Where does the money go?

ONE DAY in 1997 I asked the supermarket for plastic bags. Obviously, I asked the Greek. This was a discretion decision: you go to the top, and the name for the top was “the Greek”.

We’d already stopped calling streetcorner general stores “Greekshops” – “Nipping off to the shops, darling, calling on the dairy and the haberdasher and the tailor and the Greekshop.”

Maybe early political correctness was upon us, or maybe they’d turned into Portuguese shops before they became Indian shops. Francoshops, now, I suppose, run by a guy from the DRC who revs our pidgin French. But from the start of supermarkets, the boss was “the Greek”, which hadn’t changed.

When I asked for my bags, the Greek said: “Sure, how many?” reaching for a pile. I said “10 or 20 if you can spare them, we’re moving house”. The Greek widened his grip on the pile. He picked up a wodge, 200 or 300, saying: “Moving house! You need serious supplies, man.”

I said: “You’re overgenerous, I’ll be eating your profits.” He laughed: “These bags cost so close to nothing that you don’t know the difference, take them …”

Nou ja, fine. Last week I asked the supermarket for plastic bags. Not that we’re moving house, but that I‘ve ditched decades of belief that there is a moral law against throwing books away. My request troubles the young cashier, who constantly sells a bag at a time – “Plasteek?” – but must consult about selling a bagful of bags. Reassured, she counts a careful 30 and says: “R15.”

To the proprietor (who is actually Greek, thought the typecasting now might require Bulgarian) I say: “This must be your best line, that’s not 100 percent mark-up, it’s about 2 000 percent.”

Straightfaced, he says: “No, we make noth- ing on those, not allowed. We sell them at cost.”

I say: “I presume you’re joking ”. He says: “Trueblue truth.”

So, I enquire at doctor Google (where I respectfully record the name, Wendy Knowler coming up as prime source) and discover that: In 2003, when the supermarket bag was famously becoming the alternative national flower, spread by winds in four sets of clashing colours across wire fences the length and breadth of the land, the then environment minister Valli Moosa slapped a 3c levy on bags.

He also set up a company to use that money for the most saintly haloed set of purposes you ever saw, from skills transfer to rural waste systems to recycling plants.

Supermarkets and Co thereupon made a thicker bag, supposedly re-usable, which they sold at 10c. Subsequently, the levy has gone up to 8c, and the price, as you see, to 50c.

In 2011, the holy company was closed by the government, citing concerns over its “governance, expenditure and performance”.

In 2015, during his brief tenancy, Finance Minister Nhlanhla Nene said the state had received more than R1 billion of bag money.

What then happened to perhaps R4bn of bag price that isn’t part of the levy? Journalists have several times asked, and been told by the retailers that bags are sold at cost price or less. Which is an answer that might slip under the heading “Surprising”.

The story feels like a microcosm of a South Africa I don’t yearn for. Someone sets out to use the law ambitiously for far-reaching purposes. Net result: the public is several billion rand out-of-pocket, the corporate vehicle is dead in disgrace, there is mystery over who has the money, and there is – the heavier gauge – twice as much plastic as before things were improved. But the wire fences are cleaner, aren’t they?