Online Reporter
THERE is a great deal of pressure in Zimbabwe for small businesses in the informal sector to access basic premises for use as workshops and shops, opening doors to con artists, land barons and space barons who prey on the traders.
These simply move into an open space, divide it up and start charging rentals without any attempt to gain the consent of the landowner, private or public.
They do not attempt to meet local authority planning rules and health standards. They just grab the land, erect their containers or allow the traders to build shacks, and collect the monthly rent, which is basically pure profit.
So we get all sorts of downstream problems. Hygiene is suspect when there are no ablution facilities, or even a secure water supply.
There are no health or safety checks.
Fire risks are high. Legal development is stunted when land meant for development or other uses such as roads, termini, car parks and schools is snatched.
Legal businesses that pay licence fees and taxes face unfair competition, although usually the land and space barons charge rentals that would, in a legal development, be spent on similar rentals, but including licences and taxes.
So local authorities lose out, and taxes, small as they are for each business, but totalling significant sums, are not available for national development.
Councils, especially when council-owned land is snatched, and landowners are starting to fight back using the law and the courts.
So we are starting to see court orders issued, usually with no objections as the land barons dare not contest the order and their victims, whom they fleece, are often unaware of the legal process, or hope for the best, or have been told by the barons that no one will enforce the orders.
Well, now they are being enforced, and the successes in Greater Harare will probably encourage more such applications for court orders.
So we have seen the demolition of tuckshops at Mabelreign Shopping Centre, erected by a city councillor who claimed he had authority to take over part of the car park, which is vaguely possible considering how bad the council was at one stage, although highly unlikely.
The private owners of land in Whitecliff finally managed to have more than 300 illegal and unauthorised structures demolished just over a week ago.
Norton has been waging a long battle against a group of tuckshops, but within days of being demolished they are rebuilt.
And there are many other informal commercial complexes where so far no action has been taken, or where the whole eviction process is bogged down in the courts.
There are a lot of tuckshops and small businesses operating legally out of private premises, with a growing percentage now paying basic licence fees and registering with Zimra, even if they are too small to pay taxes, the owners falling into the zero-tax bracket.
Central Harare has seen more astute property owners remodelling their buildings as small shops, or even opening up large spaces into a collection of booths for even small businesses, with the largest single private property owner in Zimbabwe actually building a large, purpose-built market for the bottom end of the market.
This sort of initiative needs to be encouraged.
The rents now go as legitimate revenue to a property owner and developer, one who sits there with the business health and safety rules and makes sure bathrooms, water supply, fire extinguishers, proper and safe power points and usually some security are provided.
Rentals are roughly the same sort of figures, except for a proper building rather than a shack, that the land and space barons charge.
The main difference is that the legitimate property owner provides basic services and secure tenancies, while the land baron just milks the traders in what amounts to the sort of protection racket that the mafia indulges in.
Demolitions may be necessary, but are usually less than successful even in the medium term.
Traders and land barons who prey on them simply move across the road or up the street a bit and start over, unless they simply move back onto the cleared land and re-erect their shacks.
So those who are calling for more radical planning and investment solutions have a strong case. The traders need practical alternatives near where they can find their customers.
Sometimes this will involve more imaginative zoning and town planning, and here Bulawayo is acknowledged as a leader.
But the second city and its council, right from the rise of the informal sector, were closely involved in opening opportunities for informal traders, while making sure that the sector had the basic regulation that kept the gangsters out of it.
The solution appears to be a combination of legitimate property development, usually by the private sector, but working with sympathetic local authorities so that decent town planning is followed, and local authorities and Government making land available, where possible, for respectable planned development.
Most less formal traders, and this is the case in Bulawayo and parts of Harare, would prefer the security of legal and licensed premises, with the health and safety rules enforced, rather than a squalid shack and a near gangster collecting the rent.
