South Africa’s small business support system has spent the past two years being quietly rebuilt. The National Small Enterprise Amendment Act, signed into law in 2024, created the Small Enterprise Development Finance Agency (SEDFA) to absorb three separate legacy bodies, the Small Enterprise Financing Agency (sefa), the Small Enterprise Development Agency (Seda), and the Co-operative Banks Development Agency (CBDA), into a single funding and support entity. That merger is now well underway, with 2025/26 SEDFA’s first full financial year.
The other half of the Act, the part most directly aimed at protecting small suppliers from being squeezed by bigger, slower-paying customers, has moved more slowly. The Office of the Small Enterprise Ombud Service, created by the same legislation, is still waiting for its first Ombud: we found no announcement of an appointment, and the last public step was Parliament sending four recommended names to the Minister.
What the Ombud is actually meant to do
Late or non-payment by large corporate customers is one of the most common ways a small business’s cash flow gets strangled, and taking a big, well-resourced customer to court over an unpaid invoice is rarely realistic for a business with five employees and a lawyer it cannot afford to retain. The Ombud exists specifically to close that gap: it is empowered to investigate complaints about unfair trading practices, ambiguous contract terms, and late or non-payment of legitimate invoices, and where it upholds a complaint, its finding carries the same legal force as a court judgment, meaning a sheriff can move directly to attach a non-paying debtor’s assets without a separate court process first.
That is a genuinely unusual amount of enforcement power to hand an ombud service, closer to a specialised tribunal than the more familiar, advisory-only ombud model used in industries like short-term insurance or banking. It is also exactly why getting the appointment right has taken this long.
Why the appointment has stalled
The Portfolio Committee on Small Business Development ran a public nomination process, shortlisted eight candidates and interviewed them in public on 1 April 2025. It then recommended four candidates for the Minister of Small Business Development to appoint under section 17F of the Act: advocates Lufuno Tokyo Nevondwe, Sonwabile Mancotywa, Lehlohonolo Lucky Rabotapi and Mheshe Nande, as the committee’s statement lists them.
The National Assembly then referred that report back to the committee for reconsideration, after concerns were raised in declarations on the report. On 18 March 2026 the committee resolved to seek a formal legal opinion from Parliament’s legal services on whether it could re-interview all eight shortlisted candidates. At a later committee meeting, the legal advisers cautioned that re-interviewing candidates could carry procedural risks, and advised the committee to identify and address the specific concerns in the report unless a full reconsideration was shown to be necessary.
The matter has since moved on. On 9 June 2026 the National Assembly adopted the committee’s report recommending the four candidates, and the committee chairperson, Masefako Dikgale, said it would be forwarded to Minister Stella Ndabeni, who appoints the Ombud under section 17F. The Ombud serves a five-year term, renewable once. We found no public announcement of an appointment after that, so for the small businesses the office is meant to serve, the fast, binding dispute-resolution route the Act promised is not yet available.
What this means for small business owners right now
Until an Ombud is actually appointed and the office is operational, small businesses chasing unpaid invoices from larger corporate customers are still working with the tools that existed before the Act: direct negotiation, mediation through industry bodies where available, or conventional litigation, expensive and slow precisely because it favours the better-resourced party in the dispute. SEDFA’s own funding and support functions are live and can be engaged with now, the Ombud’s enforcement powers cannot yet be relied on for a live payment dispute.
Business owners in supply chains dominated by a small number of large corporate customers, retail suppliers, construction subcontractors, service providers to major companies, should treat the Ombud’s eventual launch as worth tracking closely rather than assuming it is already available, and in the meantime should keep contract terms, delivery confirmations and payment correspondence in better order than they might otherwise, since that documentation is exactly what a future Ombud complaint, or a conventional legal claim in the meantime, would need to succeed.
Source: Parliament of South Africa; see also its statement on the National Assembly adopting the report
For more on this beat, see our SME & Entrepreneurship coverage.
