Most South Africans cut grocery spend, with 86% feeling the strain
The survey reveals that many buy food on credit, and some even omit essentials from their budgets due to the cost of living.
South Africans are feeling the pinch of the high cost-of-living crisis, with a recent Debt Rescue survey finding that 86% of households are cutting back on groceries to afford other essentials like electricity.
The survey was conducted to assess the severity of the cost-of-living crisis on households, according to Business Tech.
The survey revealed that many families are being forced to cut essential items, like food, to afford electricity and other critical needs.
Debt Rescue conducted the survey ahead of the 12.7% electricity tariff hike that took effect for direct Eskom customers on April 1 this year.
Annaline van der Poel, Chief Legal Officer at Debt Rescue, in an interview with Newzroom Afrika , said this is a serious situation, pointing out that this is the second survey conducted in the past year to evaluate the impact of the cost of living, with a specific focus on electricity.
Van der Poel said in both surveys that a significant percentage of respondents indicated that they altered their dietary habits due to financial limitations.
Initially, families coped by reducing daily meals while still trying to include essential nutrients.
Although inflation has slowed down, Van der Poel said it is important to recognise that household debt is still rising, albeit at a slower pace.
'For the average household, income is not keeping up with that. Debt is still at enormously high rates.'
Vulnerable populations, especially those dependent on social assistance grants like SASSA payments, bear the brunt of the high cost of living.
Van der Poel said that when essential tariffs, such as electricity prices, increase, any benefits from rising grants can be negated, putting beneficiaries in an even more precarious financial situation.
To survive this high cost of living, Van der Poel suggests meticulous budgeting, creating a realistic and honest monthly budget, and seeking out specials and discounts on essential items by reviewing community papers and comparing prices.
'This requires discipline and careful planning to manage expenses within the limited control available to individuals. For those with credit cards, it is strongly advised to reduce their use, reserving them only for absolute emergencies when all other options have been exhausted.'
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Thabo Mbeki, the urbane, cosmopolitan, British university-educated intellectual, surprised many by his evident internalisation of the most extreme views of supposedly biologically determined black behaviour. His denial of Aids stands testimony to his fear that the worst of white racism is accurate. Consider the following, for instance, from 11 August 2000: 'The white politician (a reference to Tony Leon who had attacked his Aids denialism) makes bold to speak openly of his disdain and contempt for African solutions to the challenges that face the peoples of our continent. According to him… these solutions, because they are African, could not but consist of pagan, savage, superstitious and unscientific responses typical of the African people, described by the white politician as resorting 'to snake-oil cures and quackery'… This racism has defined us who are African and black as primitive, pagan, slaves to the most irrational superstitions and inherently prone to brute violence.' Or, after referring to medical schools where black people were 'reminded of their role as germ carriers', Mbeki said: 'Thus does it happen that others who consider themselves to be our leaders take to the streets carrying their placards (evidently referring to trade union leaders and Aids activists) to demand that because we are germ carriers, and human beings of a lower order that cannot subject its (sic) passions to reason, we must perforce adopt strange opinions, to save a depraved and diseased people from perishing from self-inflicted disease… Convinced that we are but natural-born, promiscuous carriers of germs, unique in the world, they proclaim that our continent is doomed to an inevitable mortal end because of our unconquerable devotion to the sin of lust.' The gruesome reality of Aids rules out any irony in Mbeki's comments. Let me further make explicit and unequivocal that, notwithstanding the above, colonialism was both real and a primary determinant in shaping our history and socioeconomic architecture. In addition, the rediscovery of colonialism is essential to the final burial of the idea that apartheid — the racial organisation and structure of South Africa — began only in 1948, when the Calvinist Afrikaners, unlike the nice, liberal English, took over the running of South Africa. 3 The colonisation supposedly in need of decolonising the mind The left in South Africa, Europe and the US were/are leading advocates of a decolonisation centred on universities and what is taught there. With South Africa this time being the unusual vanguard, meant Britain and the US — particularly since the Black Lives Matter uprisings of summer 2020 — catching up with the demands made by South African students five years earlier. 