SHARP SHOOTER: Every voter is not a vendor

The battle of the vendors against Government has finally degenerated into comical threats with overzealous sectors aligned to a dead political opposition making shallow demonstrations that they will resurrect in 2018 in yet another futile protest vote against the ruling party.

Vukani Madoda

What these anti-Government elements fail to realise is that every voter is not a vendor; in fact urban vendors are known to be protest voters who go with any whim.

The voters who actually matter in this country are farmers who took advantage of land reforms. If one wants to talk of elections in this country, it is rural votes that matter.

Rural population refers to people living in rural areas as defined by national statistical offices.

It is calculated as the difference between total population and urban population. Rural population (percentage of total population) in Zimbabwe was last measured at 60,40 in 2013, according to the World Bank.

Of that population, few are vendors of smuggled goods and wares and even fewer are members of the opposition political parties.

The voters that matter are not all vendors, even in urban areas the voters of note and significance have very little to do with vending. It is common cause that following the elections boycotting mantra of the opposition parties, most vendors are seen doing business on election days as was manifested during the recent June 10 by-elections.

These recalcitrant vendors are opposition supporters and are bent on clashing with Government or the ruling party at the slightest nudge of being disciplined. They have been unmasked for what they are — pretenders.

They pretended to support to the ruling party in order to make the cities ungovernable and when Government decides to end their lawlessness, their true colours as members of a fragmented opposition emerge, hence the shallow threats to bid for yet another futile protest vote in 2018.

The ruling party, Zanu-PF, is a very tolerant party which gave these vendors ample time to wind-up their illegal activities selling their smuggled goods at undesignated spaces.

With the backing of the opposition parties these vendors stubbornly refused to heed the call to respect the rule of law and move to allocated selling kiosks where they would be legally allowed to do their businesses.

The opposition party which they support has done absolutely nothing to improve the livelihood of the electorate which votes for them at every election.

Instead what the opposition party has done is to sell to these vendors a worthless strategy of protesting against everything that Government proposes.

Now we have vendors protesting against a constitution and a law which they themselves endorsed in a landslide referendum, now we have vendors protesting against matters that are in their own interests, now we have vendors protesting against having elections and protesting that they will protest again in 2018.

Zanu-PF will not be bothered by the sound of a few misguided misfits who could have made better use of themselves tilling the land in rural areas to feed the nation and the region. Zanu PF does not care a hoot about the disguised vendor vote because it has revealed itself as an opposition vote.

What Zanu-PF cares about for the time being is empowering the 16 constituencies, mostly urban, that recently overwhelmingly vested their confidence in the ruling party on June 10.

It is clear to see that the opposition party is in a desperate bid to discredit every progressive move which President Mugabe and the ruling party carry out.

The recent, strategic reshuffling of the cabinet is a case in point. While the MDC watches from the terraces of political oblivion, Zanu-PF continues to make strides for the betterment of all citizens.

The appointment of Cde Saviour Kasukuwere to the Local Government Ministry was very sound because Cde Tyson knows just how to deal with these vendors and their MDC backers.

Cde Tyson, like Cde Jonathan Moyo, is a man of action and no later than two days after his appointment sanity is coming back to our cities.

Vendors have been an eyesore in our beautiful cities moreso because they made the cities dirty and filthy.

They are the reason why the MDC has been parroting negatives that Zimbabwe is a failed State and yet in essence the real failure is the opposition MDC and its supporters disguised as vendors. Genuine vendors have since heeded to the call to move to designated places to sell their wares and genuine vendors do not sell smuggled goods.

Smuggled goods undermine the fiscus because they evade paying taxes and duties. Furthermore selling wares at undesignated places and in particular right in front of buildings of bonafide tax-abiding businesses that pay rent, rates and electricity bills is tantamount to stealing from the nation.

Genuine vendors must be willing to move to designated places and pay tax instead of providing unfair competition to formal businesses that are law-abiding and tax compliant.

A vendor worth his/her salt and a vendor worthy of voting will not fight running battles with Government because they want to continue trading illegally. We have all seen what is happening in Greece, and our Government is intelligent enough to realise the administrative lessons from the European nation’s fiscal tragedy.

Zanu PF will not allow municipalities to be woeful managers of resources and lack accountability when a stable backbone of revenue from vendors can be adequately tapped into.

The ruling party will not allow a political system that is highly influential and self-serving to prevail illegally with few beneficiaries in an excessively skewed economic environment that diverts funds from where the need exists.

One such need, unsurprisingly, which Zanu-PF has been battling to rectify is the growing number of citizens living below the poverty line, as well as the increasing cases of criminality. Vendors, therefore, are a fertile miniature Greek problem at our hands. Prolific economist of the London Business School Michael G Jacobides wrote that “an extremely important problem in Greece is tax avoidance — Greece has only 29 per cent of its GDP as tax receipts; the EU average is 37 per cent.

The inability to tax fairly has hit not only public finances, but has also created a sense of unease and social discomfort with taxation, especially under conditions of duress”.

No one could have said it better.

No one could have seen better the social discomfort that these vendors bring and no one can argue now that unregistered vendors operating illegally at undesignated places are today Zimbabwe’s greatest enemy of the State.

Dubulaizitha!