The Afro News International.
Decongestion: Council banishing illegal trading from CBD
QUICK! Move! Women street hawkers signal to each other as they quickly cover their wares, push carts laden with fruits, flap close cardboard boxes of snacks and other trinkets from the city’s bustling streets – pushing these into alleys and friendly shops before police officers and municipal details spot and pounce on the unfortunate ones.
That is the daily act informal – or illegal vending vendors, according to City Fathers at Town House – and indeed across the country.
The new authorities under the new political dispensation has committed itself to making order out of the chaos and disorder that prevailed under former president Robert Mugabe’s administration and local authorities has followed suit, vowing to improve standards of living, specifically with the “Zimbabwe is open for business” mantra aimed at turning the country into a high middle-income country by 2030.
To reach that goal, urban authorities aim to make Zimbabwe’s capital a competitive world-class city by 2025 and they have instituted neo-liberal principles of entrepreneurial urbanism. These major urban transformations attempting to make the city conform to international standards take the form of large urban and infrastructure projects, the construction of high-standing residential spaces aimed at elites, the privatization of land and urban production
But it is the cleansing operations of street vendors that have brought tension between the poor and the local authorities.
“The pavement is the pavement. It is not a place to sell things,” says the city’s council spokesman Michael Chideme. “We are doing this in earnest, to return the pavement to the people.”
The council has moved hundreds of street vendors from locations in the central business district since after the elections in a joint police – council operation to clean up the city.
This daily cat-and-mouse engagement has become daily recurring element in the capital’s landscape with the local authority flexing its muscle, power and capacity to regulate and re-arrange urban business and social spaces.
The municipality says it has identified vending sites for vendors to carry out their businesses from and warned vendors who return to cleared areas risk facing the full wrath of the law.
In response, some relocated street vendors said much-reduced foot traffic at these new council sites is threatening their livelihoods.
Doreen Mandishona, chairlady of the Zimbabwe Chamber of Informal Economy saysher organisation has submitted a letter demanding a halt to evictions and calling on officials to find an amicable way to handle the dispute.
“Council can clean up the streets but please don’t get rid of us entirely,” she told this publication at a meeting at the Zimbabwe Women Research Centre and Network (ZWRCN) discussing the way forward in the aftermath of the evictions.
“95 percent of informal traders are vendors and this is our lifeline,” she says, telling the GAD meeting of her CBD membership. “The town clerk and the spokesman bluntly told us vendors are no longer allowed in the CBD.”
Street vendors play a crucial role in the city’s and the country’s economy and are a source of affordable food and other household needs. Gamuchiral Chipangura, Programmes Assistant at ZWRCN says her organisation has carried several surveys that have shown over 90 percent of urban people in the city’s Upper Avenues bought items from street vendors.
“It doesn’t just affect the vendors. It affects the customer as well — low-income earners, for example, who can not afford the high street prices on most supermarket shelves,” she syas.
Martha, a vendor in the Upper Avenues, says the local council by-laws are archaic and colonial.
“These repressive measures, policies and strategies of evictions are not new, as since the colonial period a long history of repression of Blacks has regularly characterized and targeted street vending as illegal in order to reinforce spatial control by big business,” she says, calling for an equal response.
Business conditions at the new sites are so dire “we are prepared to risk fines on a daily basis”.
“I went to Coca-Cola market but the market was dead,” she says, shaking her head. “It was impossible to sell even nothing to anybody!” adds the tough-talking vendor.
“Before, I made enough to pay rent, pay for electricity and water. Now it’s not even enough for transport!”
But Mandishona was diplomatic, saying they were awaiting council and Government response to our petition on the way forward”.
“We have engaged authorities as we are an orderly organisation,” she said, adding: “We only remind Government it was the vendors, informal and cross-border traders that sustained the economy during the harsh years under Mugabe.”
By Patrick Musira
