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We commend measures announced by the Government to rid the streets of cities and towns countrywide of night vendors who were responsible for widespread littering and disruptions to other businesses operating in central business districts.
Local Government and Public Works Minister Daniel Garwe ordered a stop to night vending that exploded in recent months while urgent work is done by local authorities to have all vendors licensed and operating from designated areas.
However, local authorities, and Harare in particular, have been ignoring their own by-laws and general business laws for many years and doing nothing for several decades to give vendors a fair, effective and legal way of earning their small livings while sorting out the health and traffic challenges, including blocked pavements.
If Harare City Council had started 25 years ago in building and opening properly sited vendor markets in the city centre and the suburbs, building on the work done in the 1980s, by now there would be a large stock of market places, all near where customers needed them, all sanitary and none of them a health or drugs hazard.
The Minister needs to maintain his pressure on the councils, and encourage the spread of decent practices, public-private partnerships and the like that can retain a source of income for the vendors, keep them in touch with their customers and yet bring order to the whole process.
Meanwhile, the Minister was rightly perturbed at the sudden expansion of non-legal vending into the night, when even the modest daytime amenities, such as public toilets and most business being in the open, were not available.
So the temptation and actual practice of far more criminal activity, and by that we mean things like drug dealing, not just breaches of by-laws, became far more common.
The darkness also allowed more gang activity, such as protection rackets and thefts, and the sanitary, health and litter problems just exploded.
So his ultimatum to stop that will at least stop the problem from becoming worse while we start exploring permanent solutions.
Harare City Council has thought about vending several times, but not effectively and even when bust terminuses and the like have been cleared, has allowed space barons back in. For some time, for example, the council had the not so wise idea of moving all vendors to open markets far from the city centre, far from any customers and just surrounded by bush.
This might have cleared the streets, but did not meet the second requirement that vendors needed to earn a living and that a lot of people bought vegetables and other small cheap items from them and found them a convenience.
There is land in and around the city centre, some of it rented out to used-car sales people, that could be used for building proper markets. As we have suggested before, it should be possible to redevelop the whole railway reserve on the southern edge of the city centre into adjoining huge central rail and bus stations plus a giant market of several hundred stalls, all under tight security.
This would solve a whole lot of challenges, including the grossly undersized and scattered bus terminuses now in use and the lack of a proper public transport infrastructure. The National Railways of Zimbabwe, when surrendering everything but the railway station, would be compensated with land for 21st century operations elsewhere.
Proper vending markets would not be free for users. But it should be possible to give vendors some sort of stall for the equivalent of a dollar or two each day, which might even include minute presumptive tax, and to have the basic cheap vendor’s licence readily available. The advantage of licensing hawkers and vendors is that databases are created of names and addresses and it becomes harder to breach health laws or indulge in criminal, rather than just illegal, activity.
The upgrade seen at the next higher level, the new giant market at Mbare being built in a public-private partnership, and with enthusiastic backing from the stallholders who want secure decent and hygienic premises rather than a collection of shacks, shows what is possible.
If we could combine an imaginative city council with an imaginative property concern ready to create and rent out tiny vendor spaces, we could have what we need and give both the vendors a decent place to work and their customers a safe place to buy from.
Online Reporter