Vendors: Chinamasa on point, Tsvangirai misfires File picture showing fruit vending in the city of Harare.
The issue of informal street vending has drawn all sorts of emotions across the divide

The issue of informal street vending has drawn all sorts of emotions across the divide

My Two Cents Happiness Zengeni
It’s been a while. A lot has been happening. Sanlam Insurance is making a re-entry into the Zimbabwe insurance market, only this time through Zimnat, Shasha (remember him from Zol) bought Leopard Rock at a premium and gets to be a director at Cambria, the former owners (more like a reward for the huge price he paid.)

Elsewhere, Kenya Equity Bank has plans to enter the Zimbabwe market and Innscor wants to create the only listed Pan-African focused Fast Foods chain outside South Africa. In between was the Meikles and Zimbabwe Stock Exchange debacle which seems to have cooled down but we still do not know the truth about the Reserve Bank debt while businessman Justin Mutasa gets nearly $5/kg for his tobacco and media still talks about the poor tobacco prices this season.

Still on the events; vendors informalised Harare CBD and now have a seven-day ultimatum to vacate that space. The issue of informal street vending has drawn all sorts of emotions across the divide. Listed property company ZPI in March said the rapid informalisation of the CBD irritates corporate tenants and decreases land value. This has forced them to move out in droves to mostly the northern suburbs.

Of course we want a clean Harare, but perhaps we should also consider that many are drawing livelihoods from street trading.

Vending is not a professional choice, people have been driven to it by economic circumstances and this is the reason why I will support recent comments made by Finance and Economic Minister Patrick Chinamasa that we need to deal with the underlying problem first before we can hand over ultimatums to people.

He made a lot of sense because he reasoned that it would not make sense for the city to achieve a utopian kind of environment where everything appears orderly and in place when in actual fact it makes the problem bigger. If Government has acknowledged that we are in a new economy, they should also admit that in the early stages of this cycle, informal economy will be the most active for sustaining livelihoods.

We must just find a way of making the informal sector contribute to the national economy through a strategic policy, which will unlock value for Government. According to African Development Bank statistics 55 percent of Sub-Saharan GDP is from the informal economy. If our unemployment rate is 11 percent then informal traders make up the bulk of that employed 89 percent.

On the other hand, MDC-T leader Morgan Tsvangirai is attempting to capitalise on human vulnerability on a situation that he or his party has never proffered a solution to.

MDC-T has had impractical policy proposals which would never have been implemented locally. Tsvangirai should have just stayed away from it and not use people for political traction. His not-so-cleverly worded press statement will paint the vendors cause for economic livelihood as political.

Let economic issues be dealt with by the parties involved: vendors and the Government. In any case the Harare City Council is dominated by his party members, why did they allow the situation to get out of hand. Why did he not call for a caucus to bring his councillors to order? So in other words, if I am to be on the extreme side, Tsvangirai’s council was breeding the situation for political mileage.

The informalisation of the city is a problem; the people are not and as such should not be viewed as enemies.

They are economic actors we need to engage.

The fact that someone pushes a cart full of bananas to a committed stand at his preferred corner shows that he is an economically willing and able individual. He is not lazy, munhu ane simba. Tap into that power for the good of the country.

Local Government minister Ignatius Chombo who has been at the helm of this ministry before informalisation was a problem needs to find solutions The informalisation phenomenon is not unique to Zimbabwe.

We need dialogue with the vendors, and investigations into council’s complacence in the influx of informal traders into the city centre (people just don’t pitch tents from nowhere or set up barricades in the street).

Minister Chombo has qualified planners in his ministry, and if they don’t have time students at the various universities will gladly take this assignment up. He can even engage some of the degreed vendors to come up with the study. He won’t be the first minister to institute studies, Industry Minister Mike Bimha presided over the cost-competitiveness report, the Psychomotor Ministry was born out of studies.

In fact the best policies are from studies. Because of the lack of economic studies, we end up having reactive interventions (knee-jerk reactions) by Government which put us in more difficult situations.

Johannesburg tried to chase away informal street traders but all force measures failed until they had to build market stalls even in the middle of the pavement to at least formalise their operations. They didn’t go away, business just moved to Sandton. It’s a socio-economic reality that we should not wish away.

Change of tactics is necessary. The problem of informal street vendors is rather a wakeup call to the town planners.

As it stands it shows we did not plan for the city’s inevitable population growth and rural to urban migration. Harare in 2015 is not the same as Harare in 1985. Town Planning is, however, a story for another day!

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