16M get social security: Minister

ghoti said:
Canada, Norway, Finland and Sweden seem to disagree with you. Norway offers 0 tuition costs to international students even. Nice fallacy to discuss around the braai, but it can be done right with good results.
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It's actually free in almost all over Europe if you are an EU citizen or from the EEA. There is sometimes a nominal admin fee, think it's about EUR150/year in Germany. The only countries that I know of in Europe that charge huge fees are England and Wales.
 
t123 said:
It's actually free in almost all over Europe if you are an EU citizen or from the EEA. There is sometimes a nominal admin fee, think it's about EUR150/year in Germany. The only countries that I know of in Europe that charge huge fees are England and Wales.
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Its the smart choice. If you invest today, you can get return on investments in the future.
 
ghoti said:
Government should be building new universities to cope with our population needs. You cant save for the future, you need to invest in the future.
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I don't disagree with that sentiment personally... We do need more universities (and not bigger more monolithic ones)....

But we do need to protect the reputation of the education at the current ones...

Its a massively complicated balancing act, that I don't think our wonderful government is doing too well at.
 
ToxicBunny said:
In the future, free university or whatever is something I might agree with..

But currently, to make it free would mean overloaded universities since EVERYONE would want in, even if they didn't deserve to gain entry into a University or Technikon... and then once in, there would be bell curving going on all over the place to maintain passrates and the end effect is a tertiary qualification that is monumentally and absolutely useless.
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For those who do qualify for a university and are accepted it should be free. Just look at the US at the moment. Ridiculously high fees, by the time you've finished studying it'll take decades to pay off your student debt. So it pushes wages up, increasing overall costs and furthering the divide between rich and poor. It's insane to think a fair society is one where if you're poor you can't get a decent education and job, and if you have children you can't afford for them to have a decent education so they'll be poor for their entire lives and so on.

The government needs to get off it's butt and create more trade schools, more universities and more technikons. Without post-matric skills unemployment, poverty, social grants will all remain high, if not get worse. You can't even attract foreign investment because the education level is so low.
 
t123 said:
For those who do qualify for a university and are accepted it should be free. Just look at the US at the moment. Ridiculously high fees, by the time you've finished studying it'll take decades to pay off your student debt. So it pushes wages up, increasing overall costs and furthering the divide between rich and poor. It's insane to think a fair society is one where if you're poor you can't get a decent education and job, and if you have children you can't afford for them to have a decent education so they'll be poor for their entire lives and so on.

The government needs to get off it's butt and create more trade schools, more universities and more technikons. Without post-matric skills unemployment, poverty, social grants will all remain high, if not get worse. You can't even attract foreign investment because the education level is so low.
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This I agree with, if you qualify, it should be free, or the government should dish out "student loans" which require you to work in the country for x number of years after graduation type of thing.

But they also need to ruthlessly protect the quality of the education... protests because students didn't pass should be treated accurately.. investigate the issue, if the students are found to have failed through an independent check, then make damn sure they understand that.. if they fail the required number of times, kick them the hell out instead of just pushing them through and all that kind of stuff.
 
Sure, you can't have low standards and you can't have people being students for life either. The fact is that people in poverty cannot usually get out of poverty by themselves, they need assistance to do so. Handing out grants doesn't work because it's just enough to survive. Once people have that extra skill they can find jobs or start companies or whatever, but they can't get that skill without government help. I doubt anyone in squatter camp wants to be there living off grants, but there is little they can do about without extra money they don't have. It'll probably take a few generations to sort out though, every generation will almost always try make sure their children have a better life than they had.
 
Educating the masses doesn't help if government doesn't learn as well. Zim is such a case..
 
Isn't that like 30% of South Africans?
How many are frauds?
I demand - give me the money.......................
 
The handout system soon to implode; we can only pay so many times for so many people and then our money is finished.


Garyvdh said:
Just under 16 million South Africans were receiving some form of social security grant from government last year, according to Social Development Minister Bathabile Dlamini.

This cost government more than R109 billion during 2013/14, she said on Monday, in a written reply to a parliamentary question.

The SA Social Security Agency provides grants including old age, war veterans, disability, grant-in-aid, care dependency, foster care, and child support.

Of the total 15,932,473 grant beneficiaries last year, 70 percent (11,125,946) received child support grants. A total of R39.6bn was paid out on child support grants during 2013/14.

Over the same period, R44.1bn was spent on old age grants -- referred to as older person's grants -- to 2,969,933 beneficiaries.

The total spent on all grants last year was R109,053,880,000.

Figures for the first quarter of this year (2014/15), given in the reply, show the number of beneficiaries is on the rise.

There were 16,242,196 grant recipients at the end of June, and the cost of providing their benefits up to that date was R29.3bn.

There were 2.5m social grant beneficiaries in 1998.


Source : Sapa /rod/ks/th/jje
Date : 20 Oct 2014 15:08
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I have a question. I do not need to apply for a child care grant but do qualify for one as I have a 4 year old (unrelated to me or my wife) that was placed in foster care with us. Initially we wanted to apply and keep the money aside for him but due to time constraints, we have not gone to submit the application. It's not an automatic process once you get the foster care order that you will then get the child care grant. Should we still apply or leave it for someone that needs it more. He has been in foster care with us for nearly a year and the intention has always been to adopt him but that's another process that is being delayed by the DSD.
 
signates said:
I have a question. I do not need to apply for a child care grant but do qualify for one as I have a 4 year old (unrelated to me or my wife) that was placed in foster care with us. Initially we wanted to apply and keep the money aside for him but due to time constraints, we have not gone to submit the application. It's not an automatic process once you get the foster care order that you will then get the child care grant. Should we still apply or leave it for someone that needs it more. He has been in foster care with us for nearly a year and the intention has always been to adopt him but that's another process that is being delayed by the DSD.
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Unless you're very well off, if you are eligible claim it, you can put it into a trust fund for the child for later. These grants exist for you to claim, you're effectively paying for them via your tax.
 
t123 said:
Unless you're very well off, if you are eligible claim it, you can put it into a trust fund for the child for later. These grants exist for you to claim, you're effectively paying for them via your tax.
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totally agree.. if the kid is still young it can be used with additional funds to start a university fund for the future etc or even to be transferred to the kid once s/he has learned the value of investing + compound interest, giving them a head start. Yes.. maybe you can afford not to.. but really, its better to get it and save for future than not to.
 
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