Lazarus Tlhahane (69), a grandfather seven times over, is hoping to be adopted.
He owns one of the 15 makeshift stalls that have sprung up across the road from the Soccer City stadium in Soweto.
Soccer City, which will host the opening and closing matches in the Soccer World Cup in 2010, is undergoing a $1,5-billion upgrade to boost its capacity from 80 000 to 94 000 spectators.
From his stall, which is made out of pieces of tarpaulin held up by wooden poles, Lazarus serves up plates of pap [maize porridge] and stew to some of the site’s 1 600 construction workers.
At R15- ‒ a precious R1 off the canteen price — it pays for workers to go off-site in search of food. Lazarus also sells coffee and vetkoek [fried dough], boiled sweets, single cigarettes and telephone calls at 90 cents a minute for a local call.
”Business is coming alright,” he says. ”At first they didn’t want us here,” he says gesturing towards the stadium, which is beginning to take its intended shape — that of a giant calabash. ”But the workers fought for us. The canteen people don’t give them credit. We do.”
When business is ”alright” Lazarus takes home about R800 in profit a month after bad debts — just enough to pay school fees of around R100 each for his seven grandchildren.
Now, to boost their business ahead of the World Cup — during the tournament itself their spots risk being axed to make way for official Fifa sponsors — Lazarus and his neighbours at Soccer City are putting themselves up for adoption.
”We want to make proper shelters by 2010 so we’re asking big business, including some of the food companies like Nestlé and Mr Ice, to adopt a hawker,” says Cheche Selepe, media coordinator of the World Class Cities for All campaign, who is representing the group.
In return for a brick structure and electricity, sponsors could paint the stall with their corporate colours, a practice common in townships where pubs and shops are often coated in Coca-Cola’s trademark red or blue and white of Omo washing powder.
South Africa has an estimated one million street traders, a group to which the World Cup has brought mixed blessings.
”They killed it. Everything is finished now,” an Indian shop owner who did not wish to be named says of the impact of Johannesburg’s pre-2010 clean-up campaign on Diagonal Street, a once-colourful trading street near the old Johannesburg Stock Exchange.
”When they treat people like this they are pushing them to go steal,” she said.
Johannesburg’s inner-city rejuvenation programme aims to attract investment back to an area that was forsaken by big business in the early 1990s over crime. But that urban regeneration is coming at the expense of socioeconomic development, critics warn.
Gone from the shop fronts on Diagonal Street are the boubous (African gowns), cheap luggage and rain jackets with gaudy stickers assuring ”water does not go thru”.
Gone also for a while before they invariably melt back are some of the 12 000 hawkers trying to make a few bob selling items like peanuts, dried fish or traditional medicine ingredients.
Now hawkers, as well as shop owners who display their goods outside their shops, keep a wary eye out for police who confiscate their goods and slap them with hefty fines for trading outside ”demarcated trading zones”.
Witnesses told of seeing police throwing water on one female hawker’s roasted mielies and scooping up all the spinach of another.
”The World Cup is having an extremely negative effect on hawkers,” Edmund Elias, spokesperson for the South Africa National Traders’ Alliance said, drawing comparisons with China’s targeting of migrant labourers in its pre-Olympic clean-up.
The city was trying to ram the traders ”like cattle” into a few overcrowded markets, out of areas where they had made a living for years, he said. ”We are creating a generation of illegal people,” he warned, noting that street trading was the only entry point to the economy for the city’s swelling ranks of unskilled workers and migrants.
A spokesperson for the city denied any ”intention to inconvenience or harass business but rather to encourage it and continued investment as well”. ‒ Sapa-DPA