It is a constitutional right for social grant recipients to receive social grants they are eligible for. All citizens have a right to a fair administrative process by SASSA. The R350 grant is crucial for unemployed and it gets worse when not paid for months because SASSA has not changed your cellphone number after informing the department.

We have the power to protect children from hunger if we come together and demand the Minister of Finance to take action. Not only would increasing the Health Promotion Levy raise funds that could help fight child hunger, but it would also help reduce the consumption of sugary drinks, which contribute to Non-Communicable Diseases, which are a major health crisis. We’re not the only ones calling on Treasury to act, over 35 top experts on obesity, diet-related diseases and public health from some of the world’s leading universities have written to Treasury officials to support increasing the current HPL to 20%. They are also very impressed with the results of evaluations done on the current HPL.

https://youtu.be/nuVHJT_rhgI Imagine your teacher smoking in the classroom. For some of us, this was the reality until new rules were put in place by government in 1993 [6]. But why had government not acted sooner? In their paper published in 2003, Mia Malan and Rosemary Leaver outline the relationship between the biggest tobacco business and government [7] [8]. Government eventually put public health before profits, thanks to the work of health advocates. But big businesses are still using their power to protect their profits at our expense. Researchers have pointed out that big businesses have worked to delay and delegitimize important health policies by using their associations and different strategies [9]. Researchers and civil society groups are not allowed to attend a standing meeting between the National Department of Health and big food businesses [9]. State capture has shown us we have a lot of work to do. But we are making some progress in improving transparency and accountability. Politicians have to declare financial interests [10], and political parties now must disclose who funds them [11]. We need to keep building on this momentum. We can't afford to have a repeat of 2014 where big businesses that make food like polony did not agree with government's proposed hygiene rules and instead wanted to self-regulate [12] [13]. Government should have stood up to those big businesses in 2014 and put the new rules in place anyway. Government has to stand up to big business bullies. Their job is to serve the people, not private interests. References can be found here: https://amandla.mobi/big-business-bullies-references

The R350 SRD grant was mainly introduced to provide relief to the unemployed during the first lockdown in 2020 when the Covid-19 pandemic hit. The need for the grant further highlighted the urgent need for the long-overdue BIG which was recommended by the Taylor Committee Report nearly 20 years ago [3]. Unless the problems of the grant are urgently attended to and fixed, they will continue to hinder the progress of implementing the BIG by April 2023. President Cyril Ramaphosa must honour his commitment to leave no one behind and ensure that Treasury, DSD and Sassa work together to fix all R350 issues before it ends in March 2023 and then have it turned into the much-needed Basic Income Grant. [1] https://www.gov.za/speeches/president-cyril-ramaphosa-2022-state-nation-address-10-feb-2022-0000 [2] https://www.groundup.org.za/article/seven-million-people-have-applied-for-r350-grant-since-saturday/ [3] https://ewn.co.za/2022/02/09/a-basic-income-grant-the-nitty-gritty-and-feasibility-of-this-proposed-idea

On 21 July 2020 the Minister of Human Settlements, Water and Sanitation Lindiwe Sisulu announced in her budget vote speech that her Department planned to allocate R600 million towards rental relief to tenants in affordable housing facing financial distress due to the COVID 19 pandemic. The funding, aimed at tenants in ‘formal affordable housing’ was meant to help those facing potential homelessness to meet their monthly rental obligations. This in turn would assist landlords who depended on rental income to survive. In her speech, the Minister made the undertaking that the details of the rent relief for such tenants would be published 30 days after her address.[2] IT IS NOW MORE THAN EIGHT MONTHS FOLLOWING THIS COMMITMENT AND NO DETAILS OF THE RELIEF SCHEME; NO POLICY PUBLISHED, AND NO FUNDING HAS BEEN RECEIVED BY TENANTS, WHO MAKE UP SOME OF THE PEOPLE HARDEST HIT BY THE PANDEMIC IN OUR COUNTRY. The stark reality is that between 2.2 and 3 million people lost their jobs in the first months of lockdown.[2] This has created a situation where households are caught in a double bind between maintaining their shelter and having enough food and water to stay alive. Correspondingly, the TPN Residential Rental Monitor for the fourth quarter of 2020 found that low end tenants had the weakest rental payment performance. Specifically, the report states that: “the “Less than R3,000/month” rental segment is populated by the most financially fragile tenant population, with significantly fewer financial “buffers” with which to weather any storms that translate into income loss, or those unexpected household expenses that arise periodically.” [3] In fact, the undertaking to provide R 600 million in rent relief was made to prevent the crisis that many of the 3 720 000 tenants [4] living in South Africa may now find themselves in. Albeit too little too late for tenants who have fallen victim to unlawful action by landlords and service providers across the country.[5] The consequences of these shortcomings taken together might be even more dire: on 9 March 2021, DA Shadow Minister of Cooperative Governance and Traditional Affairs, Mr Cilliers Brink announced that the party is calling for the urgent lifting of Alert Level 1 lockdown regulations stating that the regulations make it “close to impossible” for property owners to obtain eviction orders.[6] We are teetering on the brink of a secondary national disaster where we stand to exacerbate a health crisis into a homelessness crisis. The former UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Housing Leilani Farha has cautioned that “[i]n the face of this pandemic, a lack of access to adequate housing is a potential death sentence for people living in homelessness”[7]. Home has rarely been more of a life or death situation – Housing remains Healthcare! JOIN US IN DEMANDING THAT THE NATIONAL DEPARTMENT OF HUMAN SETTLEMENTS, WATER AND SANITATION DO THEIR JOB URGENTLY. [1] https://www.gov.za/speeches/minister-lindiwe-sisulu-human-settlements-dept-budget-vote-202021-21-jul-2020-0000# [2]https://cramsurvey.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/Spaull-et-al.-NIDS-CRAM-Wave-1-Synthesis-Report-Overview-and-Findings-1.pdf [3]https://www.tpn.co.za/Group/Home/Media [4] http://www.statssa.gov.za/publications/P0211/P02114thQuarter2020.pdf [5] https://www.iol.co.za/personal-finance/government-needs-to-subsidise-tenants-rentals-50528669 http://www.statssa.gov.za/publications/P0318/P03182019.pdf [6]https://www.da.org.za/2021/03/da-calls-for-lifting-of-lockdown-regulations-to-restore-private-property-rights [7]https://www.ohchr.org/Documents/Issues/Housing/SR_housing_COVID-19_guidance_rent_and_mortgage_payers.pdf