The COVID-19 task team today continued supplying food to people in distress and combined forces with Cradle of Hope, a non-profit organisation in Krugersdorp, to hand out food parcels to residents in need. The need in this community is gigantic and approximately 700 people showed up to receive a food parcel.
According to the task team, it is important to cooperate with other organisations to help alleviate the need for food. Cradle of Hope was closed down by the government earlier this month because they handed out prepared food. AfriForum and Solidarity Helping Hand are currently supporting this organisation with a court application to have the close-down declared invalid.
According to Johan Kruger, Head of Community Development at AfriForum, the court application is also aiming at declaring the guidelines that were recently promulgated by the Gauteng Premier to prevent people from distributing food directly to the community, as unconstitutional. “Institutions must be able to continue supplying food to hungry communities without government interference. It is important to fight against the centralisation of food and we welcome the Human Rights Commission’s decision that it is unconstitutional to forbid organisations such as Cradle of Hope from supplying prepared meals to people in distress.”
“The nationwide lockdown presents a lot of negative consequences to various people and it is now especially important that organisations that do have the ability, will work together to provide food to people in need. We’re concerned that people will die due to poverty and hunger if the regulations to centralise food continues,” says Ian Cameron, AfriForum’s Head of Community Safety.
Even though the task team welcomes the decision of the Human Rights Commission, Cameron says that people should however realise that the state will not necessarily take notice of it. “We can clearly see that the need in the country is starting to increase immensely. That is why we should continue with food distribution, otherwise hundreds of thousands of people will go hungry.”
According to Francois Rossouw, CEO of Saai, they will continue to support the task team by providing food to needy people.
Strengthen the task team’s hand by making a donation to the Solidarity Movement’s emergency fund:
Account holder: Solidarity Helping Hand
Bank: FNB
Account number: 62 331 445 503
Branch: Centurion (branch code: 250 655)
Reference: Korona
Swift code: FIRN ZA JJ
