Stokvels must be used for the general good
It is December and all the retailers are going to be trying to separate us from our final salary.
The demands of the December season are so overwhelming that I would not be wrong to say that most of us just close our eyes and swipe our bank cards to make the many indulgent purchases that we feel are necessary for an enjoyable time with our families.
The terrible reality of the December spending is that it comes over and above our existing household grocery and other needs. So in December effectively ‘ugrosa kabini’ – buy the groceries twice.
This double groceries in one month has to be one of the most hidden stresses for Black income-earners. It can be so overwhelming that some people choose to cut their holidays short with their families so that the burden to keep re-stocking food does not fall on them.
I have at least one colleague who says that she chooses to leave her family home the day after Christmas because she cannot handle the financial stress of constantly buying holiday foods. The stress is of course driven by the hard financial realities facing people in January when school and other added costs hit families hard.
Historically, many people prepare for the December financial pressures by joining stokvels that help them to buy collectively and distribute critical items that assist families to get through the long six weeks between December and January.
Stokvelling – and any jointsaving schemes – draw their power from the social bonds people form together to save towards a joint goal. They are estimated to be worth around R49-billion within the economy, and have evolved into new forms over time. Whereas traditionally, stokvels clubs were established and run, usually by Black women of food and funeral costs, now they are used to meet a range of consumer aspirations.
There are stokvels to purchase furniture, appliances and even building materials. These days young professionals ‘play’ December alcohol and entertainment stokvels where money is saved throughout the year purely to finance partying over the holidays.
A colleague in Johannesburg told me that he had friends who were able to save tens of thousands of rands which they then blew on the widest and best range of alcoholic beverages. As an economist, this angered him. He felt that his friends could have put the money to better use, instead they were feeding the ‘white economy’ through to the worst possible ends – to just get drunk.
Indeed one must wonder, if young Black professionals can leverage the joint-power of a stokvel to save tens of thousands for entertainment, what more could they be doing with their money? The key transition that must be made is for stokvels to move beyond the consumption economy into the asset or production economy.
Two ideas that seem to be working well for young Black professionals are stokvels formed to help them pay off their cars or mortgages faster. The idea here is that these young professionals, through the stokvel, hold each other accountable towards a goal aimed at decreasing their debts and moving them closer to owning their home, or finalising their car repayments.
There are also people who are using stokvels to help them build up more savings to help to pay off school uniforms and school fees for the year.
None of this is magic, it is not get-rich-quick scheme, it is about saving what you can and putting it to good use.
As the talk of radical economic transformation continues, it seems that such needs be a combination of state and society action.
Stokvels emerge from bottom-up from us and take us through hard times such as when we turn to that last 10kg stokvel bag of rice that gets the house through the long January.
Black people must leverage these savings schemes to build our long-term economic and social autonomy.
The terrible reality is it comes over and above our existing household grocery and other needs