· South Africa’s Hidden Trillion-Rand Kasi Economy
There are few phrases in South African public life that sound more settled, more official, or more harmless than “the informal economy”. It slips easily into business reports, policy conversations, and news copy. It sounds neat. Technical. Reasonable.
And that may be exactly the problem.
One of the sharpest ideas to emerge from Randall Abrahams’ conversation with G.G. Alcock on Both Sides is that the term itself already shrinks the thing it claims to describe. In ordinary use, “informal economy” suggests something peripheral: improvised, unstable, loosely structured, small. A world of tiny hustles at the edge of the “real” economy. Something reactive rather than central.
But that frame starts wobbling the moment Alcock lays out the numbers.
Township fast food is worth roughly R90 billion a year. Spaza shops close to R200 billion. Backroom rentals at around R30 billion. Traditional medicines at around R18 billion. And behind those individual sectors, a broader township economy that he argues could be worth around R1 trillion a year.
At that point, the language begins to look ridiculous. You are no longer describing a fringe. You are describing a major economic ecosystem.
What makes the conversation land even harder is the route Alcock takes into it. He is not introduced simply as a commentator with statistics. He begins with a story: growing up in a Zulu village, in a mud hut, raised by political activists and community workers, immersed from childhood in the rhythms of township and rural life. That does not make him the owner of this story, and the episode does not pretend otherwise. The kasi economy is a Black-built economic reality shaped over decades by exclusion, restriction, invention and endurance. But his upbringing does explain why his view of that world comes with a depth of contact that many formal-sector observers simply do not have.
And that matters, because the central blind spot here is not only economic. It is cultural.
One of the most striking points in the episode is that many township businesses are not just surviving on price. They are thriving on preference, trust, familiarity and embeddedness. They know the community because they are the community. They know what people eat, how people buy, how money circulates, what counts as value, what convenience really means, and what a neighbourhood needs at street level. That is not a weakness. It is competitive intelligence built through presence.
This is why the conversation should unsettle more than economists. It should unsettle anyone who still imagines the formal economy as the main stage and township enterprise as the supporting cast. South Africa’s economic imagination is still distorted by old hierarchies. We are often quicker to recognise scale when it comes wearing glass, steel and balance sheets than when it comes through a tuckshop hatch, a kota counter, a rental room in a backyard, or a local supply chain invisible to boardrooms.
The deeper challenge in this episode is not only to update the numbers. It is to update the national gaze.
Because once you accept that the kasi economy is not marginal, several harder questions follow. Why has policy so often treated these businesses as problems to regulate rather than engines to understand? Why do formal institutions keep approaching township enterprise as if it needs validation from outside before it can count? Why do so many South Africans still talk as though opportunity sits elsewhere, when entire sectors are already thriving where people live?
The suspense in this conversation is not whether township enterprise is real. It is whether the rest of the country is finally ready to stop looking past it.