Jaspreet Kindra
‘We want Alec Erwin to come here!” screams Nolan Borman, a coffin-maker based at the Department of Trade and Industry-owned City Hive in Salisbury Street, Johannesburg.
He is one of several tenants in arrears with Business Partners, a company mandated by the department to manage these complexes. Three of them were evicted on Monday.
Albert Sembina, a carpenter, says he had R2500 outstanding in rent. “I paid R650 on Monday. They accepted it and despite that they evicted me and took my tools away.”
“Is this how the government is helping us small-scale businesses they don’t even negotiate with us?” asks Borman, who is demanding a meeting with Minister of Trade and Industry Alec Erwin.
Business Partners manager Norman Jooste says they welcome negotiations with the tenants. He says they followed legal procedures with the three evictions.
Borman is among the several black small-scale entrepreneurs based at the department’s hives complexes that house small businesses all over South Africa who feel they got a raw deal from the department.
Business Partners which is 80% privately owned, with the state holding the other 20% manages hives in four provinces.
The City Hive is located in a dying part of the Johannesburg central business district. The conditions in the complex are not conducive to business. Some of the equipment installed for the tradesmen’s use has not been working for several months and the more than 20 businesses that use wood have to share a single spray pipe.
Patrick Ramulumisi, a carpenter, says only 25% of the complex is occupied by business. The rest have moved out.
The tradesmen are uncertain where the money the government says is available to boost black business is going. They say they are in the red because no incentives and financial assistance have been forthcoming from the government.
Jeremiah Mankge won a contract to manufacture 40 000 lamp bases for Eskom. He says he went to several banks with the contract papers to raise finance, to no avail. He is now paying another person to work weekends to help him finish the contract in time.
The tradesmen, who pay R2 000 a month for a 40m2 space in the hive, feel that white-owned businesses in the complex are booming at their expense.
Borman claims that people call in with jobs but are referred to businesses who are close to management and not to the tenants of the hive.
Democratic Alliance leader Jack Bloom, whose constituency is the CBD, says he raised the issue last year when 45 tenants from the City Hive faced eviction. He has called for an urgent investigation into the matter as “struggling entrepreneurs have been abandoned” in the inner city, which needs to be revived.
Employees at the Pennyville Hive on Main Reef Road near Soweto have similar claims, saying the government is dragging its feet in providing incentives to the historically disadvantaged.
Jooste maintains the company’s managers in the hive complexes are accessible to the tenants for assistance.
Several attempts to elicit comment from the department were unsuccessful. The Mail & Guardian was told to contact the head of the communication department, Manana Makhanya, who was off sick. Queries to director general Alistair Ruiters’s office were directed back to the communications department. A department employee then referred the query to Bahle Sibisi, deputy director general. Sibisi was in a meeting and the query was referred to Ntutu Majya, a director in the enterprise development unit, who has not answered the questions.