Organising Jo’burg’s streets is crucial to new investment, but street traders are taking issue with the new laws, reports Ferial Haffajee
THE implementation of state-of-the-art by- laws to streamline hawking on Johannesburg’s streets has been indefinitely delayed as the Johannesburg Metropolitan Council hurries to start a hawker education programme, meant to have been completed by the middle of April.
Now organised hawkers say they will not give the by-laws their stamp of approval until the council issues permits only to “bonafide South African unemployed hawkers”.
The laws were passed in the first week of this year but the council set itself no official implementation date even though the city’s senior business leaders see them as key to getting existing businesses to stay in the city and to drawing in new investment.
“You must remember this is a completely new arena of city management for us,” says Roger Hand, the council official in charge of implementing the by-laws. New staff must be trained to educate hawkers, legal officials in seven magisterial districts have yet to establish a system to prosecute offenders, while the council has not yet decided which authority will police the streets where about 20 000 hawkers earn a living.
In 1993, the then Johannesburg City Council threw open the pavements with its new Businesses Act. Rapid urbanisation plus retrenchments across a range of industries has seen many entrepreneurs take to the streets in the past four years, selling everything from vegetables to cosmetics.
Last year, the provincial and metropolitan governments and several hawkers’ organisations met to begin negotiating new laws to govern hawking: they looked at stall sizes, access for pedestrians and fair deals for shop-owners who often complained that hawkers were obstructing their businesses. Marathon negotiating sessions yielded a set of simple laws that seemed to walk the tight-rope between encouraging innovative small traders while keeping the city orderly. “We even submitted the by-laws to parliament’s small business portfolio committee so that other provinces could use them,” says the Reverend Sibusiso Mendlula of Johannesburg’s Micro-business Chamber, which yokes together five different hawker groupings.
But things went wrong as soon as implementation plans began. Hawkers charge that they were left out of these as city bureaucrats hired expensive consultants to do the work. “Hawkers should be trained to train other hawkers,” says Livingstone Mantanga, who heads the Federated Association of Informal Traders and Hawkers (Faith).
Hand says hawkers have been involved with the four pilot training projects he’s run for hawkers.
Now the traders have tagged their biggest gripe to the successful implementation of the by-laws. “We want permits and [by-law] training only for unemployed South Africans as a first priority,” says Mantanga. “This place is over-flowing with Pakistanis, Chinese, Zimbabweans, Zaireans, you name it. They sell cheaply and they disadvantage our brothers.” Mantanga and other hawker organisers say that permit-holders should have to provide South African identity documents; but they also want hawkers who are employed by other business people to be cleared off the streets. They charge that many foreign hawkers work for wholesalers.
Most vegetable hawkers are no longer of the rand-a-pack stock who used to populate the street. Instead, many are dropped off with plates full of vegetables early in the morning by wholesalers and paid at night. Many wholesalers also pay bread-sellers like Alberto Magea to sell their loaves. “I get paid R90 a week,” says the young Mozambican.
Hand says the council will educate all hawkers, regardless of where they’re from. “Dealing with foreigners is not a local government issue,” he says. The council is also not able to stop employed hawkers from peddling their wares because the Business Act does not define who is and who is not a street trader.