By Nco Dube | 09 October 2026

South Africans do not spend hundreds of billions of rands on celebrations simply because we cannot do arithmetic.

A new study from UCT’s Liberty Institute of Strategic Marketing estimates that more than R500 billion is spent annually on celebrations. It points to weddings that can cost as much as R1 million, homecoming ceremonies around R70,000 and tombstone unveilings reaching R140,000. Those are examples, not average bills, but they invite an equally dramatic conclusion: we are spending money we do not have on parties we cannot afford.

There is truth in that criticism, but it is economically incomplete. A celebration is not just consumption. It can also be a purchase of social capital: recognition, reciprocity, status, obligation and belonging. In a country where family and community often do work that formal institutions fail to do, those things have economic value.

That is the part a household budget cannot easily show.

We Are Buying More Than Food and Décor

Standard economics can price the visible inputs. The venue costs this much, the caterer charges that, and the photographer, clothes, transport and DJ all have invoices. What is harder to price is the return a family expects from the event.

A daughter graduates and the family gathers. A couple marries and two families publicly recognise the union. A parent dies and relatives come together to mark a life properly. These ceremonies do more than entertain. They confirm relationships.

In South Africa, relationships often function as informal insurance. Family helps when somebody loses a job, needs school fees, buries a relative or falls short at month-end. Networks help people find work, raise children and survive emergencies. Maintaining those networks is not economically meaningless simply because no accountant can place them neatly on a balance sheet.

Seen this way, some celebration spending is not irrational consumption. It is an investment in social capital.

The problem is that social capital can be built sensibly or bought at ruinous prices.

When Belonging Becomes Positional Consumption

Economists use the idea of positional consumption to describe spending whose value depends partly on how it compares with what other people are doing. 

A wedding can be meaningful at R20,000, R100,000 or R500,000, but once weddings become public signals of status, each expensive event can quietly raise the standard for the next family.

The spending then becomes comparative.

One family adds elaborate décor. The next adds a bigger venue. Professional photography becomes expected. Then coordinated outfits, a choreographed entrance and social-media-ready production follow. None is compulsory in any formal sense, but social expectations can make them feel compulsory.

That is how a celebration becomes an arms race.

UCT’s research notes that younger generations are helping make celebrations more elaborate and more influenced by global trends, with WhatsApp and Instagram woven into how events are planned and displayed. The audience has therefore grown far beyond the people under the tent.

The old Joneses lived next door. The new Joneses are on Instagram.

A family is no longer comparing its wedding only with another wedding in the same village or suburb. It is comparing itself with carefully curated images from people with vastly different incomes. That is where inequality enters the celebration economy. People do not consume only according to what they earn. They also consume according to what society tells them success should look like.

Do Not Blame Culture for Consumerism

This distinction is especially important when African ceremonies are discussed.

There is nothing inherent in lobola, imbeleko, umemulo, ulwaluko, intonjane or an unveiling that requires financial self-destruction. Culture did not invent drone photography, designer labels, balloon arches or Instagram reels.

Consumer markets are very good at attaching themselves to needs that already exist. We need belonging, so the market sells more expensive ways to display belonging. We want to honour someone, so the price of what counts as honour rises. We want dignity, so dignity is packaged and sold back to us through visible consumption.

Tradition then carries the blame for a bill partly produced by modern status competition.

That does not excuse reckless spending. Borrowing heavily for a one-day event can damage a household for years. The economic mistake is simple: future income is pulled into the present to finance an event whose emotional return is immediate but whose repayments are not.

A household may gain social recognition on Saturday and lose financial resilience for the next eighteen months.

One Household’s Cost Is Another Household’s Income

The money, however, does not vanish when the event ends.

Celebration spending moves through a large network of small and medium businesses: caterers, seamstresses, livestock farmers, photographers, decorators, DJs, hairdressers, taxi operators, venues, florists, musicians and accommodation providers.

UCT cites the ZCC Moria pilgrimage as generating around R5 billion across transport, food, retail, church activity and local trade. The same logic applies on a smaller scale to weddings, funerals and family ceremonies across the country.

The R100,000 one household spends is not simply “lost”. It becomes revenue elsewhere. The household sees an expense; the photographer sees turnover; the caterer sees wages; the taxi operator sees fares; the local economy sees demand.

This is a distributional tension. The same rand can weaken one household balance sheet while strengthening another household’s income.

That is why telling South Africans to stop spending on celebrations is not serious economic advice. The real issue is how the spending is financed, where it flows and whether the social return justifies the financial cost.

Cash savings produce one outcome. A high-interest personal loan produces another. Spending with local suppliers produces one local multiplier. Imported luxury goods produce another. The form of the spending matters as much as the amount.

The Real Cost Is Financial Fragility

Celebration spending becomes dangerous when a family converts a legitimate social need into financial fragility.

If a household already lives close to the edge, debt-financing a wedding or unveiling reduces its ability to absorb the next shock. A medical bill, job loss, school expense or car repair then lands on a balance sheet already weakened by yesterday’s celebration.

That is not merely a personal-finance issue. At scale, fragile households reduce savings, increase dependence on expensive credit and become more vulnerable to economic downturns.

There is therefore a difference between celebration spending that circulates income and celebration spending that mortgages future income.

The answer is not cultural austerity. It is to reduce the premium attached to public display while keeping the social function of the ceremony intact. Savings products designed around predictable family events, stronger stokvel models, transparent supplier pricing and more deliberate use of local businesses can help. So can a cultural shift in which contribution is valued more highly than spectacle.

The strongest families are not necessarily the ones that stage the most expensive event. They may be the ones that can still answer the phone when a relative needs help six months later.

The Price of Being Seen

The UCT research gives marketers an enormous consumer market to study. For the rest of us, it raises a more revealing question: what exactly are South Africans buying when we spend so much on celebration?

Part of the answer is obvious. We are buying food, music, clothing and memory. But we are also buying social position, reciprocity and recognition. Those things are real economic goods even though they are not traded on an exchange.

The danger begins when the price of those goods is set by comparison rather than need, and when debt becomes the bridge between the life we can afford and the life we feel obliged to display.

South Africans will continue to marry, graduate, initiate, mourn, worship, welcome children and honour the dead. We should. The economic task is not to strip ritual out of life. It is to stop allowing ritual to strip resilience out of households.

Because the party may be expensive, but the costliest version of belonging is the one financed by money we have not yet earned.