Put a stop to pavement trading
Councillors and municipal officials need to take a walk around some of the streets, especially in Port Shepstone, to see how difficult it is to get to the shops.
IT is about time the Hibiscus Coast Municipality applied a new strategy to assist informal traders with a designated area in a bid to get rid of pavement trading.
Councillors and municipal officials need to take a walk around some of the streets, especially in Port Shepstone, to see how difficult it is to get to the shops.
And the informal traders at the beaches need to be better controlled. All the traders sell identical items which can be bought from any shop (which actually pays rent, rates, electricity and water as well as providing employment).
These informal traders create a huge mess with their broken cardboard boxes, plastic bags and newspapers and they litter the area with rotting fruit and vegetables, discarded food packaging and empty bottles and cans.
Visitors complain constantly about being harassed by fruit sellers shoving avocado pears and other goods in their faces, some traders even follow the tourists to their cars insisting they buy something.
Shopowners have every right to be angered by the traders who block the entrances to their premises.
A plan needs to be put in place to either move them or find a better way of controlling them.
Tourism is our lifeblood and we need to keep our pavements and streets clean.
ends
