Yola Minnaar carries a lot of hurt. It’s hurt that stems from feeding thousands of hungry people out of her house every day — and from having to be the one to explain when there’s no food for them.
For at least the past two years, Minnaar — or "Aunty Yola", as she’s known in the community — has been feeding the elderly of Fietas, a suburb on the edge of Joburg’s CBD, once or twice a week. Since the national lockdown, however, it’s become an everyday occurrence.
Each day, the "Brixton Soup Brigade" — an army of volunteers — delivers pots of soup to Minnaar to help her feed a community that was impoverished way before Covid-19 hit the streets of Vrededorp, Vredepark, Pageview and Jan Hofmeyr. This is a "sisterhood of travelling pots": residents from more affluent Brixton use these same large pots to feed the people of Fietas. One even carries a semi-official-looking mark: "Brixton pot of love".
Ward 58, which encompasses Brixton and Fietas, is a Covid-19 hotspot in Joburg, says ward councillor Alex Christians. So it’s helpful that Minnaar’s house is registered as an official food distribution point. It’s situated across from an open field that’s used as a testing centre — a way to persuade people to get themselves tested.
Today, there are lines painted on the sidewalk in front of Minnaar’s house — new marks for new times. They indicate where people should stand to ensure social distancing as they queue for food. Minnaar herself sprays sanitiser on the hands of those waiting for food. As she works, she asks: "But where is your mask?"
It’s a bittersweet task. On the one hand, this is a story about a community looking after its own — of volunteers stepping up in the face of increasing need. The bitter part is that she feels personally responsible for the community’s hunger.
A devout Muslim, Minnaar tells of one day during the holy month of Ramadan when there was no food. "I will never forget it," she says. "Councillor [Christians] told us we were not getting any food on that specific day. And I said to him: ‘That’s not possible, because what am I going to tell people?’ They were all standing already in line, waiting for the meal."
She began phoning around, but no-one could help, given the last-minute nature of the request.
"[Christians] said: ‘Just tell the people that we are not feeding today.’
"To me it was, like, no: it’s impossible. We cannot do that to them."
Later that day, two pots of soup arrived. These were followed by more — until there was enough food to share with the community in Eldorado Park.
But other days, there’s just not enough to go around. Minnaar ensures that Fietas’s elderly are served first; then the rest of the community lines up for food. Sometimes it runs out before the queue does. "You know, when you feed, it hurts a lot," she says.
"The other day I went to buy styrofoam [containers]. I don’t tell [Christians] that I go out and buy it. [But] I just can’t wait on sponsors and stuff," Minnaar says. "If we feed [people] and they don’t have containers, they will run. If you see styrofoam lying in the street, they will run, pick up that dirty styrofoam and come with it and beg you to dish in there. They will see a plastic packet laying in the street, they will run and pick up that packet and beg you to please throw the food in that packet. And that hurts. I decided I would rather keep styrofoam," she says.
A wider problem
The hunger that brings the community to Minnaar’s door each day is not exclusive to Fietas. Around the country, the coronavirus-induced lockdown has taken a severe toll, pushing SA’s already insecure households and communities to the brink.
Stats SA’s most recent General Household Survey, released last year, says that 11.3% of the population (9.7% of households) experienced hunger in 2018. On a broader reading, the stats agency puts the proportion of people with limited access to food at 23.8% of the population (20.2% of households).
But in a presentation to parliament in May, the department of social development said recent evidence suggests an even higher incidence of food insecurity, hunger and malnutrition. By the department’s estimate, about 50% of SA’s population is already food-insecure or at risk of becoming so.
A survey conducted by Stats SA at the end of April suggests a similarly concerning trend. In that survey, the proportion of respondents who experienced hunger since the lockdown began on March 27 increased from 4.3% to 7%. Respondents who reported receiving no income increased from 5.2% before lockdown to 15.4% by the sixth week.
