EDITORIAL: Political turbulence lurks in the grants space
The SRD has proved to be not so temporary and the government now has to tackle the tough issue of what to do about it
In the depths of the Covid-19 crisis the government introduced a special Covid social relief of distress (SRD) grant of R350 a month for unemployed adults who were not covered by any other form of social grant. It was quite a radical departure for a government that had expanded SA’s social grants to reach as many as 18-million beneficiaries, at a cost of more than R200bn a year. It had always targeted grants at the vulnerable, including children and elderly and disabled people, not at able-bodied adults.
But it was felt something had to be done, temporarily, to cushion the impact of Covid, which ramped up SA’s already high unemployment and poverty rates. At its peak the SRD, as the grant is now called, reached more than 10-million adults, adding tens of billions to the annual budget and bringing the total number of grant recipients to almost double the number of people with jobs and almost 70% of adult South Africans...
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