There is obviously a lot of business opportunities around South Africa’s R257 billion a year welfare program: loan sharking, SASSA baby factories, papsak on the book/tab etc. But that is 2D chess. The Bangladeshi’s are playing 4D chess already.
What you have below are apartheid era Group Areas Act tenements (yes, yes, I know still better than what the ANC builds for “their” people). And there are real soccer and netball/basketball courts not that Faith Mazibuko “combi court” nonsense.
In position A is currently a Bangladesh shop. While in position B there is another one currently being built. This type of saturation would have been unheard of a few years ago. Why? There was always “house shops” but those are like subsistence shops (people working for the pot). Here we have people (often more than one) coming from Dhaka or who knows where and they are setting these shops up. Now common sense tells you they need to sustain themselves while they are here. Yes, some of them live in the shops but it would be naive to think they are just surviving like that they probably need to make enough to send home as well. Otherwise it makes no sense to come and live in a hellhole like the Cape Flats.
But upon closer inspection it makes sense: selling what people on child-care grants and these R350 SRD grants will need that seems to be the playbook the Bangladeshi’s are using on the Cape Flats. They are putting up a shop in every single tenement block of flats. It doesn’t make sense right? Unless some kind of money laundering or Hawala scheme. How can it be sustainable? But when you do the calculations each tenement has 54 units (two blocks of nine units over three floors) there is almost in every house a single mother on SASSA (some with multiple children) and another unemployed person(s) on the basic income grant masquerading as “COVID relief”. Each tenement block is getting what? R50k to R100k a month in welfare alone if we factor in the amount of people living there and disability and old age grants as well (on top of some with formal and informal employment). It does seem strange at first, that people will come from a safer foreign country to a place many consider hell on earth with a myriad of social ills and come put up a shop.
Profiting from swipes
These guys are also making money charging a R5 fee per swipe for iKhokha type mobile swipe machines even though the commission is much smaller and is often eaten by the retailer. 100 people swping per day is almost R500 of pure profits and then still the profits on the goods they are selling. That is close to R15k a month for supplying fuck all. But it is convenient (closer) and cheaper than a ATM.
Are these just random families or is it a organized program
As I said in my intro South Africa has a massive ANC vote buying welfare program it might reach a trillion rand a year if the ANC can find more ways to tax hard working people. Obviously the Bangladeshi’s have discovered this gold mine and made this calculation. Without SASSA there is not enough meat on the bone to sustain this type of operation.
Usually we hear of a family from Nabinagar put some money together to send a family member to SA to open a cellphone shop or chicken tikka stand so he can send the profits back home. But this seems a bit more organized to me. They are putting themselves at massive risk: the Cape Flats home to the apex predator – the lesser-spotted tikkop – is a very dangerous place. Your house number will get stolen to put on the scale for scrap metal.
So the rewards must be worth it.
But how is the planning being arranged? Are there people sitting in some old textile factory in Savar Upazila and saying “hey look here in South Africa people are getting free money to have children and sit on their arse the whole day”. We know that the average R350 grant beneficiary has roughly R200 disposable income left after he pays his R5 a day Project Isizwe Twitter fee. That is around R800 million alone from 4 million “Social Relief of Distress” grant beneficiaries. Or is the government sitting in Bangladesh and saying বিনামূল্যে টাকা (FREE MONEY) and bascially subsiding these guys to come here and pilfer hundreds of billions away?
What do you think? Is it a state sponsored initiative to skeem money from SA to Bangladesh? Is it involved in money laundering? And why are you sleeping?
