By Cebelihle Mbuyisa.
A University of Johannesburg study of informal trade in Mogale City Municipality’s Krugersdorp CBD has found that traders and vendors, as small businesses, continue to remain precarious and stagnant, largely due to unfavourable municipal bylaws. Walking up and down, traders brave the elements every day in Krugersdorp and every other CBDs in South Africa. They lack shelter, proper training, and access to basic amenities such as toilets, and have no access to credit. and lack financial support.
And, in the case of migrants, also suffer xenophobic abuse regularly. Despite the establishment of the Small Enterprise Development Agency and several policy and legislative interventions over the years – such as the Local Government Municipal Systems Act, and the Street Trading Strategy that emanates from the Act – many traders in Krugersdorp still enjoy no protections.
This means they have failed to see the growth of their small businesses or trades, the study finds. The result is, then, a proliferation of unregistered trades that, for the individuals involved, do not improve their lives, whether they sell airtime, soft drinks, clean shoes, plait hair, or cook and sell food. The study says the traders’ standard of living tends to not improve. This, by extension, means there is no substantial black-owned small enterprise sector in Krugersdorp that is legitimate and can be scaled up to be a reliable base on which other sectors of the economy can depend.
In December last year, the University of Pretoria warned that because South Africa’s economy was vulnerable to external shocks that had slowed down development, policymakers needed to rethink their approach while acknowledging that human livelihoods were under threat. This included focusing on the informal economy which remained an untapped sector, yet consistently demonstrated great potential to alleviate poverty and unemployment. Around one-third of jobs are in the informal sector in South Africa, which is in line with estimates from the International Labour Organisation that more than 60% of the world’s population earns their livelihoods in the informal sector.
