Download PDFIn a powerful victory for social justice and the working people, the Gauteng Division of the High Court in Johannesburg has ordered the City of Johannesburg to verify, register and allocate spaces to inner-city informal traders within two weeks. This ruling confirmed the rights of the City’s working people.
The ruling gives the City until Tuesday, 18 November 2025, to complete the verification and registration of traders who were evicted from their long-standing trading spots along De Villiers and Noord Streets in Johannesburg’s Central Business District (CBD) in early October 2025. This judgement follows an urgent court application filed by the traders after the City used the Johannesburg Metropolitan Police Department (JMPD) to forcefully remove them from their stands.
For years, traders have been the heart of Johannesburg’s CBD, selling affordable food and clothes where inequality continues to define daily people’s lives. Yet, on Tuesday, 2 October 2025, many traders woke up to find their trading spaces barricaded, their stalls destroyed, and their livelihoods taken away overnight.
“The police had already blocked off the street before sunrise,” one trader recalled. “They told us to leave. “The mayor wants us gone.”
For many of these traders, the eviction also served as a chilling reminder of who controls public space, and the ongoing fight for the right to live and work in Johannesburg’s CBD.
This article was submitted on 12 November 2025. You may republish this article, so long as you credit the authors and Karibu! Online (www.Karibu.org.za), and do not change the text. Please include a link back to the original article.
