A Western Cape pensioner wants her R2 400 grant doubled. Her argument is tax.

A retired Western Cape woman who has drawn the SASSA Older Persons’ Grant for three years says it should be raised to at least R5 500 a month, because she paid income tax for most of her working life and is still taxed every time she buys food.

Phiwe Mlokothi made the case in The South African’s SASSA grant survey, which the outlet reported on 6 October. Her argument, in her own words, is that older people have been taxed all their lives and are paying some taxes even now.

Her circumstances explain the demand better than any figure does. She owns her home, which removes a bond or a rent payment from her monthly costs. It does not remove the grocery bill. Six or more people depend on her income. She spends the grant mainly on food, and by the end of the month there is nothing left. Asked to name her biggest financial worry, she points to the cost of living and rising food prices.

She receives her money directly into a First National Bank account and describes the payment process as straightforward. She rates SASSA’s communication as adequate. Her complaint is not about how the agency operates. It is about how little arrives.

That distinction matters, because the two problems are fixed in different places. Payment failures, verification delays and the annual life certificate cycle are administrative questions for SASSA. The size of the grant is a budget decision taken by National Treasury and the Department of Social Development, and it is announced in the February Budget alongside the rest of government spending.

Mlokothi has never applied for any additional government support, because she says she did not know what else was available. That is a common gap. The Older Persons’ Grant is not the only instrument aimed at her household. The Social Relief of Distress grant exists for people in a crisis, and a pensioner supporting six people may qualify for other support that is not widely advertised. The route to it runs through a local SASSA office, not an online form, and it requires documents.

The R5 500 she proposes would more than double the current payment. Whether the fiscus can carry an increase of that size for roughly four million older persons is a question the source material does not answer, and no figure is asserted here that the material does not supply. What can be said plainly is that an increase of that scale is a Budget decision with a price tag attached, and that pensioner organisations have argued the case for years on the same ground Mlokothi does, that the grant has not kept pace with food inflation.

The tax argument she makes is the part that travels furthest. A pensioner drawing the Older Persons’ Grant does not pay income tax on it, because the grant falls below the tax threshold. But VAT is charged on almost everything a household buys, including the staples that make up most of a pensioner’s basket, and there is no zero rating that reaches the till for a pensioner buying maize meal, bread and cooking oil. When she says she is still paying tax, that is what she means, and it is accurate.

Her case also exposes a measurement problem that runs through the whole grant system. The Older Persons’ Grant is set against a means test that counts income and assets, but the household that lives on it is not measured at all. Mlokothi’s grant is assessed as the income of one person. It is actually the income of seven or more. Six dependants do not appear in the means test, and they do not appear in the grant amount either.

That is the structural point behind her complaint, and it is one SASSA cannot answer on its own. The agency administers the grant it is given. The number in it is set elsewhere.

As The South African reported on 6 October, Mlokothi set out her position in the outlet’s SASSA grant survey, which invites beneficiaries to submit their experiences.

Source: The South African, ‘We have been taxed all of our lives’: SASSA pensioner wants her grant doubled