The economy is weak, but money is visibly circulating. Grocery and liquor chains are expanding. Independent pharmacies are being swallowed by big chains. Informal traders are busy. Service businesses are cleaning homes, installing security fences, restyling kitchens, and building luxury pools. It looks like plenty of money is around.
But money circulating is not the same as wealth. A household can spend every day and still have nothing. That is the paradox: South Africa has a lot of money moving through it, but not enough of it stays with the people who need it most.
Where the money is visible
Look at liquor. Big grocery chains such as Shoprite, Checkers, Pick n Pay, and Spar have been expanding their liquor footprints, often by absorbing smaller independent liquor stores. If that is an indicator, there is still a lot of money to be made in booze. The same pattern appears in pharmacies. Clicks and Dis-Chem have grown aggressively, while many independent pharmacies survive only because they offer personalised service the big chains cannot easily replicate.
Then there is the informal economy. It is estimated at R900 billion to over R1 trillion a year. Township businesses are everywhere. But nearly 80% of them are unregistered, which cuts them off from formal finance, markets, and the tools that could help them grow. Many are survivalist, not entrepreneurial. A street trader might make R150 on a bad day, and that money goes straight to food, transport, airtime, and sending something home.
There is also a service economy built around the wealthy. As the super-rich have risen in opulence, they have created demand for domestic cleaning, gardening, security, home restyling, and luxury pools. That money is real. But it flows to a relatively small number of service providers, and it does not build broad-based wealth.
Who is actually spending?
It is not only the wealthy. Low-income and middle-income households spend constantly. But much of that spending is survival, not comfort. It is often debt-funded.
We need to be precise about who “the poor” are. By absolute poverty lines, roughly 37.9% of South Africans—about 23 million people—live below the lower-bound poverty line of R1,300 per person per month. Over 30 million live below the upper-bound line of R1,634. That is real destitution.
But there is also a squeezed group earning up to R30,000 a month who are not poor by those poverty lines, yet still struggle. They are not accumulating assets. They are servicing debt, paying transport, electricity, school fees, and groceries. Their complaint is not that they have no cash at all. It is that the cash does not last, and nothing builds up.
Where the money goes
The problem is structural. Money flows into the economy, but it leaks out through debt, monopolies, and the cost of survival.
Among lower-income earners, about 96% of debt is unsecured. Non-bank personal loans have a serious delinquency rate of around 41.3%, meaning nearly half of borrowers are three or more months behind. The most vulnerable consumers, earning R5,000 or less a month, use about 92% of their income for debt repayments. When 92 cents of every rand goes to debt, you are not “having money.” You are managing a crisis.
Then there are the big financial institutions—banks, insurers, medical aids—and the large retailers. They capture a huge share of household spending. Wealth remains concentrated: South Africa’s Gini coefficient for wealth is around 0.81–0.82, among the highest in the world. The top 10% of households hold more than 85% of financial assets, while the bottom 60% hold less than 5%.
So even when money is moving, it is moving upward. The poor remain a major source of income for big companies, especially liquor stores and food chains. It is a familiar pattern: the poorest pay for services they can barely afford, while the institutions providing those services record profits.
Why complaints persist
People complain because spending money is not the same as having money. A household might have cash today from a grant, a stokvel payout, or a good day’s trading. But there is no reliable income stream, no savings buffer, and no asset base. The spending you see is a flow, not a stock. It comes in and goes out.
There is also relative deprivation. As the rich get richer, the poor feel poorer. When people see political elites displaying luxury cars and expensive homes while they share a standpipe and a communal toilet, the sense of injustice is acute. It is not just that they lack money. It is that they lack money in a society that visibly has so much of it, concentrated in so few hands.
The last three months
There are only three months left in the year. This is plenty of time for those making big money—supermarket chains, liquor store chains, banks, insurers, and other businesses—to extract as much as they can. Small service businesses and community businesses will also be out to get their portion. People will still complain that they have no money, but many will also be hustling to survive.
So don’t be disheartened—but don’t be fooled either. There is plenty of money around. The real question is not whether money exists. It is who gets to keep it, who gets to accumulate it, and who is left merely spending it. Until asset ownership, debt relief, and structural inclusion change, the complaints will continue.
