By Nangamso Mabindla
28 May 2008

SMALL business owners in the Buffalo City township of Dimbaza were encouraged to register their businesses so that the government could help them, at a seminar on Tuesday, 27 May.

The seminar, held at the Moses Twebe Hall, was arranged by the Department of Trade and Industry (DTI) in an effort to understand the challenges they faced. It also gave the community a chance to interact with the government and learn about the incentives that are available for small businesses.

Participants represented a variety of trades, ranging from selling fruit and fat cakes, to co-operatives and close corporations. Presentations from different entities set up to assist small businesses were made, including the Buffalo City municipality, the Small Enterprise Development Agency (Sida), the Eastern Cape Development Corporation (ECDC), the Companies and Intellectual Registration Office (Cipro), the South African Women Entrepreneurs’ Network (Sawen), and other DTI entities.

In speaking to participants, the deputy trade and industry minister, Elizabeth Thabethe, discovered that many of the businesses were not registered. “I urge you to register your businesses. It doesn’t matter whether you sell fat cakes or oranges, you need to register. That is the only way that the government can assist businesses,” she said.

Reasons for not registering given by the small business owners were a lack of knowledge and a lack of money.

“That is why we decided to go to all the country’s provinces to see if our programmes were understood by the people. We also discovered that some of them paid far more than they needed to for the registration process,” Thabethe said.

During the interactive session, some business people said that they had paid up to R800 for registration.

“At Cipro, if a person wants to register a close corporation they only need to pay R215 and for a co-operative the fee is not above R400. I am really happy that we came here to interact and share this knowledge with the people of Dimbaza; we now know the challenges faced in this area,” Thabethe added.

She encouraged people to learn more about the DTI entities in their areas to discover more about the incentives for which they qualified.

“If people acquire this knowledge, they will know how to grow their businesses so that they [can] play a meaningful role in the economy of their regions and that of the country.”