Concerns about TRC bursary administration

CONCERNS have been raised over the poor management of the TRC bursary as the fund’s managers visited the Western Cape this week to encourage apartheid victims and their families to apply.

The Khulumani Support Group, founded by families of apartheid victims, criticised the poor management of an education bursary run by the Department of Justice.

The department was in the Western Cape this week to encourage the relatives of victims of apartheid era politically motivated crimes to apply for the Truth and the Reconciliation Commission (TRC) bursary.

The bursary has been in place since 2015 as its implementation formed part of the TRC’s recommendation for restitution, including an individual one-off reparation of R30 000,

medical benefits and other forms of social assistance.

However, civil society groups and some recipients of the bursary have spoken out about the fund’s delayed administration and its inability to reach thousands of victims and their relatives who could stand to benefit.

Khuluma Support Group’s director, Dr Marjorie Jobson, said they had more than 130 000 victims of apartheid survivors on their reparations database, many of whom struggled with obtaining the bursary.

She said many who qualified were not identified for the bursary and those who were identified either did not succeed with their applications or the payment has been delayed.

“Our government failed to do the work of verifying all victims of apartheid atrocities. I think a lot of awareness needs to be done about the reparations failures of our government.

“There is a huge block here so the TRC unit only pays out six months or more into the new school or academic year, when students have to show up at the beginning of the academic year. This is a nightmare,” she said.

Jobson said some of the victims were now too old to qualify for funding and could not receive the bursary they were promised.

A final-year public relations student at Boston College in Vereeniging, Onalenna Mathe, said she was awarded the bursary in 2018 but only began receiving her money early this year. Mathe’s father, Pule Kgosi, was shot by the apartheid police.

“In the first four years the administration was very bad. They took too long to pay so you use your own money. They paid me in August or September. I did not receive books at school so I was unable to study and meet the deadlines. It was a chaos,” she said.

Ntombi Hlaphezulu from Nyanga in Cape Town said she received the one-off R30 000 reparation in the early 2000s and wanted to apply for the bursary for her daughter, who is now in Grade 12.

“During the apartheid, my father (Samuel Hlaphezulu) was one of the victims. One day the police were chasing people here in Nyanga and so my father ran and hid in the wardrobe but they extracted him.

“In the process my mother was also injured in the head. The injury affected my mother for a long time,” she said.