SRD grant gets one more year, and R370 a month still falls R485 short of a food basket
Treasury's Medium-Term Budget Policy Statement extends the grant for a year and links recipients to jobs through MzansiXchange, while the state argues in court that the payment cannot run forever.
The R370 Social Relief of Distress grant will run for another year, and the people who receive it are to be linked to jobs, training and business support through a government platform called MzansiXchange.
The extension is set out in the Medium-Term Budget Policy Statement, the Treasury document that updates the country’s spending plans between February budgets. Its wording is that the grant will be extended for another year while work continues on integration with labour market activation, skills development and enterprise support interventions. Beneficiaries, it says, will be linked to employment, training and business opportunities through MzansiXchange.
That is the plan as written. What it does not change is the size of the payment. Finance Minister Enoch Godongwana raised the monthly grant by R20 to R370 in his February Budget Speech. The Institute of Economic Justice has argued it should go further, to meet the official food poverty line of R855 a month. On those two numbers, the grant sits R485 below the line the IEJ says it should meet.
Kelle Howson, a labour and social security researcher at the IEJ, has argued that direct support through the SRD grant remains an important government intervention to reduce poverty. She has also raised concerns about the uncertainty created by extending the grant a year at a time, and argued that moving away from direct cash transfers could weaken an intervention that has helped people facing poverty.
For a household that depends on the R370, the practical question is not the platform. It is whether the money arrives, and whether it is enough. The grant was introduced as temporary relief during the Covid-19 pandemic. Government continues to argue in court that it places pressure on the public purse and cannot be extended indefinitely, and the future of the payment remains contested there.
Duncan Pieterse, the director-general of the National Treasury, said fraud had been identified in the SRD grant system, but investigations by the South African Social Security Agency had helped to curb it. He said government was still considering possible alternatives to the grant, and that any replacement would have to fit within the available fiscal allocation. He also said government needed to determine what the grant was intended to achieve, and that this question had not yet been answered.
That answer matters to the more than one line of the budget that depends on it. Government expects the projected decline in beneficiaries to generate R6.2-billion in savings, and it says that money will be redirected towards fighting gender-based violence and femicide and tackling child malnutrition and stunting.
The same document sets out where part of that money goes. Government plans to increase the number of sexual offences courts from 55 in 2026/27 to 101 in 2028/29, and the number of Thuthuzela Care Centres from 72 to 80 over the same period. It has reprioritised R3.8-billion over the 2027 MTEF period to appoint 3 552 social workers to strengthen prevention, early intervention, psychosocial support and victim empowerment. An additional R157.4-million has been allocated to the Department of Women, Youth and Persons with Disabilities for national coordination and oversight, and R186-million has been reprioritised for forensic services, investigative capacity and backlog reduction.
Those allocations are the state’s own account of what the savings will do. They are also a reminder that the SRD decision is not only a welfare question. It is a line in a budget that other services are already being built on.
Government says it will continue supporting vulnerable households through social grants despite the legal challenges. The court will decide how long the current arrangement can last. Until it does, the grant runs for another year, the platform is promised, and the payment stays at R370.
As Sunday World reported on 21 October, government intends to link SRD beneficiaries to job opportunities, skills development and business support through MzansiXchange. The Enquirer will follow the court proceedings on the grant’s future and the Treasury’s work on a replacement, and will report what beneficiaries are told about the platform when the details are published.
