IDO LEKOTA
There is a particular arithmetic that governs life in South Africa’s townships — one measured not in rands and cents alone, but in the distance between a grant payday and the next, in the number of days a loaf of bread must stretch, in the small, humiliating calculations that poverty forces a household to make every morning.
For years, it was the foreign-owned spaza shop, often Somali, Ethiopian or Pakistani-run, that absorbed the shock of that arithmetic. It sold bread by the slice if it had to, sugar by the cup, soap by the sliver. Now, as a nationwide movement to push foreign nationals out of township retail gathers force, a new and uncomfortable question is emerging: what if the very shops meant to replace them cannot do the same?
The scenes have become difficult to ignore. Since the “30 June deadline” set by campaigner Nkosinathi “Phakel’umthakathi” Ndabandaba for undocumented migrants to leave the country, movements such as March and March, Operation Dudula and Progressive Forces have staged marches in more than a hundred locations across the country, drawing thousands into the streets chanting “Abahambe!” — they must go.
In Johannesburg’s Alexandra township, a person was shot dead during the looting of foreign-owned corner shops the night the marches took place; in Hillbrow, soldiers were deployed after a shooting injured two people, one of them a teenager. Police say more than 900 people were arrested nationwide, some for undocumented status, others for public violence and looting.
In Durban’s Clermont, a Somali supermarket owner told reporters he had lost R5 million in stock overnight. In Ekurhuleni’s Greenfields, residents simply ordered spaza owners to shut their doors and leave. In Garankuwa, north of Pretoria, community organiser Moses Phetla has promised his group will return “every Thursday” to continue what he calls a campaign against fraudulent documentation — though, by his own account, the target is broader than undocumented migrants alone. “We are also looking at documented and undocumented foreign nationals who are operating spaza shops, including Pakistanis and Somalis,” he has said, arguing that many of their papers are not genuine.
The movement’s leaders frame this as a matter of law and survival, not prejudice. Ngizwe Mchunu, one of its most visible figures, has pointed to the proliferation of informal shops run by nationals of other African countries as evidence that “illegal immigration here is out of hand.” President Cyril Ramaphosa has pushed back publicly on the claim that migrants are responsible for the country’s deeper social and economic troubles, and has appealed to protest leaders to keep demonstrations peaceful. Independent research bodies have gone further, noting there is little evidence that foreign nationals are disproportionately responsible for crime, and that immigrant-run shops — thanks largely to pooled buying power and centralised supply chains — have tended to be more competitively priced than their South African-owned counterparts, not less.
That last point is where the politics of the street begins to collide with the economics of the shelf. And it is precisely where a quiet piece of research out of Pietermaritzburg picks up the story.
The government’s R500 million Spaza Shop Support Fund was conceived as a straightforward act of redress: help South African-owned township shops become more competitive, more compliant, and more financially sustainable, in a retail landscape long dominated by foreign shopkeepers. On paper, it is meant to strengthen local enterprise, improve food safety and build township economic resilience.
But a recent study by the Pietermaritzburg Economic Justice and Dignity Group (PEJDG) suggests the fund may be walking into a problem that policy alone cannot solve. Researchers found that residents in some Durban townships are already reporting rising prices for basic food items at shops now run by South Africans, with the cost of bread — the closest thing many low-income households have to a staple — reportedly climbing from R20 to R30 in some areas following the departure of foreign shopkeepers.
For PEJDG researcher Mervyn Abrahams, the explanation is not sentimental, and it is not really about who owns the shop. It is about how the shop buys. Many foreign-owned spaza operations, he argues, relied on collective buying networks that let them negotiate lower prices from suppliers and pass the savings on to customers. The newly localised shops replacing them tend to operate individually, without that collective muscle, and without the same access to wholesale discounts. “The community may gain in local ownership but lose in affordability,” is the tension he identifies — and it is not a small one. If the pattern holds beyond Durban, it suggests the marches now sweeping the country’s townships may be settling one grievance while quietly opening another: the loss of the price flexibility that made informal trade survivable in the first place.
