Gauteng care centres caring for people living with disabilities and mental conditions have not been able to send their caregivers to provide food and other basic needs to their beneficiaries as social development department underspends by over R400m on its budget.
This is according to care centre managers who spoke to Sowetan under the condition of anonymity to avoid being victimised. They said they were struggling to cope.
Their cries follows an annual report tabled last week before the portfolio committee on social development which revealed how the department had failed to provide funding resulting in the underspending in the following programmes – administration R38,3m, social welfare services R17,8m, children and families R305m, restorative services R13,1m and development and research R63,8m.
Chairperson of a centre for quadriplegics and paraplegics said their centre was not paid on time in April and last month.
He said they received their April payment in May and their October payment during the first week of this month. The centre usually receives R364,944 per quarter.
“When we were not paid on time we could not pay our staff salaries. As a result three of them could not pay rent and were homeless. We had to give them temporary accommodation here,” said the chairperson.
The centre has 12 staff members who take care for people in various areas on the East Rand.
“We could not send out all our caregivers to these areas to give them wate, food, help them with movement and bath them. They could not do all of these because we did not receive our funds.
“This is a life-threatening situation because when the paraplegics do not receive these services, they develop pressure sores from lying too long on one side, stay in bed all day and for longer hours, experience dehydration and have no-one to assist them. Luckily, we have not experienced such incidents,” he said.
A representative for the physically disabled centre west of Johannesburg said they could not pay salaries of 31 staffers.
The centre houses people with cerebral palsy and mental conditions.
“My staff was heavily affected by this. The cleaners and caregivers would go on a go-slow and not provide a full service to the disabled people. This would lead to our living environment being dirty and it is unhygienic and unhealthy for disabled people to live in such conditions.
“Not being paid on time also meant we were not able to buy enough food for the disabled people,” she said.
An employee at the association responsible for the centre said he was almost kicked out of the place he is renting due to not being paid on time.
The father of two said he missed bank debit orders owing to the late payment of his salary.
He said he had to borrow petrol money from relatives in order to take his children to school this month.
Last week, social development MEC Morakane Mosupyoe attributed the under expenditure to a reclassification of certain items from transfer payments to goods and services. She said she raised the matter of underspending in her department and requested an implementable turnaround plan.
A representative of a centre in Soweto, for people living with disabilities said: “We were not paid during the first quarter of April to June. We did not receive our R335,000 on time which pays salaries of our 35 caregivers. Our personal assistants could not come to work and go out to the homes of paraplegic people so that they can assist them with getting out of bed, bathing, changing clothes, cleaning their rooms and making food for them. We had to find alternative ways to assist them,” she said.
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