The shops and shelves of the mammoth Dragon City trading centre, which stretches along Main Reef Road in Fordsburg, are teeming with everything from shoes and school bags to children’s toys and bedding. Made-in-China cardboard boxes are stacked chest high, blocking walkways. Business is swift and security is tight here; the guards at the entrance are well armed.
Khuram, who chooses not to give his surname, is from Pakistan. He works at one of the shops selling shoes and clothes imported from China. Most customers who buy from him at Dragon City — open seven days a week, but busiest on a Sunday — come from neighbouring countries such as Zambia, Mozambique, Malawi, Botswana and Zimbabwe.
“Most people take the goods back themselves,” says Khuram of the informal traders who frequent his shop. “They usually have their own transport. But sometimes they hire a bakkie.”
Anne Msonda, from Zambia, was browsing the small shops inside the hulking warehouse-style centre looking for stock. “I buy from here because they sell quality goods for cheap,” says Msonda, who, like many informal traders, sells her products on credit to anyone who wants to buy. “People often don’t have the money to buy products in cash right there. So they prefer to get it from you and then pay you month-end when they get paid and have the money.”
Informal cross-border trade is a booming business for everyone in the city — and even the taxi drivers are getting their cut. Waiting to load customers into his 22-seater taxi just outside another trade hotspot — the Oriental Plaza in Fordsburg — is Timothy Mashaba, a driver who ferries mainly female traders and their goods from Jo’burg to Swaziland. He says he gets plenty of customers and, at R340 for each trader, business is swift and profitable.
The only problem, he says, is the delay at the border. “Once we get to the border point the traders have to declare their goods,” says Mashaba. “They pay R20 to get a declaration form and the whole process takes one hour and that wastes a lot of time.”
But, according to Tadeo Taruvinga, president of the Southern Africa Cross Border Traders’ Association, it’s more than just time that’s wasted at the border; there is also the potential loss of income due to the high duties informal traders have to pay as they go back into their own countries with their goods.
Taruvinga, who is also an informal trader, says without a Southern African Development Community certificate of origin — which can be obtained only from the revenue authority in South Africa — traders are charged higher rates, despite initiatives enacted to help ease issues in the sector. Last year at the annual heads of states summit in Johannesburg, the SADC Free Trade Area was launched, with the SADC certificates that were supposed to help border control personnel establish whether certain goods were eligible for duty-free entry or not.
But the initiative hasn’t worked as intended. For a trader to get the certificate, says Taruvinga, manufacturers have to provide a declaration to the exporter. But because informal traders usually purchase goods in small quantities, producers won’t provide these declarations — leaving those in the informal sector right back where they were before 2008.
Taruvinga says there are 25 000 registered informal traders in the SADC region — but those are just the ones who are on the books. Just how much those traders are buying in Jo’burg to take across borders is the great mystery, as is the amount that is traded across borders in the region. The April 2008 SADC region “Poverty Profile Summary” concluded that informal trade was “difficult to predict and quantify” because the amounts of goods and services traded are not recorded.
But Zunaid Khan, a city planner and owner of Urban Walkabout, who regularly gives walking tours of Johannesburg to visiting urban planners, says the city is the de facto capital of Africa because it is one of the largest urban centres on the continent — Gauteng generates 10% of the GDP of Africa — and is among its busiest trading centres.
“You have people coming from Malawi with a bus or their own vehicles buying stuff downtown because a lot of the guys are now into imports and export … buying clothing, food products, blankets and things like that,” says Khan, as he stands on Quinn Street, the informal trading hub of the city.
“A lot of manufacturers that were once in the city have changed their core business to dealing with wholesale products because that’s what people are coming to Jo’burg to do: to buy.”
From daybreak to sunset goods are quickly offloaded by sweaty hands short for time as business owners bark orders from their Newtown warehouses and shopfronts to the bakkies and taxis waiting to take goods to all points north. In “little Mogadishu”, as the area is also called, two waiting trucks are loaded with boxes full of curtains and blankets.
“If the bus is full by one o’clock and leaves for Cape Town it will reach there by 10 in the morning,” says Abdul Rizaq, an employee of Star Transport Logistics, whose work entails labelling and counting boxes and handling customer service. “We transport Chinese stuff like food, bags, duvets, curtains and everything that we can carry.”
Down the road, in immigrant-rich Yeoville, the local market reflects the strong Congolese presence in the suburb. Foodstuffs like fufu, cassava leaves and “dried fish from the Congo River” (as it is labelled) are brought here directly from the Democratic Republic of Congo. The homesick are able to get access to their staple foods and use the hair and body creams they prefer straight from home, thanks to the informal trade industry.
Khan gestures towards the neighbouring suburb. “The bus station is down here in Cyrildene, so they are bringing products by bus and selling them here to their people,” he says, piecing together the informal trade network that connects the city to the continent and its people.