Touts should never be allowed back

there are a whole lot of things that must be done swiftly. The Harare City Council was planning to resume full control of all terminuses and ranks within a few weeks with what appeared to be a sensible plan involving bus parks outside the city centre with a controlled flow of buses into the city centre to pick up commuters.
This must obviously be implemented now.
There may be a few more hiccups by going live earlier, but there is no option. Facilities are still being completed and signs still have to be put in place, but the council can speed up some of this work and at least take control and have a presence on the ground.
The police are very good, and have the responsibility for maintaining order and forcing people to obey the law and the rules. But they are not trained marshals of bus terminuses and cannot be expected to run these for the city.
Most people will understand any minor hiccups. So intolerable had the criminal control of bus terminuses become that we now have kombi drivers praising the police for clearing out the touts, an unprecedented state of affairs. When last did we hear a kombi driver thanking a policeman and being eager to see one?
Commuters are also far happier. This air of goodwill, possibly a brief honeymoon, is an ideal opportunity to implement the plans and iron out the minor hitches, making necessary changes, before everyone goes back to complaining. So the council must move fast and move its people into terminuses today.
There are questions of fees and the like, but so long as the council, the police and the bus operators are all talking to each other we are confident that a lot can be sorted out quickly in this narrow window of opportunity.
And it is the council that must be doing most of the listening and most of the action, because the council will have to do the positive work of creating a functioning transport system.
The police can stop criminals interfering, they can offer advice on traffic controls, and they can help enforce the rules. But the council has to do the work.
When the council abdicated its responsibilities for bus terminuses and for street parking more than a decade ago, touts moved in. They formed groups and now gangs. The council seized back the street parking, successfully.
The arguments there are whether a foreign company should or should not control EasiPark, not whether the presence of parking attendants is or is not a good thing. Every driver now agrees that things are a lot better.
The council learned from the EasiPark criticism and was building teams of its own staff for controlling bus terminuses, rather than contracting this work out. Doing it all at once instead of in phases, as the parking was done, will be harder, but so long as there is rapid progress in bringing everyone up to speed commuters will tolerate a modest number of teething problems in the first week or two. The alternative is totally unacceptable.
In fact, a programme of continuous improvement and continuous consultation will avoid the other problem of the EasiPark system, its lack of flexibility and the irritation normally felt with an imposed solution. We mention, for example, that parking charges are uniform, whether you are parking next to First Street Mall or parking in a less desirable and low rent area.
The more complex problem of public transport needs to be far more of continuous work in progress as we refine systems so that commuters can get to work and get home quickly, traffic flows well, streets are not blocked and there is a fair sharing of resources between sometimes conflicting demands.
But the plan of the council to allow kombis into the central business district but not allowing them to park there, since the western terminuses are far too small to accommodate them all, is at least a logical start that does make a rational attempt to find a balance between the conflicting demands of shopkeepers, commuters, car drivers, pedestrians and kombi drivers.
If we move from chaos controlled by criminals to a system built on enforced rules, and the police have promised to keep high pressure on enforcement until everyone actually obeys them, then we can move forward.
If we find a particular rule is not working well, or has undesirable side-effects, we can change it.
We do not have to be dictatorial, just all agree that we will work together to create something a lot better than what we have.
But the critical point, now that the touts are being moved out, is not to leave another vacuum for new gangs to fill.
The police can hold the fort while the council moves in, but the council must play its part and move in now, today. It has abdicated its responsibilities for far too long.