Chairperson

Honourable Members

As we prepare for the celebrations of a decade of democracy we will focus our commitment to transform our corporate identity from the current one which depicts 'welfarism' to one that is imbedded on the realities of social development. In keeping with the transformation agenda at the national level, we will pursue the necessary legislative processes, in consultation with all our stakeholders, to realize the objective of transforming to the developmental approach as espoused in the welfare white paper.

The empowerment of our communities to assume full responsibility for their well-being and development and to take charge of their initiatives to eradicate poverty will remain as our primary focus. We will encourage our communities to own and shape up the environment within which the disbursement of social grants take place, as a well as being at the centre of transformation of social work services. This task requires an enormous amount of human, material and financial resources in order to bring about a meaningful change to the continuing unacceptable poverty levels in our various communities.

We are acknowledging the fact that many of our 'welfare' programmes have not made any significant sustainable impact on the lives of our communities because the personnel that we have is neither adequate nor sufficiently capacitated to provide quality monitoring and continual support services.

Honorable members may I start off by bringing your attention to the fact that our provincial budget allocation has major inequalities. The social cluster is supposed to be receiving 85% of the provincial budget and instead it receives 79,6% which leaves a short fall of 5,4%. If we were to convert that shortfall into monetary terms it translate into R1, 145 billion. This shortfall has serious service implication with regard to social development vote.

Our social development budget has been receiving an average of 21% over the past three financial years and 23% for the current financial year. This is above national norm of 19%. Much as this can be seen as more than adequate funding, major portion of this budget is actually made of arrear payments emanating from the implementation of Regulation 11, the national target of 600 000 set for child support grant as well as the rate increase of grants. This picture is further clouded by the fact that 95% of this budget is spend on social security grants as against 5% spent on social development programs. This kind of trend may be difficult to sustain in a long run and it is common with rural provinces such as Eastern Cape, Mpumalanga and Kwazulu-Natal.

Even though the current budget seems to indicate somewhat positive movement towards fulfilling a considerable portion of our expectations, the reality is that the budget 2003/04 will certainly not meet the challenges and pressures that our department is grappling with. We reckon that such a development should, in the main, be informed by the scenario analysis that we dare to sketch in this illustration.

Our social development budget allocation has increased by R580m in the 2003/04 financial year representing a 13% increase over the previous year's budget. Although this increase is above the 12.2 % inflation rate for 2002 as determined by Statistics South Africa (SSA), it represents no real growth in the social security budget as the increase is mainly due to the new conditional grant for food security, child support grant age extension and the rate increase in all the grants.

The implications for this are that the department will still be faced with under funding related to some of the policy imperatives.

The inadequate budget may also account for our continuous inability to improve the much-needed infrastructure in terms of facilities, pay points, additional sub-district and satellite offices. This is over and above the fact that conditions at over 1900 existing pay points are far from being satisfactory.

Our commitment to provide social security grants as the most direct poverty alleviation intervention remains unwavering. Our

4q_ongoing persistence in regard to the adjustment to the social assistance baseline as well as grant rate increases applicable from October 2002 and again from April 2003 resulted in the department receiving additional allocations amounting to R 672 million. The amount available for grants has thus increased to R 4.443 billion that will enable the department to pay out the additional beneficiaries as follows:

The total number of beneficiaries receiving social grants will thus increase from 796 499 to 1 072 030 in the 2003/04 financial year.

This conditional grant was made available for back payment of arrears from April 1998 to 315 150 beneficiaries amounting to R421m. To date R 332m has been paid to 250 914 beneficiaries out of the projected 302 812 active cases. The province has thus paid out the bulk of arrear payments for child support grant, old age grant as well as part of the disability grant.

The verification to complete the rest of the grants i.e. foster care, grant-in-aid, care dependency as well as the outstanding part of the disability grant is in process and we anticipate to have completed the regulation 11 back pay by the end of August 2003 .The reason for this apparent delay is due to the fact that the verification process for the remaining grants requires extensive checking as well as tracing the beneficiaries of the previously lapsed and suspended cases. The current staff shortage as mentioned above is a further contributing factor to the delay in finalizing the back pay.

A total of RS, 4m allocated for poverty alleviation projects are inadequate. The challenge however remains that of ensuring sustain ability of current projects, development of management capacity of project managers as well as integrating these projects with other departments.

Our commitment to poverty eradication through sustainable and integrated poverty alleviation projects has resulted in 19 projects supplying bakery products and perishable products to 4 health institutions and 30 crèches.

During this current financial year a conditional grant of R6 1 m for food security has been set aside to distribute 1.22 000 food parcels under this programme. Taking into consideration the rural nature of our province and drought that is already ravaging us, this budget allocation will obviously not be sufficient to alleviate the suffering faced by the masses of our people.

The department has made great strides in making its services accessible to the communities in all comers of the province.

Satellite offices continue to be opened in remote rural areas so as to bring services to the doorsteps of the people. In this current financial year ~0m has been set aside for infrastructure development. However this budget allocation remains a challenge as it fall short and is retarding our progress in pursing the noble idea bringing services closer to the people. The Department has secured R5m from the Flemish government as a donation to strengthen existing facilities and to establish new facilities for the disabled.

A total budget of social work services is R6 Sm. This is meant to cater for services for child, youth and family; care for the elderly, disable, specialised social work services, social work research, child justice bill, place of safety, secure care centres as well as the social assistance to NGO's. This budget allocation is sufficient to maintain the current services, should we expand the services additional funding will be required.

The department has also been allocated some R 7 million additional finding for 2003/2004 to strengthen probation services as proposed in the Child Justice Bill. The aim is to ensure that children are no longer retained in prisons but are placed in appropriated diversion programmes.

It is evident from our submission that much as the provincial budget make look favourable for social development, the fact remain that this is eating the rest of the social services due to incorrect horizontal budget allocation. The key issue in resolving this anomaly is to re-visit the national equitable share formula.

SOCIAL DEVELOPMENT BUDGET per Programmes

SOCIAL DEVELOPMENT BUDGET per Economic classification and

SOCIAL Assistance grants