Halfway through lockdown not nearly enough support for informal traders and self-employed South Africans
20 April 2020
The Democratic Alliance (DA) calls on the Minister of Small Business Development, KhumbudzoNtshavheni, to urgently facilitate additional support and funding for self-employed individuals (sole proprietors), micro-retailers, and informal traders, during this lockdown period. Government continues to sit on their hands as these businesses buckle under the pressure of the Covid-19 lockdown regulations.
Self-employed individuals and informal traders are still left in the lurch with little to no assistance from the Department of Small Business Development since the beginning of the Covid-19 lockdown.
There are an estimate 3 million informal traders in South Africa, whose entire livelihoods have grounded to a halt with no support to keep them afloat.
The Department of Small Business Development has proven to be weak in its attempts to provide emergency relief to businesses. Even small business owners, who the Department has supposedly been assisting find themselves desperately trying to access funding and are not getting clear answers from Government as to how they can get assistance.
The DA therefore also calls on Minister Ntshavheni to inform and update South Africans on the progress thus far with her Department’s relief assistance interventions to small businesses. With the nationwide hard lockdown having been extended to the end of April, it is unavoidable that the country is poised to experience an economic massacre on the small business landscape.
Small and medium enterprises (SMEs) have had it tough in South Africa for many years now and struggling to stay afloat. If they weren’t suffocating in a stagnant economic climate, they were being strangled by cost increases, on their knees under the weight of red tape, and being in kicked in the gut by rolling blackouts.
For many SMEs, without adequate cash reserves or some kind of business insurance, this hard lockdown will deliver the final deathblow, putting an estimated 1.5 million jobs at risk.
All of those employers and employees are deeply anxious and panic-stricken about their circumstances and future, so Minister Ntshavheni needs to play open cards with the public about how far the SEFA-administered Debt Relief Scheme is with receipt and finalisation of applications, disbursement of funds and reasons for delays or bottlenecks in the process.
We will also submit parliamentary questions to the Minister to solicit this information and we also urge her to present it to the Portfolio Committee on Small Business Development at its first virtual meeting, whose date is yet to be announced.
Finally, the DA welcomes the announcement of the guidelines for the Spaza Shops and General Dealers Support Scheme yesterday. As a project with Nedbank on the back of SEFA’s Khula Credit Guarantee Scheme, it is precisely the kind of public-partnership we have previously called on the Minister and her Department to facilitate.
Issued by Zakhele Mbhele, DA Shadow Minister of Small Business Development, 20 April 2020
