Registration of spaza shops stall due to staff shortages

The national government has seen slow progress in its mission to ensure compliance in more than 80,000 spaza shops due to a shortage of health inspectors across municipalities. Health inspectors are responsible for inspecting food sold by vendors and spaza shop owners to ensure compliance in terms of health standards, educating businesses and conducting inspections. However, during a progress report presented at parliament’s select committee on small businesses meeting last week, Vincent Rabothata, the chief director for planning and policy support at the co-operative governance department (Cogta), revealed there had been no significant increase in the number of new spaza shop registrations, comparing registration numbers between February and December 2025.

There had also been no increase in the number of approved Certificates of Acceptability (COA), permits and licences. Rabothata said many municipalities were still processing business licensing applications manually. These had to go through a lengthy process in various departments in municipalities before they were finally approved.

“We still note that there is a lack of sufficient human resources when municipalities do not have sufficient numbers of business licensing officials and environmental health practitioners that are mainly based in district municipalities and metropolitan municipalities. “The key point to make here is that these practitioners play a significant role in the process. “Given that business licences are only issued when health and spatial planning considerations have been met, we find that a lot of municipalities are constrained and are dependent on the districts to provide environmental health services,” he said.

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An audit conducted on all municipalities revealed that no municipality in the country met the national health environmental norms and standards. Rabothata said Eastern Cape municipalities had a shortage of 481 health practitioners, with OR Tambo accounting for 120 of that number. The Buffalo City Metro was operating with just 29 health practitioners, with a shortage of 69.

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