Treasury Director-General Duncan Pieterse says if the earnings thresholds of parents or caregivers were raised, fewer parents or caregivers would qualify for the child support grant, meaning the grant could be increased. (Photo: Deon Ferreira) 
Chief Director for Development and Research at the Eastern Cape Department of Social Development Wayne Xola Ntshona detailed all the programmes that the department has set up to fight malnutrition in the province, including food parcels, creating food gardens, programmes to support new mothers with babies and toddlers, assistance through Home Affairs to get babies registered and a rapid response plan, among other initiatives.
He said the province’s food and nutrition security plan was fast-tracked and had been approved by the provincial exco.
The provincial manager for the South African Human Rights Commission (SAHRC), Eileen Carter, said they could see the work being done by the Department of Social Development.
“But the numbers don’t lie,” she said. “As someone said to me, you cannot eat policies.
“I think the problem is too big for the province,” Ntshona said. “It is running away from us. We need an outside force. By ourselves there are lots of ‘Stop and Gos’, and potholes that delay us,” he candidly admitted.
“We are meeting in solemn and urgent circumstances,” SAHRC commissioner Philile Ntuli said as she opened the meeting. “This is not a symbolic hearing,” she said.
“We want to secure clear accountability … This is not a natural disaster. It is a failure of the state.”
The commission subpoenaed several government departments to report back on what they had done to implement the recommendations of a report, issued in 2023, finding that child hunger in the Eastern Cape should be declared a state of disaster.
Read more: Child malnutrition in the Eastern Cape ‘qualifies as a disaster’
She said that 31 years after the fall of apartheid, where malnutrition and hunger were used as tools to oppress people, the country’s children were still dying.
Earlier in the day on Thursday, the SAHRC received data provided by the national Department of Health that stated that, in the majority of cases, severely malnourished children died from other causes, including sepsis, acute diarrhoea, shock, tuberculosis, meningitis, cardiac failure, heart failure, acute gastroenteritis, pneumonia and liver failure.
Health Department records show that 973 children who had severe acute malnutrition died in facilities around the country, the Director-General of the national Department of Health, Dr Sandile Buthelezi, told the commission.
Underscoring the extent of the hunger crisis in the country, Buthelezi added that the figures excluded children dying at home or in private hospitals. He said that, as the Health Department, they were often the last people to try to help the children.
“We are only seeing them when they are already dying,” he said.
Read more: Urgent call for accountability as nearly 1,000 children die from severe malnutrition in SA
The director-general of the Department of Social Development, Peter Netshipale, said in the Eastern Cape alone, as of August 2025, 1.8 million people were receiving the child support grant to the total value of just over R1-billion per month. This province has the highest number of children receiving the child support grant. He said he did not believe the problem was too big for them, but “maybe we are not using the correct strategies”.
“I think we have done a lot,” he said, but added that the government needs to focus more on the problem, as it did with the HIV/Aids pandemic. “All of us must gather and decide to do it. That way we can win the battle.”
Despite this, he said, social workers are reporting the emergence of diseases such as Kwashiorkor (a severe form of protein deficiency) and Marasmus, a severe form of malnutrition caused by children not having enough protein in their diet.
He said after the SAHRC’s first report, they found out the Eastern Cape did not have a food security and nutrition plan, even though all the other provinces do.
“We said ‘you must get one’,” he said, adding that they had intervened.
He said the department ran a number of programmes where people could access food. Some centres are set up for adults aged from 19 to 59, “but the kids sneak in”, he said. Other places are drop-in centres, programmes for the elderly, like lunch clubs for the elderly and home-based care.
Sassa Executive Manager: Grants Administration Brenton van Vrede said it will cost the country R37-billion to raise the child support grant to the food poverty line.
“It will be very difficult to do,” he said. He said currently there is policy work being done to revise the grant.
After listening to the presentation by the Department of Social Development, Ntuli said: “The situation is deteriorating. Clearly, these are only words. From the presentation, it is clear that we are encouraging a culture of dependency, which is also inherently contradictory. The state admits that it doesn’t have the financial resources to sustain this culture, to continue reacting to poverty and need by dishing out.
“At the same time, we all agree that this [malnutrition] should not be a problem. South Africa is a country rich in land. We feed the world. The majority of the food we produce, we export. Yet we fail to feed our own children. This is not a problem of resources; it is a problem of how we manage these resources,” she added.
She said when she visits schools, she sees a lot of green fields that are left unused.
“We have some of the highest rates of unemployed youth. They can be tilling the lands at the schools [to plant crops],” she said. “We come from the culture of ubuntu. Children should not be dying of a lack of food.”
The hearings will continue on Friday. DM