Photos show Lesotho minimarket owner, not a corner shop in South Africa

The deaths of 23 children around Johannesburg this year from suspected food poisoning has ignited anger in South Africa against foreign nationals who run small corner shops known as spazas. Amid the backlash, authorities in November gave spaza owners 21 days to register their businesses or risk closure. As tensions rose, anti-immigrant accounts on social media shared photos of a young woman inside a store, claiming she was a South African trader who had opened a spaza shop — the implication being that locals should run these places, not foreigners. However, AFP Fact Check found that the images showed a couple’s small supermarket in neighbouring Lesotho.

One post, liked 8,000 times and reposted more than 1,400 times, includes photos of a smiling woman inside a neatly organised convenience shop.

“Congratulations to Nomsa a young South African woman for opening her new proudly South African Spaza Shop (sic),” the X user wrote on November 28, 2024.

A spaza shop is an informal minimarket that often sells convenience items at lower prices. Nomsa, meanwhile, is a common name in South Africa.

Often run by immigrants, the cornershops are commonplace in South Africa’s poorer communities, where they face harassment from anti-foreigner vigilante groups stirring up animosity.

The X account behind the post communicates on behalf of Put South Africans First (PSAF), an anti-immigrant movement-turned-political party that AFP Fact Check has debunked multiple times including here.

“Who said South Africans Cant Run spazas? (sic)” wrote another X user using the same series of photos in a post that has garnered more than 3,000 likes.

However, AFP Fact Check found that the pictures are unrelated to South African spaza shops.

Lesotho entrepreneur

Several replies to the posts indicate the photos were of a store based in landlocked Lesotho — a country completely surrounded by South Africa.

Multiple reverse image searches confirmed the same photos had been published in a Facebook post by a page called “Mofammere”  on November 27, 2024 (archived here and here).

Mofammere is also seen watermarked on the bottom of all the photos, including the date and time they were taken in November.

The watermarks were cropped out in the false X posts.

AFP Fact Check texted the Lesotho phone number mentioned on the Facebook page on December 3, 2024. We received a reply from a man called Thabiso Lefa who identified himself as the owner of a store based in Lesotho’s capital Maseru. He also confirmed that he and his wife Mabophelo Lefa were running the supermarket together.

Lesotho news outlet Public Eye Online profiled the Lefa’s entrepreneurial journey on April 7, 2024 (archived here). The article detailed how the husband-and-wife team sold burgers to students before opening their Shopwell minimart in September 2020.

Thabiso told AFP Fact Check that he had seen the false posts, adding the attention could be “beneficial at one point” as the pair were looking for “investors to grow the brand”.

Spaza shop issue

The spaza shop issue is a decades-long dispute between South Africans and foreigners who are blamed for taking job opportunities that critics argue should be reserved for locals (archived here and here).

The country attracts many migrants despite having one of the world’s highest unemployment rates (archived here). This trend, coupled with an unpredictable economic outlook, often leads to intermittent bursts of anti-immigrant violence.

The tensions worsened after several children died or were hospitalised in recent weeks after consuming goods from similar stores (archived here).

Political parties like ActionSA were rallying calls for spaza shops to be reserved for South Africans (archived here).

Officials gave all spaza shops and food handling facilities 21 days from November 15, 2024, to register with their municipalities or risk being shut down (archived here).

There have been 890 reported incidents of foodborne illnesses across all provinces since September 2024, according to South Africa’s National Institute for Communicable Diseases.

In late November, President Cyril Ramaphosa said nearly 200,000 spaza shops had been inspected and more than 1,000, including warehouses and supermarkets, were closed (archived here).

He also criticised citizens for illegally registering spaza shops for undocumented immigrants in their names and warned vigilantes not to take the law into their own hands (archived here).

AFP Fact Check has debunked many false claims related to foreign-owned businesses, including here, here and here.