This is the contradiction now facing the Spaza Shop Support Fund. Ownership alone, Abrahams’s findings suggest, does not guarantee viability. Formalisation does not automatically produce lower prices for consumers. And a policy built to correct an imbalance in who owns township retail may be silent on the buying-power imbalance that made foreign-run shops cheaper to begin with.
The stakes reach well beyond the spaza shop itself. For many residents, it is not simply a retail outlet but what might be called a survival node in a fragile local food economy — a place people turn to because they are buying in small quantities, on tight budgets, needing every cent to stretch. A shop willing to sell a single onion, a small bag of sugar or a half-loaf of bread can matter more to a low-income household than a formally compliant outlet insisting on standard pack sizes and fixed prices. It is this flexibility, Abrahams cautions, that government support risks pushing out of existence — nudging township retail toward a model that is “too rigid, too individualistic and too disconnected from the realities of informal trade.” Formalisation matters, he is careful to note, particularly where food safety, tax compliance and business sustainability are concerned. But pursued without bulk-buying networks, supplier coordination, finance, mentoring and a gradual transition, it risks raising costs and weakening the very businesses it was designed to help.
What is emerging, in other words, is a policy contradiction sitting uneasily alongside a social one. Government wants to support local ownership, but local ownership without collective buying capacity may not be enough to keep prices down. It wants to formalise township trade, but formalisation without economic adaptation may strip the sector of the flexibility that made it work. The question, then, is not really whether to formalise township retail — but how to do so without dismantling its affordability and its responsiveness to the people who depend on it.
None of this is separate from what plays out on the streets each Thursday. A previous report by the Treasury-led Cities Support Programme (CSP), which Abrahams’s findings echo, found that in townships, the majority of local enterprise activity is food-related, as is most local household expenditure — placing the food economy squarely at the centre of any serious strategy for township development. As the CSP put it:
“The dispersed spatial structure of the township food economy suits households that have to access food within walking distance. Homebased food enterprises are typically located throughout residential areas at regular intervals. Township food enterprises often sell very small units of food (such as individual tomatoes or portions of loaves of bread) which fit limited budgets and which formal retailers may not sell.”
For Abrahams, this should be the guiding light for any formalisation or transformation of the township economy — one in which the needs of supplier and consumer are understood as symbiotic, not opposed. A spaza owner who raises the price of bread, he warns, may see short-term profitability but risks long-term business failure, precisely because bread has become the de facto staple food for families already priced out of most other options.
It is a warning that carries an even sharper edge given the numbers behind it. As Abrahams frames it:
“South Africa is characterised by high poverty and inequality. More than half of all households live below the upper bound poverty line and 40 percent of the households live below the lower bound poverty line. Most concerning is that 25 percent live below the food poverty line. Living below food poverty lines means that the entire income of the household is less than what is required to purchase their minimum daily calorie requirement — and any intervention that compounds that situation defeats the whole purpose of localisation.”
Put the two stories side by side — the marches and the survey — and an uncomfortable possibility comes into view. The movements filling township streets each Thursday are demanding an economy that looks more like the people who live in it. The economics emerging from Durban suggest that in getting there, the same households may, at least for a time, pay more for less. Not because localisation is wrong in principle, but because ownership was never the only variable that made those shops work. Buying power, supply networks and the freedom to sell a single egg mattered just as much — and none of that transfers automatically with a change of nameplate above the door.
If there is a lesson sitting between the burnt shopfronts and the bread-price data, it may be this: the fight over who stands behind the counter cannot be separated from the fight over what ends up in the basket. A localisation project that ignores that link risks winning the argument on ownership while losing the one that matters most to the people it claims to serve — whether they can still afford to eat.
NB: Also read the article “Missed in the Parachute Drop” featured as an analysis in the PiE NATIVE segment.