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This resource is hosted by the Nelson Mandela Foundation, but was compiled and authored by Padraig O’Malley. It is the product of almost two decades of research and includes analyses, chronologies, historical documents, and interviews from the apartheid and post-apartheid eras.

From briefing by Minister Zola Skewyiya  on basic income grant

Meanwhile, about 400 000 recipients of social-welfare grants, the bulk of them recipients of child-care grants, were being investigated for alleged fraud and the vast majority of the people involved were not state employees, Skweyiya noted.

The minister noted that this figure included the 45 000 public servants who were being probed for misuse of the grants.

Most of the fraud detected so far was the alleged misuse of child-care grants where the recipients held other jobs or sources of income. The grant is earmarked for the poorest of the poor.

It was explained that the South African Revenue Service was not able to provide the social development department with the names on their database.

However, the department could provide the South African Revenue Service with information on the recipients of the grants which could be checked against their database.

Asked about the amount of money allegedly involved in the grant fraud, it was stressed that the 400 000 figure still had to be verified but a rough average figure for one grant -- an average of the various grants paid out by the state -- was about R430 a month. This translated into R172-million a month.

The Scorpions and the security services had been asked to investigate the alleged fraud. - I-Net Bridge

(Donald Pressly, M & G Online, 20 November 2006)

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