It may not sound like much — but Stats SA is careful to note that, as a web-based survey of 2,688 people, it is not representative of the entire population.
Hunger in the general population is probably far higher than the survey suggests.
But the wider trajectory is important: hunger is rising, fast, due to Covid-19 and the government-ordered lockdown.
In an exclusive interview with the FM, social development minister Lindiwe Zulu says hunger is not new in SA — but it’s getting worse as a result of the lockdown.
"People normally would hunt [provide] for themselves," she says, "and that almost came to a standstill or a stop."
As people’s earnings have vanished, it’s put additional strain on those who rely on social grants. In many cases, grants are supplemented by a household member who has a full-time, part-time or even piecemeal job. Now, with more people stuck at home without an income, grant money has to stretch that much further, says Zulu.
It’s made a difficult situation much worse.
During SA’s hard lockdown, video footage and photographs did the rounds of long queues of people waitin g for food parcels to be distributed, with little to no social distancing protocols being adhered to. It elicited sharp criticism from Zulu at the time.
"When you are desperate and hungry, you will go out and forget about the fact that there is Covid-19 and you are going to be infected," she says now, "also because you are taking care of children at home and you want to put a plate of food on the table. That is understood and we can’t blame them."
But Zulu says making people stand in long queues for food strips them of their humanity, and that there’s a better way of doing things. "That’s why I am talking about giving dignity to our people in whatever way we are supporting them," she says.
While her department has been distributing food parcels and vouchers on a knock-and-drop basis during the pandemic, Zulu says this is not something that normally forms part of its core work — it only happens during a state of disaster like a flood, fire or drought.
"We didn’t want people to queue," Zulu says. "I think that making people queue, for me, it just strips dignity away."
Zulu tells the FM that her grandparents would never have allowed the family to queue for food. "My grandmother used to sell clothes, and sew things for us to survive, and I can tell you [she] would never, ever have wanted us to go and stand somewhere for some food. She would rather have us work in the garden … our vegetables came from the garden. We didn’t have a gardener, we were doing the gardening ourselves."
Now, by moving to food parcels, Zulu says the department can provide what a family needs, based on nutritional analysis. The voucher, on the other hand, offers more options. "You have a bit of freedom to go to the shop and check what you need," she says.
According to its presentation to parliament, the department of social development had, with the Solidarity Fund, co-funded 58,750 food parcels by May 29, valued at R43.5m.
The Solidarity Fund has distributed an additional 250,000 food parcels, in partnership with organisations such as Gift of the Givers and Food Forward. And a presentation to parliament from the SA Red Cross Society shows it distributed 15,763 food parcels to vulnerable community members.
But these are organisations that have co-ordinated with the government to ensure that food parcels are distributed to those in need. The issue, for Zulu, is "who was bringing them out into the street [to queue for food]" — a reference to smaller NGOs providing food to the hungry independently.
Snarled up in red tape
It is here that a central issue has arisen around food distribution during the pandemic — one for which the government has drawn repeated criticism. The red tape around the distribution of food parcels, and the government’s attempts to control how food is distributed, have limited what help can be given to hungry communities.
For example, NGOs are required to apply for permits to distribute food to those in need. Soup kitchens and food-aid outfits have been prevented from preparing and serving hot meals.
Zulu says the regulations are in place to ensure relief efforts are co-ordinated. But DA MP James Lorimer says the government’s draft regulations — put into effect without having been gazetted — have caused many problems, including hampering people who do not have electricity and cannot cook hot meals. There have been delays (and corruption) in distribution.
It was exactly this red tape that led to Minnaar’s house become a designated food distribution point. As Christians tells it, because NGOs were being fined for doing their jobs, the group put in an application for distribution with the provincial social development department.
Minnaar is more blunt: the government has given her no help, she says. Many others would agree with that assessment.
