Why should the harassed poor respect the law?
Spokesperson Edmund Elias for the SA National Traders Retail Alliance explains how street traders are penalised by municipalities as they try to make an honest living through micro-retailing. The councils see hawkers as a problem and havent been creative in their responses. They crowd too many competing hawkers into artificial marketplaces and busy, noisy taxi ranks perceived by customers as dangerous. And it looks as if enforcement of restrictive by-laws is increasing towards making hawking completely illegal in various suburbs where retail trade is good. Instead hawkers need to establish and capitalise their own relatively isolated locations and remain unhassled by the authorities. Metrocops naturally insist that theyre only doing their job, focusing on fining specific transgressions such as obstructing pavements and trading next to a government building, ATM or church. But in the niggardly bureaucratic spirit of stifling enterprise, by-laws are often drawn far too widely then furthe
