Town Centre traders have dismissed a storage unit plan as untenable, but the sub-council said the space has come about after years of negotiation with informal traders’ associations.
Trader Tash-riek Erasmus of Eastridge said the plan was not the council’s first attempt at regulating them through a storage unit, but they had failed dismally before and would again.
The matter had been tabled at the Subcouncil 12 meeting last month.
Subcouncil chair Solomon Philander said that a storage facility had been built for traders in Town Centre.
“For many, many years there was a promise made to the informal traders in Town Centre that they would be given storage space, and finally that building is complete,” he said.
Philander said that the storage will come with stricter adherence to the trading by-law.
“You will see that we are removing structures and things in Town Centre, because the by-law says that a permitted trader will come at sunrise and set up, and at sunset they will leave the place as found, but what is actually happening is people put pallets there, they put kissies there, they put structures there and it is just a lawless thing. So now with the storage space up and running, these things will not be allowed. A permitted trader will need to ensure that they stick to the by-law. We ask the support of every trader to follow what the permit says. We cannot allow lawlessness in the community.”
A trader who has been selling in Town Centre for more than 30 years laughed out loud when TygerBurger asked him his opinion on the matter.
Not wanting to give his name, the trader said that theft from the facility would be his biggest concern.
“Do you know how the people will steal from that storage?” he said. “No, it’s not going to work.”
The trader has been selling second-hand tools in Town Centre “since 1982, before any of these things were here”, he said, pointing to the sheltered area that had been converted from a bus terminus for the traders’ use in the early 2000s. The sheltered hub had at the time been one of the anchor projects for the Mitchell’s Plain Urban Renewal Node.
First storage plan failed
The multi-million-rand plan aimed to restructure Town Centre into a commercial and transport node. The plan for informal trading in Town Centre was to only allow trading in designated areas by permitted traders, but 20 years later, traders are still selling from every available inch in the space.
Erasmus, a permitted vendor who pays just under R200 a month for the space to put up his fruit and vegetable stall, said: “It doesn’t make sense. It’s a lot of stuff to pack up.”
His main concern was also the possibilities it opened to theft.
“How are they going to know whose goods are whose?” he asked.
Erasmus said that “way back” there was an attempt by the council to store the traders’ goods, but “it didn’t work”.
“When they open, if you are not there for whatever reason – your child must go to the doctor or whatever – and you come a little bit late, then your stuff is gone,” Erasmus said of previous storage attempts.
He added that the loss of goods for informal traders could be devastating.
Erasmus said the vendors had their own system of securing their goods and spaces. Many of the stall structures had been built with locking facilities.
Erasmus wanted to know how the Subcouncil would fit the hundreds of stalls and goods in one building and how the building would be secured. He asked how the goods would be sorted and organised so that they would not be stolen by another vendor. “I don’t see how this is going to work,” he said.
TygerBurger asked Philander to address these questions and he said: “Not all traders will be part of the process. We have agreed with the informal trading associations that we will have 15 members from one and 15 from the other of the two main associations in Town Centre.”
Those 30 spaces will only be for fresh produce, he said, “as was agreed by the associations when we had long discussions around this over the years”.
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