Heads must roll over family maintenance payment violation

Politicians need to start taking responsibility for their blundering departments which tramp on the rights of our most vulnerable and make a mockery of our constitution.

The latest horror, care of the ironically named justice department, has once again struck at mainly women and children.

Thousands who desperately need monthly family maintenance payments have been denied access to this income in the midst of a horrific pandemic and a lockdown that has robbed this country of investment and its people of jobs and a regular income.

This newspaper first broke the story of the system failing its beneficiaries in May.

Since then, it has written a number of stories on how migration from a chaotic system to one that was supposed to bring order has instead had the opposite effect.

Long queues of desperate people outside court buildings in the midst of the pandemic became a common sight.

The Dispatch exposed that the problem appeared to lie with MojaPay, the new “smart”  system the justice department started using in 2016 for third-party payments such as court-ordered maintenance payments.

For reasons which remain unclear, thousands of people, particularly in the Eastern Cape, were not migrated to the new system.

When the old system was mothballed, employers and individuals continued paying court-ordered maintenance into a now defunct bank account.

Some bounced back, some disappeared into a black hole.

None of it reached the struggling single mothers and children for whom it was intended.

Unravelling this self-created Gordian knot in an inefficient and stagnant bureaucracy will be a mammoth task.

In the meantime, over a protracted period of almost six months, mothers and children have been forced to do without an income.

Deputy justice minister John Jeffery has shaken his head, tut-tutted, and acknowledged that the rights of these women and children have been “violated”.

He expressed his “dissatisfaction” with the situation and says he is sending two people from the national office to try to sort it out.

But it is simply not good enough for the responsible politician to wring his hands and acknowledge how badly his department is treating women and children.

In almost every other democracy in the world, an admission by a politician that their department had effectively used the constitution as toilet paper would conclude with an offer to resign.

Someone, somewhere must be held accountable.

If Jeffery cannot find the appropriate head to put on a platter, both he and justice minister Ronald Lamola should resign.