Food at spaza shops is likely being poisoned. President Cyril Ramaphosa’s response is exactly what would-be poisoners would have wanted.
Today is the deadline for all spaza shops who wish to continue operating to register with their respective municipalities. This requirement is over and above the usual company registration and business permits that are required in the ordinary course of formal operation.
Spaza shops have been part of the informal business landscape for decades. It is where millions of people buy affordable groceries and household items. Thousands of entrepreneurs operate these shops, forming the backbone of the township economy.
In September 2024, out of the blue, hundreds of people – primarily children – began to get sick, and a couple of dozen died, after consuming food bought from spaza shops and street vendors.
All of the reported incidents that I have seen involve foreign-owned spaza shops. And all of them involved either terbufos, an organophosphate insecticide used in agriculture, or a mystery contaminant. These contaminants were discovered not only on the outside of food packaging, but inside packets of chips.
What changed? Did spaza shop owners all over the country suddenly decide to get reckless with food safety? Did they plant the poison inside the chips packets? Did they suddenly decide, all at the same time, that killing customers makes business sense?
Or is there another explanation for the sudden increase in outbreaks of food-related poisonings involving foreign-owned spaza shops?
Official story
President Ramaphosa, in addressing the issue last month, said that problems were not limited to foreign-owned spaza shops, but were widespread. He spoke of food-borne illnesses, although it wasn’t about biological pathogens such as listeria, botulism or salmonella, but about food poisoned with agricultural chemicals. He said that investigations did not suggest a deliberate campaign to poison children.
The problem, he said, is that shop owners store prohibited insecticides that are used to control rodents in townships right next to foodstuffs.
Why they all started doing that in September, he left as a homework exercise.
When Johannesburg officials and police raided spaza shops eleven days later, they targeted only foreign-owned shops, and discovered “expired food items and non-labelled goods”, but no poisoned packets of chips.
Instead of issuing fines, which one might expect in such cases, they shut every single one of the raided spaza shops down.
Poisoning theory
Dr Cloete van Vuuren, an infectious disease specialist from the University of the Free State, doesn’t buy the explanation that it’s merely about poor food safety.
He noted that the deaths occurred very quickly, which suggests that the victims ingested substantial doses of pesticide, which is unlikely to happen after accidental contamination.
“What seems to be happening here is food that is contaminated with poison, with an organophosphate,” he told Sunday World. “Contamination is accidental if it happens in small amounts, and you would have a case here and there. In this instance, we have a huge number of children simultaneously being poisoned in certain places over a wide area and they are exposed to very high doses of organophosphate.”
He added: “Spaza shop owners won’t poison their customers. The concern here is that there are outside forces involved. People argue that most spaza shop owners are foreigners and people do not want foreigners to trade. They poison their stock, children get poisoned and their shops close. That might be an underlying explanation. It is unlikely that the doses that the children are exposed to, and the number of deaths is purely accidental. This is not a medical food-borne outbreak. Somebody is deliberately contaminating food that is sold at spaza shops to discredit spaza shops to get them to close. Police need to investigate this.”
Pull the other one
Is Van Vuuren’s story more farfetched than the president’s claim that these incidents were just accidental and weren’t targeted at foreign-owned spaza shops?
People have been selling and using dodgy pesticides forever. All you need to do is ask around, and you’ll soon get your hands on a bunch of nasty poisons like terbufos or aldicarb (colloquially known as “Two Step”, for the number of steps a poisoned animal supposedly takes after consuming it). Although it is illegal to sell these poisons to consumers, and they are not registered for domestic use, they are routinely used for the control of pest animals. Burglars also use them to poison dogs.
And yet despite widespread availability for decades, we are to believe that spaza shops only started mishandling these substances a few months ago?
Pull the other one. I don’t believe it. The targeted poisoning theory is almost certainly correct.
Bureaucratic mess
The government’s reponse, absurdly, involves requiring all spaza shops to register with their municipalities in less than a month.
Although the deadline is today, the registration campaign is an entirely predictable (and predicted) bureaucratic mess. Last week, it was reported that 51,000 spaza shops had been registered so far, but there are hundreds of thousands of spaza shops, tuck shops and general dealers in the country. (Tiger Brands alone deals with 91,000, and plans to add 150,000 more to its network.)
The Department of Small Business Development will helpfully deploy a national online registration platform by January 2025, a month after the registration deadline. Nobody appears to have noticed the problem with this arrangement.
An organisation representing foreign shop owners has begged the government for a six-month extension of the deadline, which seems entirely reasonable.
Illegal immigrants
While legal immigrants in possession of a business visa, an asylum seeker certificate or a refugee certificate would be permitted to register their shops and maintain a business licence, that does not apply to foreigners on work, student or tourist visas, or to business owners who employ illegal immigrants.
That said, it would be fairly trivial for an illegal immigrant to set up a fronting arrangement with a South African citizen to bypass all this bureaucratic nonsense.
Ramaphosa has directed a wide range of inspectors, including police officers, military health services members, environmental health inspectors, members of the National Consumer Commission, and labour inspectors to visit every one of the hundreds of thousands of shops to check that rules and standards are being met.
The only likely result of this inspection blitz is a temporary boost in employment numbers.
Ramaphosa might say it has nothing to do with foreigners, but every government action so far – and some of the statements of other members of cabinet, like Gayton McKenzie – made it clear that the main target is shops owned by foreigners. Deputy President Paul Mashatile has said that government wants South Africans to own most shops.
It is also not the first time that the government has acted to arbitrarily close shops operated by foreigners.
Why? If South Africans were better at running these shops than foreigners, they would already be running them.
Anti-immigrant groups like Operation Dudula and Put South Africans First have also been vocal on the matter, and have been implicated in spreading fake news about it.
Rising prices
While foreign nationals who own township shops have spoken out on the apparent poisoning campaign, over 1,000 shops have already been closed nationwide, at last count.
All the closures will reduce competition in the market. All the red tape will raise costs. I can’t imagine this ending without violence and vigilante action against more foreign-owned shops.
The inevitable outcome will be less choice and higher prices for the consumer segment that can least afford food inflation.
If the targeted-poisoning theory is true, and I believe it is, then the true villains in this story will get away with their deadly crimes. Not only does the government appear to be too spineless to tackle them, preferring to pander to the rising tide of xenophobia, but by acting against the victims, they have given the real criminals exactly what they wanted.
We are not led.
[Image: Legal immigrant Hadidja Mgoqi stands in front of her Kraaifontein shop, which was arbitrarily closed by the SA Police Service in 2018, without a court order, ostensibly because unnamed “community leaders” objected that it was too close to a rival shop. Photograph: Vincent Lali, GroundUp, used under CC BY-ND 4.0 licence]
The views of the writer are not necessarily the views of the Daily Friend or the IRR.
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