Listening to Metropolitan Trading Company (MTC) CEO Keith Atkins, one might think the City of Johannesburg had brought its street traders under control.
British-born Atkins has inherited daunting challenges from Rory Robertshaw, the previous head of the council-owned MTC. After piloting the city’s first “modern” market in Yeoville’s Rockey Street for R5-million, Robertshaw called it quits.
Atkins’s job is to bring order to the small, closely-knit world of hawking in Johannesburg by shifting traders from pavements and other unregulated areas to the more limited space of the newly built markets.
But “illegal” traders deeply resent what they view as the unjust confiscation of their goods by the metropolitan police. They continue to pay their monthly rentals, but 90% still operate outside the formal markets.
If one talks to Soweto-born Jabulani “Jomo” Nkomo of the newly-formed Traders Crisis Committee (TCC), it seems the control institutions have lost control. A former Soweto Student Representative Council leader during the 1976 student uprisings, Nkomo carries a pamphlet reading: “Metro police, stop stealing our stock. Your markets policy has failed.” He had a police permit giving the go-ahead for the “great hawkers’ march” on Wednesday.
Demanding proper dialogue with the authorities, the leaflet complains that a secret council document, never discussed with traders, openly speaks of forcing all street traders into markets.
Street trading had been banned in 27 suburbs and precincts and “thousands of breadwinners had their stock plundered”. No trader had been convicted in a court of law, and no confiscated goods had been auctioned, as legally required, the leaflet claimed.
It said a document handed to mayor Amos Masondo had spoken of 808 traders in the Johannesburg CBD, while there were closer to 8 000. Those forced into the Bree Street Mall — where by the MTC’s admission, 200 stalls were not viable — had run up rent arrears of R1,2-million, where they had previously had no debts.
The emergence of the TCC has highlighted the viper’s nest of organisational and personal rivalries among hawkers’ representatives in Johannesburg. It includes some — but not all — leaders of the African Council of Hawkers and Informal Business (Achib), the Gauteng Hawkers Association (GHA) and the city-initiated Informal Business Forum (IBF).
The TCC’s leading lights are GHA general secretary Nkomo; Achib’s general secretary, Livingstone Mantanga; and Edmund Elias of the IBF. By spearheading the new body, they have put themselves in conflict with some of the most powerful figures in the informal sector.
Achib president Lawrence Mavundla has ruled his organisation for 17 years, and takes an extremely dim view of internal and external competition. To his mind all other formations are Achib splinter groups.
Other power brokers whose noses are out of joint include Mannetjies Solomon of the GHA, and IBF president Churchill Mrasi, the latter a shebeen king and former leader of liquor traders who disagrees with street protests.
TCC leader Elias, who moves around the city collecting tales of police confiscations from hawkers, has an interesting history. The son of a Johannesburg tycoon, this well-travelled man is said to have blown his parents’ fortune. He now sells books and magazines on the streets, has lost weight and no longer drives a yellow Mercedes-Benz. A gifted writer and strong believer in hawker unity, he was expelled by Solomon from the GHA after he joined Mrasi at the IBF.
Their direct experience of the crackdown binds the TCC leaders together. Nkomo, a hawker who sells such products as Chinese slimming tea and cockroach poison, could be forced to vacate his shack in Vlakfontein and return to his home in Zola, Soweto.
Although the march, which proceeded from the Library Gardens to the Johannesburg city council offices on Wednesday, did not have the blessing of the three organisations’ upper echelons, President Thabo Mbeki was aware of it, Nkomo said. He said he, Mantanga and Elias recently met an official of the presidency at government offices in Pretoria to discuss the crisis facing Johannesburg’s street traders.
“People have tried to stop the march, but God is on our side,” he insisted. “Mannetjies [Solomon] tried to stop it, but he failed. The people of Von Brandis Street asked me to act.”
Mantanga read out a press statement penned by Elias: “A crisis committee was elected by hundreds of Johannesburg street and market traders … Johannesburg needs to understand that street trading is permanent … The purpose is to bring city policies in line with the national government’s policy on developing and empowering the second economy.”