GOOD Statement by Brett Herron, GOOD Secretary-General:
The GOOD Party is deeply concerned by the National Treasury’s imposition of punitive and exclusionary conditions on the 2025/26 operating budget of the South African Social Security Agency (SASSA). These conditions effectively extend the flawed administrative procedures of the Social Relief of Distress (SRD) grant to long-standing grants such as the Child Support Grant, Disability Grant, Care Dependency Grant, and Older Persons’ Grant.
The new conditions include intrusive monthly bank account checks, biometric screening, and excessive cross-verification with multiple government databases, mechanisms that serve more to restrict than to enable access. This is despite a January ruling by the Gauteng High Court declaring similar SRD procedures unlawful and unconstitutional. Rather than comply, the Treasury and the Department of Social Development have appealed the judgment and are now escalating these measures to other grants.
The Court found that the surveillance-heavy, bureaucratic requirements, including algorithmic profiling and database cross-checking, are intentionally exclusionary and deny eligible citizens their constitutional right to social assistance. Governments own data shows that 9 out of 10 people excluded from the SRD grant were wrongfully denied. Now, similar barriers threaten to disqualify millions more.
Even more troubling is the requirement for SASSA to report quarterly on the number of cancelled grants and the amount of “savings” generated, as though social assistance were a luxury rather than a basic right.
While Finance Minister Enoch Godongwana has promised the SRD grant will continue until March 2026, the lack of a long-term funding plan and talk of converting it into a “job-seeker grant” is alarming. South Africa’s structural unemployment is not a result of laziness, but a stagnant economy. Conditioning survival on job-seeking in a jobless environment is irrational and punitive.
The statement of intent signed by all members of the Government of National Unity obliges government to take reasonable steps to provide a social safety net. We urge the GNU to halt the implementation of these exclusionary conditions, comply with the High Court ruling in good faith, and adopt a people-centred approach to social assistance.
GOOD Manifesto on Gender Equality: Advocating for gender equality and women’s rights.