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In such raids most vendors are able to flee with their goods without much problem. We see this ability to pack and go just about everywhere, from the hawkers at intersections to vendors on pavements.
Arrests are rare in these raids. The laws being broken are municipal by-laws, rather than defined criminal acts, so the police, probably correctly, feel that it would be very heavy handed to arrest swathes of people who will end up paying minute deposit fines, but on Wednesday things got worse. As the news of the raid spread rapidly down the street, most vendors did their usual vanishing act.
A group of young men selling pirated CDs, and DVDs down Nelson Mandela Avenue decided to resist police pressure to pack up and go. They felt they had safety in numbers.
Police reinforcements were called in. Things calmed a bit and then that same group of vendors started pushing again, while their wiser colleagues drifted away and joined the shoppers, so the police used tear gas, the violent group threw stones and violent men were arrested.
The violence tends to overshadow what the final result was.
As usual with such raids the vendors vanished. When police and municipal officials left they started drifting back, and within an hour most were in business again.
Raids do not seem to be the solution, and we once again urge the city council to think creatively. It is unlikely that the police can keep huge teams in First Street to enforce minor by-laws with a riot squad on standby in case vendors resist. Nothing else will answer, at least at the moment.
Just about everyone agrees that Harare city centre has moved down market over the past decade or two; the Kopje has spread east, as it were.
But the vendors are just part of the problem. There are no more than a couple of dozen in First Street, certainly once we exclude the newspaper sellers and those women who sell shopping bags outside supermarkets, a necessary service.
First Street itself is badly rundown. The brick sets are cracked and crumbling, the flower-beds are empty and dilapidated, the drains are bunged up with take-away garbage, the rubbish bins are a disgrace and the benches are rubble.
The city council needs a holistic approach to restoring the mall, and must involve both the owners and tenants of the shops along the mall, and near it, and the vendors in the area. For a start, we agree that vendors and hawkers blocking pavements are not really in keeping with an upmarket shopping street but obviously they offer something that the shops in the area do not, otherwise they would not come there. Shoppers seem to need them.
The council needs to think about this and there is a solution. In two shopping areas, Avondale and Downtown, there are large private markets, that large concrete structure turned into a flea market in the suburb and the giant Gulf Market, with facilities from the cupboard shop for the starter vendor to large shops on the street, around Market Square.
Several points need to be noted about these private markets. Both have facilities for the sort of person now vending in First Street, and both offer upgrades as those vendors acquire more capital and boost their business.
Both are clean and crime free. Both are well-run. And both are considered an advantage to the larger shops in their areas, rather than a nuisance, as they attract a lot of shoppers into these areas.
So we need something similar for the First Street area. Private owners of land and buildings on or very near First Street need to be invited to come up with proposals for one or two flea markets, properly run, that can be used by the present vendors. The vendors in turn must accept that they should use these markets, not the streets.
Newspaper companies need to be invited to erect small booths near each intersection, similar to but perhaps smaller, than the two already in the mall.
the mall needs to be rebuilt and redeveloped; brick paving and flowers are not that expensive. While this is going on the city council can station staff in the mall to ensure that no new vendors move in; arresting one sneaking in is a lot more effective than intermittent raids once they are established.
The city council can also plan for weekly markets in the mall, perhaps on Saturday afternoons when the banks and department stores that line so much of the mall close. If very upmarket Borrowdale can do this, we do not see why First Street cannot have the same, but with proper tables not cardboard boxes.
Harare needs a vibrant, active city centre, open at least 10 hours a day, six days a week.
There is a place for the vendor and the giant department store in such a mix, but it needs management and more importantly a management that is responsive to the needs of shoppers, as well as those who sell to them.