R370 and a dream – priced out of the future

JUNE is Youth Month in South Africa, a time set aside to honour the brave young people who stood up against the apartheid state in 1976, and to reflect on the democratic promise of a just, equal, and inclusive future. It is meant to be a moment of national reckoning and recommitment, a time to ask not only how far we have come but how far we still have to go in securing a future worthy of the next generation.

- TARA ROOS

Yet in 2025, as the commemorations unfold, one is forced to ask: What does the South African state truly offer the youth it claims to celebrate? Not employment. Not quality education. Not even the dignity of meaningful work. What it offers instead, starkly, symbolically, and with little imagination, is R370 and a dream.

This is the value of the Social Relief of Distress (SRD) grant, a monthly payment introduced as a temporary intervention during the Covid-19 pandemic, but now the most enduring form of state support available to millions of young people. According to SASSA, 62% of SRD recipients are 35 or younger. Every month, approximately 80 000 new applicants join the queue seeking not comfort, but survival. In the absence of any serious youth employment strategy, the SRD grant has become the closest thing South Africa has to a youth policy.