News24 | Mpho Phoba | How students, nurses and shop assistants are sinking, R50 at a time

Spend an extra R50 just four times a week and you’ll end up spending more than R10 000 in a year, says Mpho Phoba, who has stopped telling South Africans facing impossible odds to simply budget better.

• For more financial news, visit News24 Business.

It’s still dark when she gets up. The taxi or Golden Arrow bus leaves before the kettle has boiled, so breakfast becomes a pie and a coffee bought on Main Road with cold hands. By the time the ward doors open, she’s already spent R50 she didn’t plan on spending.

Across town, a student does the same outside a lecture hall, hungry, rushing, telling herself it’s only today.

It’s never only today.

That’s the cruelty of it. Nobody feels their money leaving in R50 pieces. We notice rent. We notice the taxi fare going up. We don’t notice the small, ordinary purchases we make because we’re exhausted, there’s no food at home, and the shop is right there.

But spend an extra R50 just four times a week, and you will end up spending more than R10 000 in a year.

Students, read that again

Read that again if you’re a student on a stipend. That’s the cost of your textbooks. That’s a year’s worth of transport. That’s a deposit on a room closer to campus, so you can stop leaving home at 05:00.

If you’re a nurse, a retail assistant, a call centre agent or a teacher in your first post, it’s the savings you keep promising yourself you’ll start next month, every month, for years.

So I’ve stopped telling young South Africans to budget better. Honestly, it’s an insult. You cannot budget your way out of a shortfall you didn’t create, and the people I meet are not reckless. They’re some of the most careful communities I’ve ever encountered. They’re just tired, and tired consumers buy what’s familiar.

That’s the thing we never say out loud. Consumer behaviour tends to follow what’s familiar, and even when a better option is right there, if it takes shoppers out of what they know, they fall back into old buying patterns. We shop where we’ve always shopped. We buy the brand our mothers bought.

We pay full price not because we compared and chose, but because comparing takes energy we don’t have at the end of a 12-hour shift. Familiarity feels like comfort, but on a tight income, it’s a tax.

And the ground keeps moving under everyone’s feet. Stats SA put headline inflation at 5% in June, the highest in two years. The Pietermaritzburg Economic Justice and Dignity Group’s household food basket reached R5 530.52 in July, R87.81 more than the same month last year, with Cape Town’s basket climbing R69.26 in a single month. Feeding one child a basic, nutritious diet now costs R980.66 a month. Food inflation has technically eased. Tell that to anyone standing at a till, doing sums in their head, quietly putting something back.

A R1 000 budget now gets you a handful of groceries. Rent and taxi fare swallow most of a first salary before a new month has begun, and what’s left must stretch over food, data and dignity. So we give things up.

First, the outings, then the small treats, then the quality of what we eat. We buy what we need and quietly bury what we want. This isn’t a discipline issue; this is young South Africans carrying a load that was never theirs to carry, and doing so without complaining.

Which brings me to the part we’ve had wrong for years. We’ve spoken about food waste almost entirely as an environmental issue. Yes, it is one – South Africa throws away 10 million tonnes of food a year, roughly a third of everything we produce – but it’s also an affordability issue, and that’s the part which should be keeping us awake.

Every tray of tomatoes and every loaf of bread going into the bin unnecessarily is money that could have stayed in someone’s pocket. It’s a meal skipped by a hungry student. It existed, it was fit for consumption, it just never reached her.

Shame is the biggest problem

The obstacle isn’t supply; it’s shame. When I tell students about surplus food, I hear two things. The first is: “What’s the catch?” The second, usually from shoppers who should know better, is “I’m better than surplus food.” I’d gently ask both to think again. Surplus food isn’t damaged food, it’s quality stock from trusted retailers that simply needs to sell before its best-before date.

Choosing perfectly good food isn’t settling; it’s one of the smartest and most dignified money moves available to us right now. And let’s be honest, we’ve always known this privately. We’ve all decided that yoghurt a day past its date is fine, that a bruised apple is still an apple. We’ve challenged the idea of the perfect grocery for generations, and in South Africa, technology has finally made that instinct usable at scale.

Normalise minimising waste

Apps like Refreshi connect unsold food from local supermarkets, bakeries and cafés to real households, offering students and general consumers a tool through which sustainability and affordability can stop arguing with each other.

Since March 2025, the Refreshi app has kept R12.5 million in South African households and returned R10 million to local stores.

But importantly, such a concept should not be the exception. Minimising waste should be a part of our daily lives. On a far broader scale, minimising waste – not just food – needs to become part of the way we think, produce, and consume. It must be normalised and widespread.

To the student walking to that 08:00 lecture, and to the nurse stepping off the bus in the dark, you’ve been handed an impossible sum and asked to solve it. The problem is structural, but you do have tools at your disposal to help you solve it – some closer to home than you may have ever imagined.

So, think twice about those R50 purchases. Notice one this week. Question it. Consider alternative paths that can help bridge those seemingly impossible gaps.

Almost none of us will wake up with thousands more in the bank tomorrow, but we can all take the first small, important steps toward change today.

Mpho Phoba is an ambassador and consumer behaviour commentator for Refreshi.

News24 encourages freedom of speech and the expression of diverse views. The views of columnists published on News24 are therefore their own and do not necessarily represent the views of News24.