Chronicle Editor
The two-week grace period for informal traders in Bulawayo to have moved to designated zones expires today.
Bulawayo City Council announced the plan late last month, part of a range of measures to decongest, smarten and ensure greater order in a city once held as the country’s cleanest.
Indeed, the motive is sensible. The traders have taken over almost every pavement in the city. Pushcart operators are all over, always fighting for space with motor vehicles. As the traders’ work is unregulated, they throw litter everywhere. Council is not helping matters as it has demonstrated zero capacity to collect the refuse timeously.
Commuter omnibuses are also picking and dropping off their passengers wherever they please.
The result is a chaotic city.
A time had to come for the local authority to do its work by removing the informal traders and commuter buses from the undesignated places they are operating from to designated ones.
We appeal to the traders heed the city’s call. Yes, we appreciate that informal trading is what brings bread and butter on their tables, is what takes their children to school and so on. However, their hustles must be more organised and smarter.
In any case, council is not throwing them off the streets, but urging them to move to designated bays. For commuter buses, Egodini is where they used to operate from for decades until its closure for renovations some eight years ago. Now the work has been completed, thus they must be encouraged to get back there.
Also, we report elsewhere in this edition that council is opening up more spaces for the informal traders to operate from. This should accommodate many more of them in due course.
However, we foresee some resistance from the businesses. Some have already complained that the licence fee for them to operate from Egodini is too high and must be reduced. Others are complaining that the designated vending bays are situated too far away from busy spaces.
We urge the local authority and the Egodini contractor, Terracotta, to consider the traders’ suggestion that the licence fee is reduced to a level that ensures their viability.
On the complaints that the new trading spaces are off the beaten path, traders must not worry because buyers will always follow them if all of them operate at one, large designated zone. That is why the market on the side of Highlanders sports club is always busy, yet it is off the path.
We urge council to be more robust in enforcing its by-laws so that long-distance buses are shepherded back to Renkini, commuter omnibuses are back to Egodini and informal traders are back in their spaces. As mentioned, council police must strengthen their policing and fines for those violating the local laws must be punitive. If they have to engage the Zimbabwe Republic Police in some sort of operation, so be it.
But as municipal police work to bring more discipline in the city, they must be disciplined themselves. They must not demand or accept bribes as many of them are known to do.
Online Reporter