GRAAFF-REINET NEWS — The SASSA Social Relief of Distress service seems to be in considerable distress itself, and is not fulfilling its mandate to aid the poorest of the poor in Graaff-Reinet.
It appears that despite policy framework stipulating a 24 to 48 hour turnaround time for Social Relief assistance in the food of emergency food parcels, the turnaround in Graaff-Reinet is three to four months.
Cllr Samantha Graham has tried to assist two women to obtain this emergency aid and has been appalled at the problems experienced.
The first person is a young lady with a baby who was waiting for SASSA to finalize her grant application (over a period of three months due to a file transfer between provinces). She is unemployed and lives in a shack with her mother and other family members, all of whom are unemployed. SASSA offered her a food parcel to compensate for the month that she now has to wait before her first grant payment is made on 1 September 2017.
The second instance involves a lady of 57 who lives in appalling circumstances. Cllr Graham recently accompanied her to the clinic where she discovered that the lady weighs a mere 29.9kgs -this is down from May when she weighed 32.2kgs. Cllr Graham got a referral letter for her from the Clinic to apply for Social Relief.
In both of these cases the need is clearly urgent, and immediate assistance is required.
“On Friday of last week, the young lady that I have been assisting was contacted by our local SASSA office and asked to be present this morning to collect her food parcel” said Cllr Graham on Tuesday. “We arrived at 09h00, along with approximately 30 other people. The manager of SASSA had the unfortunate job of having to tell us all that the service provider had advised them late yesterday that they would not be delivering the food parcels today but instead, would do so next Wednesday”. Another person that was there that morning was a Military Veterans. They are supposed to receive three food parcels a year, according to the man, but he says he has not received a single parcel this year.
The members of staff at the local office of SASSA are doing their utmost to assist people, but their hands appear to be tied. Apparently, due to the high levels of fraud and corruption that was endemic in the procurement processes of SASSA, it was decided to alter the system for procurement of food parcels and uniforms and the supplies are no longer sourced locally. They have centralized its process and now all supplies for the Eastern Cape are issued from two service providers in KZN and one in Gauteng.
“Not only is this unacceptable in terms of not keeping the money in our Province, but given the vast distances that the service providers have to travel, they are understandably not prepared to deliver less than fifty food parcels at a time. This means that our local offices are having to "bank" Social Relief applications until there are sufficient for the service providers to justify delivery” said a frustrated Cllr Graham. “In the meantime, our people are literally starving while they wait 3 to 4 months for "emergency" relief”.
Cllr Graham has sent the information to Bridget Masango, the DA’s Shadow Minister of Social Development who will take the matter up at a National level.
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