Police and Makana Municipality officials in Makhanda closed down shops found to be selling expired food.
Well ahead of the 13 December deadline to register shops set by the President last month, Makana Municipality shut down 12 out of 20 spaza shops it inspected in central Makhanda on 26 November. The Makhanda spaza shop owners have not yet managed to comply or reopen their shops. Two cash loan businesses were also shut for compliance failures.
Lack of required documentation, improper product labelling, and selling expired food were the main violations. Inspectors confiscated bakkie-loads of expired food.
The operation was led by Mayor Yandiswa Vara and two councillors, and included police, traffic and fire officers, health and building inspectors, and officials from town planning and Home Affairs among other departments.
Municipal spokesperson Anele Mjekula said, “The exercise was part of an effort to get owners to understand what’s expected of them to run their businesses legally.”
The operation has hit immigrant business owners hard. Osama Iqbal, one of the affected spaza owners, said, “I have nothing now. I don’t even have money to buy new stock.”
Adam Chidothi, who together with Sufan Mohamed had a spaza shop in Extension 10 which was also shut down, said, “We are very hurt and it’s not going to be easy to start up again.”
To reopen, spaza shop owners must obtain a business license, submit certified documentation, pay a R525 application fee, and ensure full compliance with municipal bylaws. (Read government’s guide to register shops here.)
Customers had mixed reactions to the operation. Nowakhe Dwani said people have been buying expired food, but they were not getting sick from it.
Babalwa Nonyathi complained that whereas the spaza shops would slice up polony or sell tea bags separately customers would now be forced to purchase only fully packaged goods.
“Sometimes you don’t have cash to buy the full packet,” she said.
Mjekula said inspections will continue until all businesses meet the required standards. He said fines and contravention notices will be served for building, fire and town planning issues.
GroundUp experimented with Claude 3.5 Sonnet in the editing of this article.
© 2024 GroundUp. This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
You may republish this article, so long as you credit the authors and GroundUp, and do not change the text. Please include a link back to the original article.
We put an invisible pixel in the article so that we can count traffic to republishers. All analytics tools are solely on our servers. We do not give our logs to any third party. Logs are deleted after two weeks. We do not use any IP address identifying information except to count regional traffic. We are solely interested in counting hits, not tracking users. If you republish, please do not delete the invisible pixel.
Cardinal Rebel
The Man who could only Drink Milk
I know an old man who had lived a life full of adventure, but his health started to catch up with him. He\’d run the Boston Marathon, was an avid surfer, and climbed Everest, but he\’d started to have abdominal pains around his 85th birthday and went to see a doctor. Sadly, he ultimately was diagnosed with a rare degenerative liver disease that slowly made him allergic to everything he ate.
He kept copious notes, and as an avid gastronomist slowly grew to despair as everything he\’d spent his life enjoying became something he could no longer eat. Alcohol went first, then mushrooms, then bread, then root vegetables, then coffee, one at a time he had to remove them from his diet. The doctor was clear: if he kept eating something his liver rejected the autoimmune response would be quick and severe, and would lead to a painful death. Little by little, everything was taken away as an option, until the only thing that remained was milk.
In some ways, this actually made life easier, because the mental strain of remembering what he could and couldn\’t eat was gone, but then so was the joy in variety. But he took it in stride, and got his own cow and took classes from a farmer to learn everything he could about the only thing that could give him sustenance. And even within milk, he could still have yogurt, butter, cream, some cheeses, and other milk-derived products he hadn\’t fully rejected yet, so it wasn\’t all bad. But then one day a few months later he felt the pain again, and he knew cow\’s milk was no longer an option.
Lacking other options, he tried goat\’s milk, and he was delighted that it worked! The protein structure is just different enough that his body still tolerated it. That bought him another month. And that\’s when we came up with a wonderful plan to go on one last grand adventure around the world. If he could get one month of life out of the milk of every mammal, he\’d actually have a few more years to enjoy life to the fullest and see the world in all its beauty. Each month, we\’d pick a place with a new mammal, and he would immerse himself fully with the locals, learn all the ways to prepare the milk, and just enjoy the hand he had been dealt as much as he could.
We milked sheep in New Zealand. Camels in Egypt. Zebras in South Africa. Giant bats in Indonesia. Do you know how many Peruvian cuy you need to milk to get a single glass? I do. Even as his health slowly faded, he stayed cheerful, and I felt lucky to join him on the adventure of a lifetime. That brings us to today when he got to the very end of his spreadsheet, and declared that he was now allergic to every mammal. He\’d enjoyed his journey, but his time had come to an end, for there was nothing left to milk.
To which I said nonsense, I bet we can milk a few thousand karma out of this post.
LocKz
Yebo – yes [yeh-boh] Often expressed as a double positive by combining it with the English “yes” in “Yebo, Yes!” or as an extremely expressive “Yeeebo!” This Zulu word is used regularly in South Africa to show agreement or approval with something or someone.