March and March Movement leader Jacinta Ngobese has expressed strong anger after a video surfaced showing a newly constructed RDP house allegedly turned into a spaza shop and rented out to foreign nationals.
She used the footage to challenge what she sees as the unfair branding of South Africans as xenophobic when they highlight such issues.
“South Africans are working daily to make sure that they expose all this rot and the only thing they get called is XENOPHOBIC???” Ngobese wrote on X, while reposting the video originally shared by social media user Judaeda Blanco, who captioned it “Newly built RDP house turned to spaza shop.”
The TikTok video, captioned “RDP is renting foreigners,” shows the inside of a government-subsidised RDP housing unit being used as a business premises, reportedly operated by foreign nationals, instead of serving as a home for its intended South African beneficiary.
The clip has touched a sensitive chord in the ongoing immigration debate because of the central role RDP housing plays in South Africa’s post-apartheid social framework.
Since 1994, the Reconstruction and Development Programme has delivered millions of formal homes to low-income South Africans, making any perceived diversion of these properties from their rightful recipients a highly emotional and politically explosive matter.
Ngobese and the March and March Movement have increasingly moved beyond protests to actively documenting what they call everyday examples of systemic abuse linked to foreign nationals — ranging from alleged child labour in spaza shops and breaches of business regulations to the alleged misuse of state-funded housing.
At the core of Ngobese’s reaction is the movement’s irritation that South Africans who share such evidence are routinely labelled xenophobic, rather than having their concerns properly examined.
Critics of the movement, however, maintain that focusing on nationality instead of addressing failures in law enforcement or housing allocation could stoke anti-foreign hostility rather than lead to meaningful, system-wide solutions.
