DON’T PUNISH ELDERLY

OUR government is becoming synonymous with an inability to deliver on its obligations due to a cash flow crisis. Just about every sector is feeling the pinch. We posed the question last week; what next? Well it has emerged that some of the elderly were next in line to be shut out of the payment rotational system that appears to be at play here. But why?

How does a government begin to even imagine forcing an elderly person to go for a day without the means to survive? This is abuse in its worst form and is unforgivable. Elderly grants in this country hardly deserve to be called that by any standards when measured against the cost of living today.

E400 a month is all they get but you still have a government delaying such a measly amount. Its value depreciates even further by each day of delay because they have to borrow to get by,  at times repaying with interest. This is why we have some of our gogos and mkhulus risking arrest to cross the border into South Africa to join the queues for elderly grants.

Who wouldn’t if we still believe the elderly can survive on E400 per month. Many households are also crossing the border to buy cheaper mealie meal but the same cannot be said of the elderly who do not have the means to do so.

They were neglected when every civil servant received a bumper pay rise and back-pay dubbed ‘Dvuladvula’, with politicians pocketing an average 32 per cent. It would appear that the decision makers saw the elderly as excess baggage despite the significant role they play in keeping our communities intact. Hundreds and thousands of children today are growing up with their grandparents while their parents roam the streets searching for jobs in a country that has a 40 per cent unemployment rate.

Lest we forget we have over 200 000 orphaned and vulnerable children in this country, a large number of whom are cared for by the elderly in our communities.

We may take for granted the role the elderly play in keeping our communities together but they are the reason we still have chiefs and the structures that make up the Tinkhundla System of Governance. In fact, they are the majority voters.

When we begin to ill-treat the foundation upon which this country is governed, we most certainly begin to self-destruct. As we say in Africa; a village without the elderly is like a tree without roots.

What’s worse is that we are also subjecting the future generation to conditions that do not encourage support for the government. School children have been starved the previous weeks while government tried to source medical supplies that had also not been paid for.

This came at a time that our treasury was said to be scraping the barrel of whatever was put into its coffers to try and settle outstanding debt to service providers that runs into the billions of Emalangeni. This debt has also seen the Immigration Department run out of travel documents - once again.

It is very hard for government to deny the fact that we are now facing a very serious financial crisis but it has still not come out to declare this. To do so would mean invoking the drastic measures adopted during the global financial crisis back in 2008 – 2010.
We do recall the economic recovery strategy that placed a freeze on hiring or creation of new posts, travel, salary hikes, advances, teas and coffees and the number of cars per ministry eligible to get fuel.
Ministries were called upon to put on hold ‘non priority projects’ by reducing their expenditure. So what’s stopping us from doing the right thing by reining in on the wasteful expenditure side to enable priority areas to be properly served?  
Senate has raised serious concerns about government’s inability to manage the taxpayer’s hard earned money. The House of Assembly is worried about the rise in borrowing to service consumption and non-viable projects as this inevitably means we may struggle to repay the loans.
Our children will inescapably be left to foot the bill leaving them so poor they will not be able to look after their parents, the elderly. That’s us, in a few years time.
So while the decision makers think they have cushioned themselves with pay perks to last them a lifetime, they should never lose sight of the fact that the value of those retirement perks is only as good as the state of the economy at any given point in time.
There is no guarantee that cash will keep flowing. They only have to look at how it is drying up for everything else these days. As they say, what goes around comes around.

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