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By Anita Dangazele
- For every R100 a poor household earns, almost R67 goes straight to food and housing, before anything else is paid for.
- Electricity, water, petrol and taxi fares have all gone up sharply in the past year, making things even tighter.
If you feel like your pay cheque disappears the moment it lands, before you’ve even bought airtime or paid for transport, you’re not alone, and you’re not imagining it.
The Competition Commission’s Cost of Living Report, released this month, looked at how poor households in South Africa spend their money.
It found that for every R100 a poor household earns, almost R41 goes straight to food. Another R26 goes to rent, electricity and water. Add those together, and that’s R67 out of every R100, gone, before you’ve paid for anything else at all. Taxi fare to work. Airtime. School shoes. Medicine. Whatever’s left has to stretch to cover it all.
The report also looked at how much things have gone up.
In the past year, electricity has gone up by about 8%, and water by about 10%. Petrol shot up by 26% in the first six months of this year alone, mostly because of a war happening far away in the Middle East that’s pushed up the price of oil around the world. When petrol goes up, taxi fares usually follow, and this year they went up by 13%.
Here’s the part that makes it worse: when petrol and transport get more expensive, it doesn’t just cost you more to get to work. It costs more to move food from the farm to the shop too. So even things that have nothing to do with fuel end up costing more, because someone had to pay to transport them.
There’s one more thing worth knowing. Sometimes, when the actual cost of making food goes down, for example when a good harvest means maize or vegetables cost less to grow, that saving doesn’t always reach you at the till.
The report found that in some cases, shops and suppliers kept charging high prices even after their own costs had dropped, and pocketed the difference instead of passing the saving on to shoppers.
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Image source: [no image provided]