'Among the most visible targets' of this catching up, Pranay Somayajula notes, 'were intellectual and cultural institutions — universities, museums, archives, and the like — which came under pressure to 'decolonise' through gestures such as land acknowledgments, renaming buildings, repatriating looted artifacts, and reworking curricula to more adequately 'centre' black and indigenous voices.' This forced European institutions to reckon with their complicity in nineteenth- and twentieth-century empires, North American institutions to reckon with their complicity in settler-colonial violence against the continent's indigenous peoples, and institutions to reckon with their complicity in the trans-Atlantic slave trade. Somayajula's conclusion is that this focus 'on the institutions that function as pillars of Western knowledge production constitutes in many ways an indictment of Western epistemology itself… Implicit in this critique of dominant forms of knowledge production is a call to uplift in their place the indigenous ways of knowing and being that have been suppressed by the same processes of colonial violence and dispossession in which these institutions were (and are) complicit.' South Africa's student rebellion of 2015-17 provides a case study of what this means in practice. The student who threw the poo at Rhodes' statue that sparked the rebellion came dressed as a mine worker. The Marikana Massacre of 2012 is a stark reminder that the problem is not colonialism, or Rhodes' dead legacy, but the awful power of his very-much-alive mining descendants, for whom colonialism is rightly history. The exclusive focusing on the colonial insult symbolised by Rhodes' statue leaves this living legacy untouched. Shouting for the removal of other 'white colonial' names — like in 'Jameson' Hall — makes it very easy for the university authorities to agree. It is easy for them to do so for it serves as a distractive anachronism. Focusing on our formal colonial past obscures the inconvenient present and its truth that UCT is heavily reliant on the various post-colonial forms of Rhodes' legacy for its current funding; a reliance reflected in so many of the corporate names that now festoon supposed 'academic' buildings. Indeed, the entire corporate takeover of all universities, not just UCT, is the living legacy of Rhodes, the mining magnate/politician. This ought to be a prime focus of students who describe themselves as radical. Instead, they divided themselves on so-called 'racial' lines and, as a final mocking irony, did so using the 'races' Rhodes did so much to institutionalise as part of his divide-and-rule legacy. His contribution to the forced creation of an African working class with a ready and self-replenishing supply of dirt-cheap labour for his gold mines is a prominent feature of his legacy. The supposedly 'black students' demanding the removal of the offending statue bring warmth to the coffins containing the heroes of the apartheid pantheon, beginning with Dr Hendrik Verwoerd. These apartheid architects argued that the four 'races' of apartheid South Africa reflected a natural order in which each 'race' had to live separate from the others because of their natural differences and in-born wishes. 'Coloureds' and 'Indians' are not black, according to the students who accused the formerly white universities of still being predominately 'white'. Students were not welcome at some of the student gatherings because of their 'whiteness', even though they fully supported the 'black' campaign to remove Rhodes from UCT as part of the decolonisation campaign that swept the country. Rhodes, too, would have greatly enjoyed this spectacle of how students allowed the 'races' he helped manufacture to divide themselves, even while campaigning against his 'colonial' legacy of dispossession and subjugation. Colour-coding access to scarce resources is the main hallmark of the new, post-apartheid, non-racial South Africa. We'll be returning to this issue in due course. The right wing has also been prolific in its understanding of what decolonising means. The well-known academic, Professor William Gumede, of Wits University, provides one such example in his 2022 Daily Maverick article, ' African economic transformation demands a radical shock to failed post-colonial system '. His article begins: 'Several types of collective mindset changes drove the astonishing industrial transformation of the East Asian developmental states from similar poverty levels to their African and developing country peers, to levels of development similar to or better than those of their former colonial occupiers.' And ends: 'If… South Africa and other African and developing countries want to mimic the extraordinary and radical economic transformation of the East Asian tiger economies, (they) will have to undergo drastic individual and collective mindset changes, and overhaul old institutions, behaviours and customs. Without such a shock to thinking patterns, they will stay locked in mass underdevelopment, poverty and instability.' A single word defines his remedy: entrepreneurship. It is this, he contends, that has transformed all four of the countries he mentions: Japan, South Korea, Taiwan and Singapore. What he singularly fails to mention is that the first three countries all owe their good fortune to the privileges the US allowed them as an integral part of the post-World War 2 challenge posed by both the Soviet Union and the then China. Highly selective perception is required to see Singapore as a success story, as detailed in 'Singapore — little to sing about despite Greg Mills' call for encores', my January 2024 response to a Daily Maverick article by Greg Mills. (This response is the only one never published by the Daily Maverick but is available on request.) Franz Fanon now enters the story with his seminal book, first published in 1952, Black Skin, White Masks. Many worldwide have long attributed the need to decolonise the mind to this book. Yet 'decolonise' does not appear in the book, not even once. It is, indeed, part of his book, The Wretched of the Earth. This difference is not an academic quibble. It alerts us to the confusions caused by the misuse of colonialism and why that matters. Considerably.
