STEVEN ZWANE | Grant recipients show township financial intelligence

Workers’ Day has come and gone. The speeches were made. The banners were raised.

The minister of employment and labour called on South Africans to honour the dignity of labour. Parliament’s presiding officers spoke of “unfinished work”. The DA’s Geordin Hill-Lewis named the harder number: 31.4% official unemployment, rising to 42.1% on the expanded definition.

That is 7.8-million people with no work to show. Two days after Workers’ Day, a story appeared in this very platform.In Evaton, the Vaal, 1,200 beneficiaries of the R370 SRD grant had pooled their money; trusted a former financial adviser named Sibusiso Ntsele; and, within six months, acquired a struggling local bakery, resuscitated it, launched a supermarket, and opened a butchery. They now receive dividends.

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Some are employed. The rest are investors. Not a grant recipient in the traditional sense.

Not a statistic in an unemployment report. That story, the Isinkwa Sethu Campaign, is the most important financial literacy lesson published in SA this month. Ask mostfinancial literacyprogrammes what they teach, and you will hear the same curriculum: budgeting, saving, managing debt, and building a credit score.

These are valuable concepts for a person with a salary arriving on the 25th, a bank account with zero monthly fees, and disposable income to set aside after expenses. But what about the person whose income arrives in irregular amounts, sometimes daily, sometimes not at all? The person the bank charges more to hold their money than they can afford to lose.

The person whose savings take the form of a stokvel that keeps the community alive through hard months, not a unit trust growing quietly in their name. The conventional definition of financial literacy was not written for them. It was written for a version of economic life that millions of South Africans have never lived.

A University of Cape Town researcher captured it plainly: SA’s economic promise has long been “anchored in the idea that formal employment is the primary route to dignity, stability, and upward mobility”. That world is fading. Yet our financial literacy frameworks have not moved with it.

In applying a formal-economy definition to an informal-economy reality, we have made a damaging mistake. We have confused exclusion with ignorance. We have told people they don’t understand money, when in truth, the system has never understood them. There’s a specific institution that deserves to be named here: the banking sector.

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