Council to build vending structures

Gloria Muruva

Harare City Council is working towards building modern vending structures to remove all illegal vendors from the pavements of the city centre following the escalation of cholera cases recently, clearing suitable spaces and converting Copocabana into a proper market.

The City’s small to medium enterprise head, Dr Collen Tongowona said work towards formalising illegal vendors was in progress and most of those operating from the streets would be moved once structures were available.

“Our thrust as SMEs department is that we want to formalise the informal sector by making market places for them. For example, we can divide Cocacola market into two that is one side for food stuff and the other side for clothing and one has to pay a certain fee to be allocated on a stand,” he said

“Our short term plan is clearing spaces. We can turn Copa Cabana into a modern vending structure and we are not only aiming to do that in the CBD but we also want to revamp residential areas and modernise them as well.”

Harare City was in December tasked with removing food vendors from the streets by the Minister of Health and Child Care Dr Douglas Mombeshora as the sale of food in undesignated places was among the chief drivers of the cholera outbreak. However, the local authority has yet to action the directive with illegal food vending still rampant in the city centre and the suburbs.

Harare City spokesperson, Mr Stanley Gama said removing illegal street vendors was a gradual process.

He said the council were engaging the vendors while waiting for the allocation of designated places for them to operate from.

“It is not only vendors. There are a lot of illegal activities which are being done the in the central business district which we are trying to combat. We are going to have 24 hour services because we have discovered that most of these illegal street vendors they come to do their business late and we want to be highly alert so that we can fully conduct this exercise of removing all those doing their activities on illegal places to their designated places,” Mr Gama said.