‘Local SMMEs have surrendered their spaza shops due to no support’

Home | ‘Local SMMEs have surrendered their spaza shops due to no support’ President of the Congress of Traditional Leaders of South Africa (Contralesa), Chief Mathupa Mokoena says many local business owners have surrendered their spaza shops due to a lack of support from the Small Businesses Development Department. Mokoena says this has led to foreign business owners exploiting communities by selling expired food. In a number of incidents, children were admitted to hospital after suspected food poisoning.

Six of them died in Naledi, Soweto. Mokoena says the Health Department must also intervene and ensure that spaza shops sell good quality food products. “Strange this is happening in our country where the majority of our spaza shops are owned by foreign nationals.



Contralesa is worried that many of these shops are selling expired or poisonous food; we lost so many kids due to this expired or poisonous food bought from these shops. The question we are asking is where is the Department of Small Businesses that is supposed to support our local small business owners? The lack of this support from this department is the cause of many of our local business owners surrendering their business to foreign nationals. Contralesa calls upon the Department of Small Business to start supporting our small local business people, we call upon the Department of Health to unleash those health inspectors to go and visit those shops or even confiscate some of the expired or poisonous food from these shops,” concludes Mokoena.

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