Other NGOs have been less successful. Krugersdorp-based Cradle of Hope, for example, was barred by the government from distributing peanut butter sandwiches to the needy in Krugersdorp West. So the nonprofit went to court to get clarity on what disaster and relief packages could be distributed to SA’s needy during the lockdown.
In her founding affidavit, Cradle of Hope CEO Melodie van Brakel paints a depressing picture of life under lockdown: "The need in the community escalated profoundly, resulting in more and more people lining up to receive sandwiches daily."
Days before the court challenge was set to be heard, the Gauteng provincial government revoked the regulations, allowing the Cradle of Hope to once again distribute sandwiches to the needy.
It’s not the only legal action the government has faced on the food issue. Last month, the DA took Zulu’s department to court over its draft regulations around food distribution to the needy.
The party says the draft regulations prevented NGOs from distributing food to desperate and hungry people who were otherwise unable to provide for themselves due to the lockdown regulations.
Late last month the Western Cape High Court postponed the DA’s challenge to June 19 — but it did, in the meantime, order that the government may not prevent people from exercising their rights to distribute and receive food. And, it said, police and government officials were not entitled to enforce draft regulations that had not been gazetted by the minister.
Poverty, unemployment and inequality
Zulu, for her part, says the government would never stand in the way of anyone who wants to help — but that it’s a simple question of co-ordination.
"We have repeated over and over again that we could not stop people from distributing food, we would not stop people from cooking food and distributing it," she says. "The issue for us was: can we have the co-ordinated approach to the distribution of the food? Can we make sure that the spread of the distribution of the food reaches right out to even those in far-flung areas? Can we ensure food is also of good quality?
"You can’t just say we have this food and go around distributing it. We have to be sure it is good food, where as far as possible it is nutritious."
Yet on this point, Zulu speaks with a forked tongue, saying on the one hand "we could not stop people distributing food", then immediately contradicting herself by saying people can’t "go around distributing it".
No wonder society is confused. This muddled thinking has done her government no favours, pitching itself as an obstacle to assistance, rather than a conduit.
Of course the responsibility goes beyond Zulu’s department, and beyond food parcels. Zulu says the government as a whole needs to work together to combat the intertwined issues of poverty, unemployment and inequality.
She adds: "You need to get your communities to also look at themselves and see value in themselves, doing something for themselves in order to deal with poverty.
"I am very excited at the moment by the manner in which this thing [Covid-19] came. It was painful, but it forced us to look at each other and say: ‘You know what, it is possible for us to work in a co-ordinated manner; it is possible for us to do what we have done’."
Now, says Zulu, is the time to flatten the curve of hunger and inequality by introducing programmes that will empower communities. "We need to relook at our interventions … even before Covid-19 we already knew by then of the challenges of hunger … if you go to the statistics they tell you some people only have one meal a day," she says.
The government has already increased social grants and introduced a temporary distress relief grant of R350.
But even that has been fraught. At the beginning of May, beneficiaries of SA Social Security Agency (Sassa) grants in KwaZulu-Natal arrived to collect their grants only to discover there was no money in their accounts — while those in the Western Cape were paid double. This, Zulu said at the time, was a "temporary glitch" that arose with the addition of Covid relief grants.
As for the temporary relief grant, applications opened on May 11, with the first payment made on May 15. But a delay meant only nine people had received the money by May 25. Sassa said this was simply a 10-person sample to test the efficacy of the system (and one applicant had entered his details incorrectly).
On May 29, Sassa told parliament it had received 13-million applications and inquiries for payment of the temporary grant. By May 25 it had processed almost 38,000 payments, and about 666,000 applications had been approved.
Even those numbers are embarrassing though, implying that 95% of applicants were still waiting. And this is a relief package only available for six months.
"Then what, after that?" Zulu asks.
It’s an apt question, with no readily available answer. Clearly, for a number of reasons, not least government bungling, many South Africans will only be worse off when that six-month period ends.
The DA’s Lorimer fears that the nonprofits, which have done sterling work thanks to donors, may soon face a crunch, as people’s salaries are cut and donations dry up.
