SASSA R350 Grant News Today 19th February 2023
In todays latest SASSA News – At the Portfolio Committee Meeting, representatives from various South African government agencies weighed in on the R350 Sassa grant and its far-reaching effects. For millions of people, the social grant has been their primary source of income ever since the year 2020.
Among those present at the Portfolio Committee Meeting were Minister Lindiwe Zulu, Brenton Van Vrede, and Lucas Ndala. Throughout the discussion, participants stressed the necessity to keep the Special Covid-19 Social Relief of Distress (SRD) award flowing to individuals in need.
“the payment of social handouts is more than an administrative duty,” Minister of Social Development Lindiwe Zulu said. It’s required by law.”
The SRD grant has become an essential resource for tens of millions of people in South Africa. Those who are currently unemployed and not receiving any other government aid have been selected to get this grant.
More than 13.5 million applications for the Covid-19 SRD award were submitted to the South African Social Security Agency (Sassa) by the month’s conclusion. The monthly approval rate for this pool of applicants is between 7.4 and 7.8 million.
Around 95% of accepted candidates received their scholarships in the first several months, Minister Zulu said. Eighty-nine percent was the number in August of 2022.
The number of people who actually receive their grant money from the government has dropped even further. Just 85% are still around in the most recent months.
We do acknowledge that the value of this award is extremely minimal, and the government should consider increasing the grant,” stated Brenton Van Vrede, the Executive Manager: Grant Administration.
We’d like to get to a place where customers can use their bank cards to make purchases and still have funds available in their accounts, said Van Vrede.
He thinks they should have done a better job of informing the grantees of the problems that were causing the payments to be late. Seeing as how this may have saved recipients from making multiple journeys to the bank to double-check on their grant money.
Interim CEO Lucas Ndala has said that cyber security experts have been brought in to monitor Postbank’s infrastructure. The security team was brought in to keep the system safe from harm and deal with security issues as they arose.
