An eight-year-old girl from Ramosadi village, near Mahikeng in North West, died on Friday, April 11, after allegedly eating snacks bought from a house in the area, police said.
North West police spokesperson Colonel Adele Myburgh said police were called to a local clinic after the child died there.
“It is alleged that the girl and her 10-year-old sister started complaining about stomach aches at school at about 9.30am,” Myburgh said.
She said school teachers transported both children to a local clinic, where the younger child died later that afternoon.
“The 10-year-old was admitted at a local hospital,” Myburgh said.
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Initial investigations indicated the girls had purchased snacks from a house in their village before they started feeling ill.
“Police investigations are continuing,” she added.
Myburgh confirmed that Mmabatho police have opened an inquest following the child’s death.
Meanwhile, qualifying South African-born spaza shop owners have been urged to stop leasing their properties to undocumented immigrants operating spaza shops in their communities.
This call comes as dozens of spaza shop owners, hawkers and Soweto residents gathered at Eyethu Shopping Centre in Soweto to attend the unveiling of the R500 million Spaza Shop Support Fund by Minister of Trade, Industry, and Competition, Parks Tau and Minister of Small Business Development Stella Ndabeni-Abrahams, last week on Wednesday.
The fund is aimed at empowering South African-born spaza shop owners and food-handling businesses through training, skills development and financial assistance.
It follows a wave of food-borne fatalities in Soweto and other parts of the country. Business owners were previously given until February 28 to register their operations.
Abrahams stressed the importance of adhering to the new fund’s rules and South African laws.
“It would be a futile exercise should qualifying South Africans continue to act as fronts for illegal immigrants who run spaza shops leased to them by ‘irresponsible’ South Africans.”
“Out of the more than 87,000 registered spaza shops in the country, only 53% of those are from South Africans. The question is, who the other people are who have registered? I know that South Africans are not xenophobic, but we must use the law to bring transformation. We are not xenophobic when we give effect to what the Constitution says,” Abrahams said.
The fund, which is jointly administered by the National Empowerment Fund and the Small Enterprise Finance Agency, offers financial and skills support to township businesses and has strict qualifying criteria for the R50,000 package.
IOL News