The City of Tshwane is calling on informal traders in and around Pretoria to register on its newly launched database to help them comply with regulations.
The City has been cracking down on non-compliant small businesses and now wants to help them operate lawfully.
The metro on Friday launched a registration and compliance portal for informal traders, of whom it estimates there are more than 7,000.
Mayor Nasiphi Moya said the city is ahead of its counterparts in terms of the registration of spaza shops and other informal businesses.
“From our side, as the leadership of the city, we made a promise that we’re going to get the informal trading and township economy right. And we’ve demonstrated this work.
“We started in December 2024, when this work was unpopular, when the President called on all municipalities to make sure that there’s compliance of the spaza shops, when kids were dying from things we didn’t know.
“So, as this administration, we’re only two months at work, and this is one of the things that was dropped on our lap to make sure that it happens,” said Moya.
“I mean, car washes — no one ever regulated car washes before.
“The hair salons, no one ever regulated such. The events guys, they’ve never been regulated by the city. They will just have their company registration certificates, and that’s where the relationship ends.”
Trader database and portal
“One of the issues that the traders have been raising with us is that the city is not supporting them. But the question is, who are you? We don’t know you.
“So this database, or at least this platform, now enables us to have a central database where we can tell you how many businesses we have in the City of Tshwane.
“I mean, one of the presentations we received this morning was just to check, for instance, from the health inspector’s point of view, how many establishments do we inspect?
“But it’s not against how many businesses we have. It’s against which businesses we inspected.
“And we do need a central database, and this is the beginning o