The Johannesburg Greater Metropolitan Council stands accused of wrecking the livelihood of the city’s 15 000 street traders in its pursuit of a “world-class city”.
Researcher at the Centre for Policy Studies Paul Thulare, who is studying the effects of the Jo’burg 2030 plan, said it “has undermined the city’s weakest members”.
The plan was launched three years ago to boost investment by addressing business’s fears of and objections to the perceived problems in the inner city.
Planners and government officials identified escalating crime and informal trading as the main reasons for business fleeing from the city to the suburbs.
It emerged this week that one feature of the new approach was the payment of premium rates by large corporations and certain residential areas to ensure that, among other things, hawkers were kept off their streets.
Sean Dinat, the council’s small business development manager, confirmed this: “We gauge the prosperity of the city through the property prices. The perception is that street traders are a brake on growth; new investments are not being attracted, which is keeping the city in decline,” he said
The Informal Trading Development Programme, the council’s plan for dealing with street traders, published in 2002 with the Jo’burg 2030 plan, states that: “Council is not opposed to informal traders, but illegal trading that is threatening the economic status of the city.”
Since then, city by-laws have been amended to restrict or prohibit informal traders in 27 areas of the city. Yeoville, Troyeville, Salisbury, Norwood, Doornfontein, Mayfair, Jeppestown, Hillbrow, Fordsburg, Constitutional Hill, Braamfontein and China Town, among others, have become no-go areas for pavement hawkers.
The council has built about eight markets for them, which include the Yeoville and Hillbrow markets, the Metro Mall in Newtown, the Mai Mai market in Bree Street and the Faraday Market. According to the plan, orderly formal markets are meant to offer hawkers a better trading environment, as well as getting them off the streets and thereby removing “the negative consequences of street trading”.
However, Edmund Elias, the head of the South African National Street Traders Association — formed recently to oppose the city council’s street trade by-laws — complained bitterly that the “urban management plan” has destroyed the livelihood of thousands of hawkers who have been removed from the “foot trade” in the streets and concentrated into markets that are “hopelessly overtraded”.
And Kgosieniso Ramokgopa, CEO of the Metropolitan Trading Company, a council company responsible for the establishment and maintenance of informal trading facilities, admitted: “An African city can’t be like New York. While the by-laws can’t be described as discriminatory, they could have been much better formulated.”
Centre for Policy Studies researcher Kenny Hlela agreed: “Most of the [tensions between the street traders and council] emanate from the failure of the authorities to examine the history of informal street trading.
“People who could not be accommodated in the mainstream economy identified opportunities in the streets that relied on visibility and accessibility: most of their stalls were located in busy areas, usually in front of popular retail shops. Formalising their trading areas has tended to marginalise them even further by cutting them off from their market.”
Added to this, hawkers have to pay a monthly levy of up to R600 to the Metropolitan Trading Company, although there are plans to reduce this amount.
A young woman trader, Dipuo Thuka, claimed her income had dwindled from R500 to R350 a week since she was moved from Bree Street into Metro Mall. “People come to the mall to board taxis, not buy goods,” she said.
Marvelous Tshabalala said that his daily profits had fallen by half, from R100 to R50, since he was relocated to the market.
Dinat said there was an ongoing “trade forum” initiated by the council, which sat once a month to address traders’ complaints.
However, Elias said the meetings are “irregular” and “cosmetic”. He described them as briefings rather than proper forums where traders can express their views.
The rationale of the Informal Trading Development Programme is that the informal sector will shrink “as the formal job-creating capacity of the city improves on the back of increased investment and growth”.
However, Thulare argues there is no guarantee that if informal traders are chased off the streets businesses will return to the central business dictrict.
Paul Arnott-Job, a development manager at the Johannesburg Development Agency, said big business had not returned in large numbers, but that entrepreneurs were renting the office space.