Cape Town - The Social Development Department has saved more than R3 billion and removed almost a million bogus social grant beneficiaries from the system, according to Minister Bathabile Dlamini.
She was briefing the media on Sunday – a day before the start of the second annual South African Social Security Agency (Sassa) anti-corruption conference to take place in Pretoria until on Tuesday.
Dlamini and officials from Sassa gave details on how the social sector has performed over the past few years, after rooting out fraud and corruption in the sector.
“We’ve saved more than R3 billion and nearly 850 000 people moved out of the system, and out of that number, some of the people did not re register, and those were mainly children,” Dlamini explained.
She said they did manage, however, to bring some of the child beneficiaries back into the system after verification.
“The number of people (children) has grown because we’ve been running a campaign. And there was a report from Unicef (the UN Children’s Fund) saying there are more that 2 million children not getting a grant,” Dlamini said.
She also hit out at “immoral” debit deductions on the poor with the entrance of the Sassa card into the banking system.
“While we have made progress in rooting out blatant fraud and corruption, we are also finding ourselves having to deal with a new frontier of exploitation of the most vulnerable members of our society as a result of the entrance of the Sassa payment card into the banking system,” Dlamini said.
There was a growing “national phenomenon of unlawful and immoral debit deductions that we now see is unacceptable”, she said.
“While some of these deductions may be technically legal, they remain immoral as they rob the poor of resources that we, as South Africans, provide for them so that they can meet their basic needs,” Dlamini pointed out.
When the department began with the re-registration of beneficiaries in 2012, it found that in areas around Mthatha, Msinga (in KwaZulu-Natal) and the Northern Cape, many cards were being returned to the department.
“What shocked us was that people wanted to know what we’re going to do as a form of appreciation because they returned cards on their own,” she said.
Sassa chief executive Virginia Petersen said that between 2012 and 2013, as many as 7 000 cards were received, with 2 600 coming from the Western Cape, 1 054 from Gauteng and 1 700 from the Free State.
Acting director-general Thokozani Magwaza said the department had finally approved and established an inspectorate.
“We hope that with the inspectorate in place we will be able to further reduce fraud,” Magwaza said.
Political Bureau