Grants for all is the answer
· Citizen
Here’s a proposition: South Africa needs a universal basic income.
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We’re in a hole, we’re digging fast – inequality is a yawning chasm, the Unemployment Insurance Fund system is broken, fraud is rife when it comes to existing grants, state capture has brought the nation to its knees – and we need a radical plan to get out of it.
The thing is, every adult needs an income to survive, to thrive, so I say let’s give them one, no questions asked. Stay with me, please. We have a population of about 63 million people.
Say there are 40 million adults over 18 in South Africa; say we gave every single one of them – rich, poor, working, unemployed, whatever – R1 000 a month. It would cost R40 billion.
Yes, it would be a giant hole in the country’s finances, but not nearly as big as the one created by Eskom – now over R400 billion in debt – or the one inflicted when Transnet collapsed in 2023, at a cost of R353 billion.
It’s less, too, than SAA’s state bailouts to date. But here’s the magical thing.
This money would almost immediately all go back into the economy, filling the hole, building the country from the ground up.
It would swing the needle of economic growth from day one, as 40 million people suddenly found they had money to buy food, pay for resources, patch the roof, make plans, access things hitherto unaffordable to them: a little money to start a micro-enterprise, to buy needle and thread and mend things, to set up a tuckshop, to purchase seeds and a watering can for subsistence farming, to make a small start on their dreams.
Because nothing can ever be built from nothing. Everybody needs a hand-up and a universal basic income would be exactly that.
It would be taxable income too, of course, so those who didn’t need it would be handing it back in their annual returns.
Admin would be minimal because everyone gets it, no questions asked, and no, it wouldn’t necessarily replace existing means-tested grants, though it would likely reduce the bill for those because it would be deemed income.
The system is already there, because everyone would be automatically included when they registered for their identity documents.
Then when they turn 18, boom, R1 000 into their account every month, R12 000 a year, enough to create a future.