Women’s Month shame as thousands of mothers left without maintenance payments | The Citizen

As South Africa marks Women’s Month, thousands of single mothers are left stranded without child maintenance payments, exposing flaws in the justice system meant to protect them.

Advocacy group Child Maintenance Difficulties in South Africa says beneficiaries across the country are still waiting for garnishee payments that never arrived last month, even as the department of justice and constitutional development promotes its annual Access to Justice Week.

The group’s founder, Felicity Guest, said the timing could not be more worrying.

“The department’s access to justice programme promotes access to services, including family law and maintenance,” said Guest.

“Yet, families dependent on the maintenance system are struggling to obtain basic information about why payments have not reached them.”

“South Africa’s maintenance system has experienced systemic difficulties for years,” she said.

“Parents can spend months or even years obtaining maintenance orders and pursuing enforcement when those orders are not complied with.

“For those who finally secure a garnishee order, the expectation is simple: money deducted from the payer’s salary should reach the beneficiary.

“But when the state payment infrastructure fails, the burden falls once again on the primary caregiver and, ultimately, on the child.”

Guest said during July, beneficiaries across the country began reporting that garnishee maintenance payments due to them had not been received.

“After repeated inquiries and media engagement, the department confirmed to the media that there had been ‘suspicious activity’ and that the payment system had been shut down,” she said.

“However, there has still been no comprehensive public explanation from the department on what happened, the extent of the disruption, whether beneficiary information was affected, what arrangements are available, or when payments will resume.”

Guest said the government may call this a system disruption or a technical problem, but “for a mother standing in a maintenance court with an empty bank account, it is survival”.

The department was yet to comment at the time of publication.

The maintenance system collapse wasn’t new, with concerns about the high numbers of child maintenance applications that remain incomplete, being highlighted as early as 2024 after data provided by the department of justice indicated over 170 000 incomplete child maintenance applications in February 2024.

However, a Gauteng single mother of one child, who did not want to be named to protect her child, said she was not getting any maintenance money, despite having a parent plan in place and appearing before a magistrate.

“The father was responsible for school fees, while I paid for her living expenses. Last year, he was unable to pay the fees. Now everything is my responsibility,” she said.

To make matters worse, the mother received a call from a lawyer in February after the school handed them over for being in arrears of more than R10 000.

“Not only does he not pay for anything, but he didn’t even have the decency to let me know that he wasn’t paying fees anymore,” she said.