Medication or rent? Pensioners reveal the impossible choices R2400 forces on them
· The South African
Frustration among South African pensioners is boiling over, with beneficiaries taking to Facebook to demand an urgent increase to the Older Persons Grant, insisting the current payout is nowhere near enough to cover the basics.
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Commenting under a recent The South African article on SASSA payments, Annamarie Otto laid out the brutal arithmetic pensioners face every month.
“R5000 would help us so much. Some medication costs more than R1000. Then rent…food, and the rest follows. R2420 is not enough. How can we survive???” she wrote.
Her frustration was echoed by Vani Deevichand, who framed the grant shortfall as a matter of basic human dignity for older people.
“Really speaking, old age is literally saying… the last few years of their lives …make them happy and help them live comfortably, after 60 is bunsela years God gives grace …DO THE RIGHT THING, GOVERNMENT…. R5000 IS NOT A LOT…COST OF LIVING IS HIGH,” she said.
Calls for R5000 grow louder
The demand for a R5000 grant wasn’t an isolated complaint – it was a rallying cry repeated across the comment section. Mlungisi Donda put it simply: “We now demand R5000 grant for the older people.”
Nola Van Loggerenberg went further, tying the grant amount to broader dissatisfaction with SASSA’s payment schedule, arguing that pensioners deserve both consistency and a livable amount.
“Sassa old pensioners need a decent increase up to R5000. No one can survive on R2400 a month, everything is expensive in South Africa,” she wrote, adding that “Government should do the right thing and look after these old age pensioners.”
Patience wearing thin
Not everyone believes change is coming any time soon. Casper Janse van Rensberg was blunt about his scepticism, joking, “You will only receive that R5000 once the Donkeys are out and the Horses are back”, a comment that captured the weary cynicism running through the thread.
Whether government responds to the mounting pressure remains to be seen, but one thing is clear: pensioners are no longer prepared to suffer in silence over an amount they say simply isn’t keeping up with the cost of living.
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