Road shows to help Tshwane’s township economy

AT LEAST 2500 entrepreneurs in townships across Tshwane Metro stand to benefit from road shows aimed at providing business and infrastructure support to small-scale enterprises.

MMC for Economic Development and Spatial Planning, Bruce Lee, said the entrepreneurs targeted were based in townships like Atteridgeville, Mamelodi and Soshanguve.

He spoke to the Pretoria News yesterday before the road shows tomorrow and Thursday.

While the initial road shows were held between September and November last year, and then continued early this month, Lee said they had not yet benefited small businesses.

“Let me be very honest, these programmes were planned before my time (as an MMC). I don’t believe that they are already beneficial because some of these programmes were planned before Covid and with Covid the macro environment has changed.”

He said going forward he would like to do things differently, like focusing on the large enterprises.

“My new focus will be on large enterprises. We are going to be focusing on exports going into the future,” Lee said.

He believed that with efforts channelled into ramping up exports, production rate would increase and there would be more jobs created in the process.

“For example, with these road shows that we have been running we are targeting 2 500 SMMEs. But if I look at the Ford expansion programme (in Silverton) that merely created 10 000 jobs,” he said.

According to Lee, the new approach should not be interpreted as if the City doesn’t want to look after the SMMEs, but that its ability to assist is hamstrung by limited resources.

Explaining how the SMMEs would be affected by the City’s new approach, he said: “It is not like I don’t want to support them. But again I do believe that if I am able to catalyse the macro economy then the SMMEs would be taken care of by the macro economy. If you consider a budget for my department it is only R5 million and there is really little I can do with R5m.”

The City’s road shows would be rolled out in partnership with the Small Enterprise Development Agency and the Small Enterprise Finance Agency.

The primary focus would be to provide business, infrastructure and financial support that enables entrepreneurs to thrive.

Entrepreneurial support would include the scale bakeries and confectioneries support programme, auto body repairs and mechanics support programme, butcheries’ support programme, and the clothing, leather and textile support programme.

There would also be support programmes for spaza shops and tshisanyama and cooked food businesses.

Pretoria News