The eThekwini Municipality’s policy on informal business may need reviewing after the Durban High Court allowed photographer Khehla Vilakazi to continue snapping tourists on the city’s beaches to provide for his wife and five children.
The case turns a particularly harsh spotlight on the city’s Public Realm Management Plan, introduced last year. Pat Horn, coordinator of Streetnet International, which campaigns for street vendors’ rights, described the plan as “an attack on street vendors and informal traders”.
Vilakazi will be allowed to work until final determination of his plea. He is contesting the municipality’s right to prohibit photography for gain on the beach and bylaws ostensibly made in terms of the Sea Shores Act.
Vilakazi’s children, who live in rural Umgababa, are still at school. One, Sanelsiwe (13), is mute, epileptic and mentally retarded.
Judge Herbert Msimang granted Vilakazi an interim relief order after the 44-year-old part-time photographer spent months winding through a Kafkaesque nightmare in search of a council permit.
Part of the bureaucratic maze included being told by Andreas Makhoba of the council’s recreation department that he had to get a permit from the “Durban Beach Freelancers Association”. Vilakazi said “the association’s phone number and e-mail address did not exist; and it did not even occupy the premises indicated” by Makhoba.
Vilakazi, who has worked on the beachfront since 2000, told the court that over the past year he had been increasingly prevented by police from working and threatened with confiscation of his equipment unless he obtained an official permit.
“I … was given the runaround, and ended up with conflicting information about which department … dealt with the issue,” said Vilakazi. His experience of “being sent from pillar to post” left him “confused and frustrated”.
The city estimates there are 25Â 000 informal traders and workers on Durban’s streets, of whom 7 000 have permits. Horn says the council issued 872 permits last year.
In court papers he says the Government Gazette in which the relevant bylaws were supposedly published could not be found.
Horn said “there is complete confusion in permit issuing” in the municipality and “no standard document to outline procedures to obtain permits”.
The city had had an “extremely good informal trading policy [with a strong developmental focus], which was very seriously implemented from 2001 until 2003”, Horn added.
However, this changed with the introduction of the Public Realm Management Plan, which had a R3,7-million budget [in 2005] entirely for policing, with nothing for development.
Horn added that the Vilakazi order might open the door for others to fight the council over informal work on Durban’s beaches.