By Anita Dangazele
- Nelson Mandela Bay Municipality held a workshop to simplify spaza shop registration, addressing confusion among foreign shop owners about required documents and procedures.
- Councillor Bulelani Matenjwa emphasised unified information delivery to prevent missteps, such as landlords unknowingly losing municipal benefits by registering shops.
Nelson Mandela Bay Municipality in the Eastern Cape hosted a workshop to educate foreign spaza shop owners on the registration process, ensuring compliance with the presidential deadline.
This comes after many of the shop owners complained that the process was confusing for them, especially with the different documents required to successfully register their spaza shops.
Ward councillors in Motherwell said after receiving these complaints, they felt it was necessary to host the workshop to promote cooperation and understanding between business owners and local authorities.
The workshop was attended by various departments from the municipality, including Home Affairs, the South African Revenue Service (SARS) and several law enforcement agencies to ensure compliance.
Motherwell councillor Bulelani Matenjwa said it was important to get all the spaza shop owners together at once so they would have access to the same information.
“As councillors in the area, we felt it was important to bring everyone under one roof, because people are getting different information at the different wards and that information could be dangerous in the long term.
“So we asked the municipality to bring every department that is involved in the registration process to explain what is it that they require from the spaza shops to successfully register them,” he said.
Matenjwa said in some instances landlords registered themselves as spaza shop owners to try assisting the foreign owners.
“That is part of the reason for this workshop because you’ll find that the foreign national will come to the resident and say ‘register this shop as your own’. So we said no, now you will find a homeowner losing out on municipal benefits because they’ve registered themselves as a business. They could be doing this unknowingly.”
Pictured above: The Raymond Mhlaba community hall in Motherwell was packed with spaza shop owners and their landlords on Thursday.
Source: Anita Dangazele
