With nearly one in three South Africans expected to receive state assistance in the form of welfare benefits during the 2011-12 financial year, commentators are wondering how the country can afford to keep providing an ever expanding social safety net.
JOHANNESBURG, 2 February 2011 (IRIN) – According to the latest South Africa Survey, released on 1 February by independent think-tank the South African Institute of Race Relations (SAIRR), the number of social grant beneficiaries has increased by more than 300 percent in the past nine years, while the number of registered individual taxpayers has grown at a much slower rate.
Only about 12 percent of South Africans (5,9 million individuals) paid personal income tax in 2009-10, while 14 million claimed child-support, old-age, disability or other types of social grants.
– South Africa is becoming a welfare state… Grants risk creating a dependency syndrome, commented Nachi Majoe, a researcher at SAIRR.
In 2010, the government increased state pensions by 7 percent and extended the child-support grant from a previous age limit of 15 to include children up to age 18.
Economists responded by calling South Africa’s ratio of taxpayers to grant recipients (forholdet mellem skatteydere og modtagere af offentlige ydelser) unsustainable, but others point to evidence that social grants provide an important safety net for millions of poor South Africans and a springboard to better opportunities for some.
A 2009 study by the Institute for Poverty, Land and Agrarian Studies at the University of the Western Cape, which looked at how recipients used their grants, found that some used them to support informal economic activities, while others undertook care work in the home, allowing other household members to look for paid work.
– South Africa has international levels of poverty and inequality, pointed out Ivan Turok, deputy executive director of the Economic Performance and Development Unit at the Human Sciences Research Council.
– We are not a Scandinavian country where any increase in social grants might be a bit of a luxury; this is desperate poverty we are talking about so anything the state can do to improve welfare conditions is very important, but we do have to take into account affordability (om vi har råd), he told IRIN.
He added that a segment of the population (middelklassen) was “doing very well” and could probably afford larger tax contributions.
One in four out of work
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