R80 a day: Gauteng pensioner runs out of money before month-end as food and clinic trips eat the grant

Elizabeth van Zyl, a Gauteng pensioner over the age of 65, says her Older Person’s Grant no longer reaches the end of the month. She has received the grant for more than five years and set out where the money goes in a SASSA grant survey published by The South African on 13 October.

Her arithmetic is simple and she states it plainly. “I am grateful for the amount I receive but R80.00 per day is not sufficient to live on,” she said.

That R80 is what is left when the monthly grant is divided across the days it has to cover. Van Zyl says ordinary household items take most of it. “If you buy essentials such as toilet paper the R80 a day is almost gone,” she said. Soap, deodorant, meat and bread then have to come out of what remains.

Transport is the expense that hurts most. A single trip to a clinic for medication, she says, consumes the whole day’s money. “If you need to travel to the clinic for your medication you have nothing left for that day,” she said.

She lives in a shared family home where one to two other people depend on her income, and she says her children provide food and help with other expenses. Without that help, she said, her position would be considerably harder. She runs out of money before the month ends and names the cost of living and rising food prices as her biggest financial worry.

Her payments themselves have been straightforward. SASSA deposits the grant directly into her Capitec Bank account each month, and she reports no trouble with the deposit.

What she does fault is the agency’s communication with the people it pays. Knowing when to renew or reapply is her biggest difficulty with SASSA, and if she could change one thing it would be better notice of payment dates. She has never applied for any additional government support, because she did not know what else was available to her.

The Older Person’s Grant is the monthly cash transfer paid by the South African Social Security Agency to people aged 60 and over, with a higher rate for those 75 and above. It is one of the country’s largest regular payments to individuals and, for a significant number of older South Africans, the only income in the house. When the grant is the household’s only money, the day-rate is not an abstraction. It is the number that decides whether there is taxi fare to the clinic.

Two things in Van Zyl’s account are worth separating. The first is whether the amount is enough, which is a budget and policy question. The second is whether recipients know what they are entitled to and when to act, which is an administrative one, and it is the second that she raises against SASSA directly. A pensioner who has never applied for additional support because nobody told her it existed is a failure of reach rather than of intention, and it is the kind of gap that shows up in a survey before it shows up in a queue.

The pressure she describes is not confined to her household. Older people across the country carry the same transport costs to reach clinics and the same food bill, and many of them carry dependants on the same payment. Her account of a clinic visit costing a full day’s budget is the clearest illustration of how a health service that is free at the point of care is not free to reach.

The survey that produced her account remains open to SASSA grant recipients. Van Zyl’s experience is one household’s, told in her own words, and it stands as testimony rather than as a measured national figure.