Online Reporter
THERE are a few things more embarrassing than watching an institution trying to regulate the future with the laws of the past.
The Harare City Council appears to have perfected the art.
The latest masterstroke from Town House is an intensified crackdown on e-hailing drivers, including the popular platform InDrive, with the municipal police reportedly posing as passengers, booking rides and then arresting or fining unsuspecting drivers.
Imagine that. You accept a trip thinking you are picking up someone who needs a ride.
Instead, you pick up a municipal officer whose actual destination is apparently the council offices — and whose fare is a fine.
Welcome to Harare, where accepting a passenger can now apparently be a high-risk occupation. Drivers are understandably operating on high alert, with some becoming suspicious of unfamiliar passengers for fear that an innocent-looking ride request could actually be a Town House sting operation.
This is less about public transport regulation and more like ride-hailing hide-and-seek.
And the biggest casualty could be a service that has become increasingly popular precisely because it fills gaps left by Harare’s struggling public transport system.
Instead of sitting down with e-hailing platforms and establishing sensible rules around licensing, taxation, safety and compliance, the council appears to have chosen the oldest trick in the enforcement manual: ambush them.
The law has not properly caught up with technology. But having identified the problem, Town House seems to have arrived at the strangest possible solution: force 21st-century technology into a 20th-century taxi box.
The council wants e-hailing vehicles to comply with traditional taxi requirements, including white number plates and operating from designated ranks.
But e-hailing is not a taxi-rank business.
The whole point is that the passenger summons the vehicle digitally.
The driver does not sit at a rank waiting for someone to walk up and shout: “Driver, town!”
The smartphone has changed the game.
Yet Town House appears determined to tell technology: “No, thank you. Please form an orderly queue at the taxi rank.”
That is not regulation.
That is like trying to make the internet use a fax machine.
And why can’t Harare learn from central Government, which has found ways of bringing digital services into the tax net without simply trying to kill the services themselves?
Why not engage the platforms, create a modern licensing framework and establish clear safety and compliance requirements?
Why the fake passengers?
Why the ambushes?
More importantly, why is the council fighting a service that many residents clearly want?
Harare should instead be asking why commuters have embraced e-hailing in the first place. Could it be because the city’s public transport system has failed to keep pace with a modern population?
People want convenience, reliability and the ability to summon transport from their phones from anywhere in the city.
Instead of fighting that reality, Town House should be fixing the transport system that created the demand for alternatives.
Technology will not stop because the council has failed to update its regulations.
People will not suddenly stop using e-hailing platforms because the municipal police are booking fake rides. And innovation certainly will not wait patiently for Town House to catch up. Regulation is necessary, but this is not the way to go about it.
It is simply a dinosaur trying to catch a smartphone.