"People have been feeding for some time, [and are] not able to distribute any more. This is much more of a long-term problem as the economy closes down," Lorimer says.
Solidarity Fund steps in
Before the hard lockdown, the Solidarity Fund was set up by the private sector as a rapid response vehicle to Covid-19. It has since contributed significantly, distributing food parcels to more than 250,000 households. It’s also trialled a voucher programme, as part of a multipronged approach to humanitarian disaster relief.
Nicola Galombik, head of disbursement at the fund, says the vouchers not only contribute to food security in households, but put much-needed cash into the economy.
She says the fund realised very early on that there was a perfect storm brewing around food security.
"At the start of the lockdown it was estimated that an additional 3-million to 5-million households would experience acute food insecurity, given the reduction in income from employment and remittances," she says. "It was clear that the fund would not be able to serve all South Africans in need, using the resources available to it."
As a result, the decision was taken to balance the need for food with other priorities, like the need to buy personal protective equipment. With that, a R120m disbursement was made available to provide emergency relief for households.
"The Solidarity Fund’s response was to roll out an immediate and short-term food relief intervention designed to be a stop-gap measure to allow time for the more systemic government grant solutions to come on stream," she says. This includes government feeding schemes at schools.
Galombik hopes food security will begin to improve as people return to work and government grants come through. But the focus needs to shift to more sustainable answers, as the economic consequences of the pandemic deepen.
An outside view
Prof Julian May, director of the Centre of Excellence in Food Security at the University of the Western Cape, takes issue with the government’s response. He says it wasn’t well placed to deliver food parcels during the crisis and that it was the nonprofit organisations that stepped up to the plate, to mitigate the damage.
It would be better, he argues, for the government to simply give the money it would have spent on food parcels to the nonprofit organisations, which have a better track record anyway.
But May says there is another problem: people are getting a less diverse diet during the lockdown. In a pre-lockdown scenario, May says people were already not eating enough fresh fruit and vegetables. South Africans tend to rely on a diet of bread, pap, potatoes (and meat, when they can afford it).
It’s a narrow diet at the best of times, which results in South Africans probably being nutrient-deficient — which can lead to a weakened immune system. "We are in an odd situation in that healthy food is more expensive than unhealthy food. It is cheaper to buy takeaways than to buy fresh vegetables," he says.
When Covid-19 hit, informal traders who sell fruit and vegetables were initially not allowed to operate, which compounded the problem.
May is worried about the longer-term effects — especially if women in their third trimester of pregnancy were without adequate nutrition. "Two months for an adult is difficult, but two months for a woman who is carrying a child at that stage of a pregnancy can be very severe. It’s a very critical stage of a child’s development."
A second concern is women who were breastfeeding during the lockdown. As May points out, two months is a very long time for a newborn baby. Even prior to lockdown, about a quarter of children under the age of five suffered stunting. This, he says, has not changed since 1993, "which is very worrying".
When looking at hunger’s awful spectre, one grave concern is its consequences for unborn infants and young children
— What it means:
The main focus now, he says, should be on providing support for prenatal and postnatal care, given the impact this period has on a child’s development.
It’s a sentiment echoed by Prof Imraan Valodia, dean of the faculty of commerce, law & management at Wits University.
"When you go through what we are going through with such a large number of households [not having enough food], I think you really have a potentially serious problem that we will have to deal with," Valodia says.
The longer that continues, the more you will see an impact on the stunting rate in children. This has an effect on their performance in school and on their general health.
The government’s inability to provide for its citizens, at their hour of greatest need, will have far more dire consequences in the years to come.
Some, like Yola Minnaar, have realised that unless South Africans do it for themselves, they’ll end up worse off. "[Whatever] I do have, I will give," she says.
And she’s doing far more for the country than any well-fed politician preventing food handouts on the tenuous basis that this "strips away dignity".
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