By PHAKAMISA MAYABA
EARLIER this month, residents of Naledi in Soweto resorted to shutting down – and eventually looting – some foreign-owned spaza shops in the area. This came after six children had died from consuming snacks allegedly bought at those spazas.
In Bronkhorstspruit, a further 25 pupils were reportedly given medical treatment after allegedly eating snacks bought from a street vendor near their school. At about the same time, 47 children in Hammanskraal and 74 others on the West Rand were treated for food poisoning, bringing the issue of foreign-owned spazas back into the national dialogue.
Rekindling his #Abahambe pre-election rallying cry, now sports arts and culture minister Gayton Mckenzie came out guns blazing. ‘We need to close all these shops,’ he declared. ‘We can’t be debating this matter. The shops should be closed and owners arrested to be deported.’ He added: ‘What more do we want to see, more children dying? … What do we owe the illegal foreigners? Let them go.’
Gauteng finance MEC Lebogang Maile was more measured. ‘This matter is complicated,’ he said. ‘The other day we walked into a foreign-owned shop, but the Bangladesh national had South African citizenship. When you say, ”close all the foreign-owned shops”, how do we refer to those people who have citizenship? This issue has become more complex, and that’s why we must allow national government to lead us.’
In all the subsequent brouhaha, Maile came closest to the heart of the matter, which is, more than anything else, that the underlying issues are deeply entrenched in the DNA of the spaza industry. So much so that they are so seemingly normalised as to be a rule of thumb rather than an aberration.
Moreover, the government is clearly falling short as far as regulating the sector goes. In Soweto, Daily Maverick reported, there was a ‘dearth of health inspectors’, with only 16 assigned to oversee 19 wards in Region D1 Soweto. ‘This is considerably lower than the global health standard requirement of one inspector per 10 000 people.’
Whatever you will say of the foreign-owned spaza, one can’t deny that they are highly organised and have altered the ‘spaza’ — which denotes ‘just getting by’ — into a highly lucrative sector worth an estimated R178 billion, according to research by Accenture Africa. There are more than 150 000 of these shops with a deep footprint across the township landscape, and if Tiger Brands, SA’s biggest food company, plans to partner with some 130 000 spazas is anything to go by, the industry is blossoming.
However, given such staggering numbers, the possibility of malpractice is never far off. Factors like price fixing and monopolising the township economy are an ever-present threat. For instance, the industry’s communication channels are so effective and collaborative are that a message on a WhatsApp group can increase the price of a particular overnight across all the businesses in a particular area.
The liquor and cigarette ban during the Covid pandemic was a windfall for spazas. Overnight, the price of a loose cigarette shot up as much as five times, and even higher in more affluent suburbs. Of course, you usually collected the contraband through the back door, in case law enforcement came sniffing around. Often those owners who were wary of the cops got willing local residents to do the dirty work from their households.
In May 2020, I wrote in City Press: ‘It is common cause that government’s U-turn on tobacco sales has left manufacturers peeved and black marketers laughing all the way to the bank.’ Back then I was dismissed as a whining smoker. But history shows that spazas have never really stopped coining it, given how unfamiliar, cheaper cigarette products have since penetrated the market. Nearly a year after that article, News24 reported that ‘Shoprite lost a sizeable chunk of its alcohol and cigarette sales to the black market during sales bans in the pandemic.’ Its CEO, Pieter Engelbrecht, told 702’s The Money Show that ‘that business is not coming back.’
Few will dispute that spazas offer an important service in the townships. In these communities, they are known to offer credit to residents who are on the dole or are formally employed. However, one also has to recogise that all or almost all of them employ questionable business practices that fly in the face of domestic laws. Following the uproar in Naledi, Daily Maverick reported how one resident didn’t apparently mind that these shops charge R10 for a cash-back transaction, saying: ‘I still don’t mind the extra R10 because I get groceries much cheaper and save on the trip to town or to the mall, which can cost a lot more.’
It all sounds good until you dig a bit deeper. These shops charge 10% extra for electricity vouchers even though the slip clearly states that consumers should not pay more than the amount reflected on the receipt. The same goes for airtime and cash-back transactions. Parting with R10 on a R100 cash-back transaction may not be too much skin off one’s teeth, but forfeiting R100 when withdrawing R1000 is ridiculously steep by any measure. Is it all legal? Seemingly, there is also no cap to the rule, so be prepared to be fleeced of R300 when you urgently need to withdraw that R3000, a brutal pound of flesh when compared to the bank charges.
Mckenzie’s call for mass deportations and closing down foreign-owned spazas somes across as a knee-jerk response, if not counterintuitive. You can deport one owner, but his substitute will likely pick up where his predecessor left off, inflated electricity vouchers and all. Such action would hardly make a dent in the structural issues dogging the industry.
It is clear, even to an armchair critic, that efforts to fix the spaza industry should ensuring that they adhere to the law, that they are inspected regularly, and that consumers know their rights. They can’t simply be dismissed with the ‘take it or leave it’ liquor peddlers in the Covid era when they raise their concerns.
While writing this article, I had to pay R2 on top of R20 when buying a beer by card. When I enquired what the R2 was for, I was told, rather confidently, ‘for card machine [speedpoint].’ Also, I was reminded that all card transactions starts at a minimum off R20. Bread is R14, hence you can’t swipe for it, not unless you buy something else so as to get to the minimum. On another occasion, a R10 electricity voucher set me back R12. Why? Well, that’s just the price.
Outside of the unnecessary deaths, one can’t deny the micro-aggressions that go unchecked in the industry. Over the years social media has been inundated with pictures of foreign nationals purportedly producing counterfeit food brands, over-the-counter medication and even liquor, often from within clearly unconducive settings. Some of these have also found their way into investigative television programmes.
Despite such interventions, the black market supply chain seems unbroken. For all their media releases, McKenzie and Co may enjoy some airtime, but until the inherent matters are tackled, they might as well tell the wind to #Abahambe.