For two months, President Ramaphosa’s “fellow South Africans” have been waiting for their R350 payments, which the president committed in his SONA address would be extended to at least March 2023.

When the grant was first introduced, I volunteered my time to assist people with the difficult process of applying. Now that the grant payments have stopped, I have been receiving calls from people in Gauteng, North West, Mpumalanga and my home province of Limpopo, asking why.

The researchers and organisations that work with #PayTheGrants show us that government departments are in chaos since the National State of Disaster was ended and new regulations were drawn up for the grant. Maybe the government hasn’t noticed, but Mahlathi village is still in a state of disaster. 

In the last two months, I’ve heard from Community Policing Forum members in my community who say they don’t sleep at night. They told me about robberies in local shops and when I ask what was stolen, they report it’s usually cooking oil, rice and maize meal. Going to bed hungry and waking up knowing you will have nothing to eat again drives people to desperate acts. 

It drives women into sex work when they don’t have a choice. 

And it will drive more people to suicide when they have lost hope.

While R350 is nowhere near enough to survive on, the grant did allow the most desperate among us to keep from starving. It was not enough, but it did stop starving people from stealing from local shops. Without that small amount, I am certain there will be more starvation, more malnutrition in our children, more GBV, more crime.

Withholding the SRD payments for two months is nothing but cruelty. But there is more cruelty waiting for us, thanks to National Treasury. #PayTheGrants shows us that the threshold to apply for the grant is dropping from R595 to R350. Hundreds of thousands of desperate people – people living in a state of disaster – will now be excluded from the grant when it’s finally paid.

The SRD grant should be made permanent and raised to R1,500 a month, a level that can really make a difference. The insulting, inefficient means testing should be scrapped. As I’ve said before, this could be a flagship project for our country, something we could all be proud of for the difference it could make.

Maybe Mr Ramaphosa’s corner of Limpopo is doing just fine, but mine is not. For people in my village, and for millions of South Africans, the state of disaster is carrying on every day. Nobody in government – not the president, the ministers or the opposition parties – want to recognise it. We live in the most unequal society in the world – when will our so-called leaders stop saying our country is too poor to do anything about it? DM/MC

Israel Nkuna is a ward committee representative and community activist in Mahlathi Village, Limpopo.