The Mangaung Metro has disqualified more than 1 000 spaza shop applicants who were found to be fronting for undocumented foreign nationals.
The disqualifications leave 956 successful applicants from more than 2 100 submissions.
Mangaung Metro MMC for Economic Development, Manthuse Letawana, says compliance is critical to ensuring that government support reaches legitimate spaza shop owners.
The metro says it is working with various stakeholders to assist qualifying business owners with funding and compliance certificates to formalise their businesses.
Letawana says, “We find out that most of those applications were for fronting, which means the person who applied was not the owner of the spaza shop. Because the name on the application form will differ with the bank details, and all of that. So that’s what made them fall off the 1000 plus number. So we ended up with that 958.”
