The City of Cape Town has registered over 6 500 spaza shops.
Cape Town - A total of nine spaza shops have been shut in Cape Town in line with a City Health prohibition order, while over 6 500 shops have successfully been registered in the Cape Metropole.
President Cyril Ramaphosa called for spaza shops in the country to be registered by December 6, 2024, following the deaths of six children in Naledi in the North West due to contaminated food.
The country is believed to have around 100 000 informal traders in the R178 billion small business industry.
The registration deadline has since been moved to February 28, while political parties in Cape Town said not enough was being done to speed-up the process.
Mayco member for Community Services and Health, Patricia van der Ross, told the Cape Argus the latest figure for registrations in the metro had reached 6 510.
“In Cape Town, between 15 November and 31 December, 6, 510 applications were received for Certificates of Acceptability,” she said.
Van der Ross said the majority of the applications received were from Khayelitsha, Mitchell’s Plain and the eastern areas of the city.
“The eastern areas include Strand, Mfuleni, Kuils River and surrounding areas,” she added.
Van der Ross said for the same period, City Health issued nine prohibition orders.
She said people had once again to be mindful of the expiry date on goods.
“The ‘sell by’ date is for retail purposes. This date is the product’s shelf life in-store. It tells the retailer when the product should be sold and gives the consumer time to use the product at home after it has been bought.
“Baby food and infant formula must always be within the date of durability and must not exceed any date of durability.”
Professor Pieter Gouws, Food Science Director at the Centre for Food Safety, Stellenbosch University, said many people did not understand the term food contamination and the dangers of it.
“It refers to the presence of unwanted stuff/substances in the food,” said Gouws.
“We normally refer to either biological contamination (unwanted bacteria, viruses or moulds that can cause spoilage, or food borne infection or poisoning as a result of consumption of the food), or chemical (unwanted chemicals like cleaning solutions, pesticides, poisons, toxins, organic pollutants industrial oils, toxic heavy metals etc) or physical contamination (any unwanted foreign object that can cut, injures or let people choke like bone fragments, pest droppings, soil and sand, metal pieces and even jewellery).
“Food contamination in spaza shops can be significantly controlled through proper food handling practices, such as cleaning, cooking, proper storage, and segregation of raw and finished products, especially keeping chemicals away from food and packaging material.
“Every food business should be mandated to establish controls and monitoring procedures against food contaminants.”
Anton van Zyl, DA Research and Communications Officer in the Western Cape Department of Local Government, Environmental Affairs and Development Planning, said proper registration allowed local municipalities to conduct effective oversight and regulation, which is essential for safeguarding public health.
Brett Herron, GOOD Party Secretary-General, said not enough was being done to speed-up the registration process.
“Traders are not geared-up to register their small-scale stores and the vast majority have operated informally for decades.
“Municipalities who were suddenly tasked with registering the spaza shops have not been actively doing so and had to put systems and resources in place way too quickly to meet the deadline.”