the SRD grant due to current regulations.
“The respondents are seeking to immunise the SRD grant from court scrutiny and seeking to avoid accountability for the massive arbitrary exclusions and the stagnating grant value and income threshold,” the advocate told the court.
READ MORE: ‘We were found wanting’: Sassa aware of social grant ‘fraud breaches’ since at least 2023
The lawyer highlighted the presence of systemic non-payment issues.
He noted that beneficiaries who were approved for the SRD grant were not assured of receiving the full allocated amount, owing to inconsistencies in the payment process.
Brickhill also questioned the reasoning behind the decision to raise the grant by only R20 to R370.
“The data shows that 93% of recipients who use the grant spend at least a portion of it on food, and over 50% of the grant value, the overall money, is spent on food,” he said.
The case will continue in court on Wednesday.
The government introduced the SRD grant in May 2020, during the peak of the Covid-19 pandemic and the national state of disaster, providing R350 per month.
Initially available only to unemployed adults, the grant was later expanded to include individuals earning below R624.
The grant amount was increased to R370 this year, and its duration has been extended until March 2025.
Meanwhile, the Congress of South African Trade Unions (Cosatu) expressed its support for the litigation, advocating for a basic income grant (BIG).
Cosatu deemed it “unacceptable” that since the SRD Grant was introduced in 2020, it has been adjusted for inflation only once.
“We remain concerned by the difficulties many legitimate applicants experience when applying for and receiving their SRD grants.
“We agree that the government must ensure fraudulent and corrupt applications and abuses are dealt with, but this needs to be done in a manner that does not inadvertently exclude genuine applicants,” the federation’s statement reads.
Last week, two students from Stellenbosch University presented their findings in Parliament, revealing how they discovered fraud within the Sassa’s SRD grant system.
NOW READ: ‘List of Sassa failures are endless’: Calls for SIU probe into alleged fraud and corruption
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