Hawkers close CBD businesses
JOBURG- Two people were arrested after frustrated informal traders stormed the Johannesburg CBD, forcing businesses to close.
This followed the Johannesburg High Court’s dismissal of an urgent application, brought by the South African National Traders Retail Association and the South African Informal Traders Forum, to allow inner city informal traders to be reinstated.
Groups of displaced informal traders targeted businesses in Kerk, Small and Bree streets, forcing them to close their doors.
Businesses were also stoned and looted.
Edmund Elias, South African National Traders Retail Association spokesperson, said violence erupted when informal traders refused to allow anyone to trade after they had been barred from their operations since October.
Elias said that allowing some groups to trade while prohibiting others was a “recipe for disaster”.
However, the association condemned any form of violence.
On 26 November, the court ruled that the traders’ application to return to business was not urgent and must therefore be struck off the roll.
As a result, the matter will be placed on a normal court roll, where court hearings were only available from March next year.
Elias said that despite the traders’ lawyer arguing that the application was urgent because thousands of informal traders were without an income and faced poverty, the court did not provide any reasons why it dismissed the matter as not being urgent.
He said preventing traders from returning to their stalls was contributing to the rapid formation of an underground economy where desperate traders were selling goods in secret.
The traders’ associations represent 6 000 informal traders, who are arguing that the city council had broken the law when they forcibly removed them in October.
The removal and re-allocation of traders from the pavements of the CBD is supposedly part of the City of Johannesburg’s ‘Clean Sweep’ campaign in a bid to organise and improve safety and cleanliness in the CBD.
