Using social grant beneficiaries as political footballs? (Part 2)
In Part 1 of this series of articles I discussed the closure of grant payment points immediately before the 2024 election and the striking coincidence that it followed a failed attempt by the Minister of Finance and National Treasury to end the SRD Grant shortly before the elections. The lowest estimates suggest that the closures will ‘only’ affect 100,000 grant recipients. Let us briefly consider that ‘best case’ scenario and back-of-the-envelope calculations of its potential electoral impact.
Grant recipients (as opposed to beneficiaries, who can be children) will typically be adults and of voting age. It is reasonable to assume there is at least one other person of voting age in the household. If 60% of these 200,000 individuals vote and half of those switch their vote from the ANC to another party, the ANC would lose 60,000 votes: approximately one seat in Parliament. In a tight election that single seat could be a lot. But of course this is the lowest estimate: if 300,000 grant recipients are negatively affected, all of them and their voting-age adult household members were previously ANC voters and decided to switch this could affect 10 seats in Parliament. Only three political parties obtained more seats than that in the 2019 elections. It would certainly be enough to swing the 2024 election if the margins are at all close.
How does this help us understand the possible motives of civil society organisations (CSOs) for their remarkable silence on this issue, after previously (up to December 2023) being very vocal on similar matters? The non-exhaustive list I provided previously was: the Institute for Economic Justice (IEJ), Section27, the Alternative Information and Development Campaign (AIDC), Studies in Poverty and Inequality (SPII), OpenSecrets, the Budget Justice Coalition (BJC, which incorporates some of the previously-mentioned CSOs), #PaytheGrants (also includes previously-mentioned CSOs).1
Let us take a look at the case of Black Sash.
One of Black Sash’s funders is an entity known as the Millenium Trust. I once did some digging into this trust’s directors and only found an unremarkable group of individuals with no plausible level of wealth that could support the Trust’s activities. I later found out, from someone with direct knowledge, that the Trust was funded by Stellenbosch billionaire Michiel Le Roux. The details of how Le Roux came to be so wealthy and what his agenda might be are topics for another time. For now, what is important is that we also know Le Roux has been funding opposition parties through other intermediaries: entities called Fynbos Ekwiteit and Fynbos Kapitaal. So, Black Sash receives millions from a man who is pouring even more millions into the coffers of opposition parties to get the ANC below a 50% majority. And Black Sash happens to be silent about a policy that will harm social grant recipients shortly before the elections and therefore increase the likelihood that they will vote against, or not vote for, the ANC.
Black Sash’s silence is otherwise inexplicable, but what about all the other CSOs? Not all of them are funded by Michiel Le Roux, though Section27 and OpenSecrets are. But every single one of them, without exception, is funded by someone who in parallel is also trying to push the ANC below 50%. IEJ is funded by Adrian Enthoven through Yellowwoods. (Enthoven is a neglected political player and I will write more about him soon). The supposedly extreme radical AIDC is funded by the Open Society Foundation, which harboured, and presumably partly bankrolled, Songezo Zibi in the period between his departure from ABSA Bank and the starting of his political party (RiseMzansi). When Zibi resigned from OSF shortly after starting his political party, he was reportedly replaced by Mavuso Msimang, who for years has been campaigning against the ANC’s majority from within the party. IEJ and SPII are also funded by the OSF. In addition to Le Roux, Section 27 is also funded by the Oppenheimer family who are the biggest funders of (opposition) political parties in South Africa. In short: every single one of these CSOs that has stayed stunningly silent on this issue has a key funder whose core political agenda is served by their silence.
There are other intriguing connections that I will develop in separate writing, such as the fact that a Black Sash employee is the chair of a CSO called ‘MyVoteCounts’ which purports to provide independent analysis of party funding but is also funded by Le Roux (through the anonymised Millenium Trust) and the OSF.
An interesting wrinkle in the above theory, which is in fact much more than a wrinkle, is that many of these CSOs have been very vocal about a basic income grant (or ‘universal basic income’) recently. Does that contradict the theory? Not at all. In fact, it provides evidence for a broader strategy that is playing out in relation to social grants, which I will discuss in my next piece.
In Part 3 I will explain what I believe is going on in more detail by zooming in on the IEJ, which is currently litigating against the State to increase the value and scale of the SRD Grant. I have had a low opinion of the IEJ for some years now after observing the conduct of its co-founders first-hand, but one puzzle for me has been: if IEJ is not the left-wing social justice initiative it purports to be, what is its actual agenda? As is often the case, close attention to its funders has helped provide a possible answer to that puzzle.
And that piece will link to the crucial pieces I will publish in the week before the election where I tie all these seemingly disparate strands together into a picture that points at a fairly sophisticated, wide-ranging strategy to manipulate the 2024 election outcomes and construct a series of favourable post-election outcomes and narratives.
One alternative explanation would be that these CSOs are so out of touch with what is affecting grant recipients that they simply failed to notice. While there are areas in which these organisations have demonstrated a lack of competence, I do not find it convincing that they would be this out of touch. And if they are, they should shut down.