Over the next few days the 21-day spaza shop registration drive precipitated by the spike in foodborne illnesses that left children dead countrywide will end.
The reason for the illnesses and deaths range from poor health and food management protocols to the use of dangerous pesticides in the shops that crept into the food preparation processes.
As one would expect in a crisis, identifying the source of the outbreak in a poorly understood and poorly managed ecosystem proved to be an exercise in head scratching.
Data regarding the location, size and supply chain systems for the sector does not exist in a coherent form. Mapping out a solution that would be fast enough to address an escalating crisis and agile enough to deal with an industry of unique complexities, required co-ordination across various state agencies that are responsible for some parts of the overall canvas.
The drive to regularise the industry through a process of registration seeks to at least provide a baseline for understanding the size and shape of the spaza shop industry. During this drive the government aims to assist the various operators within the spaza shop value chain in regularising their compliance status with the various regulations and bylaws that are meant to guide the industry. An allocation of R500m from the departments of small business development and trade, industry & competition has been mobilised to roll out the initiative.
Since the beginning of the process long-standing tensions regarding the perceived overpresence of non-SA operators in the spaza shop industry have once again escalated. The overpresence is often expressed in terms of the high prevalence of foreign-owned shops compared with the government’s own data regarding migration patterns and rules concerning those who arrive in the country with a desire to establish a foothold in the economy by operating a business.
Some of the anomalies are glaringly obvious to everyone. According to the census data published by Stats SA, foreign nationals make up just 3% of the people living in SA. Of those, only a fraction would be operating businesses as the total number includes those in formal and informal employment, children and those who are of foreign origin but do not work at all.
Such numbers should translate to a small fraction of foreign nationals theoretically operating businesses of any kind in the country. Yet for some communities where every second tuck shop and spaza shop is operated by a foreign shopkeeper, such data is at odds with their experiences, and escalates tensions.
In addition, the regulations as now understood require foreign nationals to have at least R5m to qualify for a business visa — which includes spaza shops. The idea that anyone with R5m to invest in a business would opt for a spaza shop is itself fanciful. The obvious risk associated with such a threshold is that for a sector in which barriers to access are far lower than R5m, a parallel industry can emerge comprising those without the means to meet the threshold but with the willingness to enter the field.
Once such a parallel industry thrives outside the net of vigilance and regulation, the possibility of health and security risks increases exponentially, with the government none the wiser about where to intervene and address risk factors. On a community level, the suspicions regarding the unregulated businesses run by undocumented individuals being a source of any outbreak is difficult to dispel due to the lack of any form of compliance and legal standing.
Such problems are pervasive and will not simply fade away. All of this makes the current process of understanding the lay of the land an important if tentative step towards fostering compliance, vigilance and coherence in a sector that forms such a critical part of our social and economic system.
• Sithole is an accountant, academic and activist.
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