Social Development Minister Lindiwe Zulu has issued new regulations governing how food relief can be distributed.
A month ago, her first draft regulations were shelved after the DA got a court order to block their implementation.
The new regulations don’t repeat the demand for departmental approval of all relief efforts but would still plunge relief efforts into a bureaucratic nightmare where food distribution will be hampered.
The new regulations issued last week manage to be both intrusive and vague at the same time. They stipulate that soup kitchens cannot provide seating and that people must bring their own food containers to soup kitchens.
They encourage meals being dropped off at people’s houses, but do not stipulate who should provide those containers.
The regulations require soup kitchens and food parcel distributors to submit a plan of their activities and a report afterwards.
This implies that permission may be denied simply on the basis of a plan. This process requires the names and addresses of all recipients. How one gets the names and addresses of people, including the homeless, who will arrive at a soup kitchen is not known.
There are many other instances of vagueness. Unclear regulations can be interpreted by officials in the most obstructive possible way and enforced by a police force that inclines naturally to oppression.
This will inevitably make it more difficult to get food to people who are hungry.
This still looks like the work of a minister who wants to control food, doubtless as a means of controlling political allegiance.
No sane person could believe the Department of Social Development, with a track record of failure in delivery of its core mandate could successfully “coordinate” food relief to millions of people.
Lindiwe Zulu typifies the worst of the ANC cabinet, all mouth, aggression, incapacity and a fondness for the military uniforms of international human rights abusers.
The DA will go back to court to stop these regulations which have the potential to stunt children and to starve people, all in the name of Zulu’s megalomaniacal control agenda.
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