A Gauteng pensioner's grant runs out before the month does

Samson Tshabalala, a 65-year-old pensioner in Gauteng, says his monthly SASSA grant no longer stretches far enough, and he wants the government to raise it above inflation before older South Africans fall further behind. He is retired, has a background in admin and office work, and two other people depend on his income.

As The South African reported on 20 October, Tshabalala set out his position through the outlet’s SASSA grant survey. The single change he would make to the agency, he said, is the amount it pays.

Tshabalala receives the Older Person’s Grant, the monthly payment the South African Social Security Agency makes to people aged 60 and over, subject to a means test. He owns his own home, but he told the outlet that housing costs remain his biggest financial concern and that most of his grant goes towards rent or housing expenses. By the end of the month, he said, nothing is left.

Despite that pressure, he confirmed that nobody in his household went without food in the past month.

His experience of the agency itself is unusually smooth. The grant lands in his bank account each month, he described the process as straightforward, and he said he has never had a problem with his payment. He rated SASSA’s communication with recipients as very good, a rating many recipients would not share. His complaint is not about delivery. It is about the size of the payment.

Tshabalala has never applied for any additional government support, because he did not know what else was available to him. That gap between what the state offers and what a pensioner knows about it is its own quiet problem, and it sits alongside the one he named directly. His message to SASSA, as he put it, is to increase the grant above inflation.

The demand is not his alone. Pensioners around the country say rising living costs leave them with less each month even when their payments arrive on time, and the Older Person’s Grant is the main income for many households that also carry children and unemployed adults. When a grant is fixed in rand while food, electricity and transport prices move, the household absorbs the difference.

The South African’s survey invited grant recipients to describe their circumstances, with a R2 000 draw for participants. Tshabalala’s account is one submission among those responses, and it is the kind of testimony that shows what a payment looks like from inside a household rather than on a schedule.