00:00A convenient place to buy essential items, or a deathtrap for children.
00:07That's a question plaguing South African communities, where shops like these are a convenient source of food and other household products.
00:17Called Spazas, until recently they operated with little oversight or health inspection.
00:25But then, a group of immigrant shop owners were accused of being responsible for the deaths of several children.
00:33This was the trigger for anti-foreigner vigilante groups, who even forced some shops to close.
00:40Abera Joore, from Ethiopia, owns one of them.
00:45The experience left him scarred and without a living.
00:50They come and they break the shop, they loot and they vandalise.
00:54And then, even they burn, like, two, three cars.
00:58They beat our brothers.
01:01Even they burn some shop.
01:03They just, we save some of our brothers by a lot of struggle from the shop, when they try to burn the shop.
01:13Even though none of the affected children were from his neighbourhood, Joore was forced to shut up shop.
01:29The people behind the attacks say they're acting to protect the community at large.
01:35But many local residents depend on the shops and want them to stay.
01:40I don't have an issue with the spaza shops.
01:43If the shops, they get maintained, they send food safety to be checked,
01:48every month, maybe every month, or after six months, they must visit the stores and check the store that they're selling the good product.
01:56But the controversy over the convenience stores isn't just about contaminated food and the alleged poisonings.
02:04It's also about money and who's earning it.
02:06South Africa's spaza shop economy is estimated to be worth 10 billion euro.
02:11Some local business and community groups argue that too much of that economy rests in the hands of immigrants.
02:19They say that all these shops should either be shut down or transferred to the hands of locals.
02:26These business owners in the Waal area, south of Johannesburg, have formed a group and call themselves the Waal Keepers.
02:33They've been leading calls for immigrant-owned spaza shops to close.
02:38And they want the government to change the regulations so that only South Africans can own such stores.
02:45We don't want to compete with these people because, one, they're doing things illegally in our country.
02:50Number two, they're not even paying tax.
02:54The authorities are already clamping down.
02:57As well as ordering all the spazas to get registered,
03:00South Africa's government has responded to the anger surrounding immigrant-owned shops by increasing on-site inspections.
03:08But food inspectors aren't going there alone.
03:12They're accompanied by immigration officials on the lookout for violations.
03:17I am charging you for immigration.
03:21Human rights activist Dale McKinley says the government clampdown is more about garnering votes.
03:28Again, it's part of a deployment of a particular politics.
03:34I think we've seen it with Trump, we've seen it in the United States, we've seen it all across Europe,
03:38which is deliberately peddling and conscious peddling of misinformation in order to stoke political tension,
03:45in order to get votes, in order to get support for an anti-immigration agenda.
03:55As the deadline approaches for the spaza shops to register with the authorities,
04:00anti-immigrant sentiment here shows little sign of fading.
04:05But for Abera Jawore and many other immigrant shop owners, South Africa is home.
04:10Us, we don't have any way to go.
04:15He believes local communities, the government and shop owners will need to work together
04:21to ensure children's lives are protected and the rights of immigrants too.
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