Build One South Africa (BOSA) condemns in the strongest possible terms the City of Cape Town’s reported intention to impose fines of up to R800,000 and possible jail terms on residents who operate small businesses from their homes without the required onerous zoning approvals.
At a time when millions of South Africans are unemployed and forced into the informal economy simply to survive, it is both harsh and disconnected from reality for a DA-run municipality to respond with punitive enforcement instead of practical support.
What the City is effectively saying to a struggling mother selling clothes from her garage, or a young entrepreneur running a micro food business from her kitchen, is if you try to feed your family outside the formal economy, we will criminalise you.
This is not how you build a city that works for everyone. It is how you entrench exclusion.
The informal and “hustle” economy is a central pillar of survival for millions of households. In the absence of jobs, people innovate. They sell, trade, bake, repair, and resell from their homes because they have no alternative.
Instead of recognising this reality and adapting regulations to enable safe, compliant participation in the economy, the City appears intent on enforcing rigid by-laws in a way that punishes poverty rather than reducing it.
This approach reveals an unwillingness to modernise outdated zoning and regulatory frameworks to reflect the lived reality of South Africans.
A 21st-century city should be asking how do we support micro-entrepreneurs to formalise gradually, reduce barriers, and grow the tax base by enabling small enterprise.
BOSA believes South Africa must urgently embrace an economy that works for everyone. We call on the City of Cape Town to:
- Immediately pause any punitive enforcement against home-based micro-entrepreneurs;
- Introduce a simplified, low-cost registration and compliance pathway for home businesses;
- Work with communities to legalise and support the informal economy rather than criminalise it;
- Align municipal by-laws with the economic reality of unemployment and poverty.
A city that threatens jail for informal trading is a city that has lost sight of what its people are going through.
BOSA will continue to stand with – and not against – South Africans who are working, hustling, and innovating under the most difficult conditions.
Media Enquiries:
Roger Solomons
BOSA Spokesperson
072 299 3551