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The drive to clear the roads in Harare Metropolitan, basically Harare City and Chitungwiza Municipality since Ruwa is far better organised, has shown up a flood of needs that the local authorities cannot meet plus a high degree of organised corruption with, as usual, those at the bottom of the economic heap carrying the burden.

Many people have to be self-employed, that is run their own business no matter how small. This is praiseworthy as a concept and beats turning to crime or getting involved in complex fraud and get-rich-quick schemes.

But they need some support. Few have the capital and other resources to buy land and build proper premises or rent premises from someone else.

Properly run councils would have long ago worked out where markets and micro-industrial areas could be set up that were convenient for potential customers and put in the basic infrastructure: public toilets, a decent fence and a row of roofed shelters.

And those same councils would have then made it totally clear that vending or manufacturing on road sides was simply not permitted and would, weekly if necessary, clear away the obstructions that some might want to put in place.

Instead they did nothing and allowed the shacks and obstructions to become entrenched, causing congestion as roads and road verges were blocked.

To make matters far worse a lot of council staff have been printing their own licence forms and receipt books and have joined the ranks of the “space barons”, so many of these vendors and others think they have legal rights. They are not just squatting on public land and roadways, but are paying for the privilege.

The councils seem to allow that and do not have any independent inspections, which would have quickly uncovered the mess that would have seen a few council staff dumped for corruption and a properly run local authority coming into operation.

Adding to the confusion are the human rights lawyers, those who tend to regard anything the Government does as totally evil and quite willing to see the mess continue so long as it is not in the suburbs where they live and work.

While the roads and road verges are being cleared under the authority of the Roads Act, which actually criminalises obstruction of highways and road reserves and places the responsibility for clearing such obstructions on the road authority for each highway or stretch of road, we have the lawyers pretending the obstructions have some legitimacy that can be regularised and so getting court orders that will be overturned, but only after an appeal hearing.

Many of those being moved off the highways and the verges say they have nowhere else to go. In some cases this is a poor excuse, since by just moving onto a verge somewhere and building their shack they do not pay anyone any rent or tax, so it is convenient.

The major growth in micro businesses has seen a strong and positive response from developers in the private sector, with major markets being created and with property owners applying themselves to work out how they can subdivide existing property or create new structures that can be rented out at prices low enough to be affordable.

The most interesting point of these developments is that they quickly fill up. You do not find vacancies very easily and so there is a lot of demand.

The private developers have also realised that when you have small and micro-businesses you need a critical mass of such businesses, so customers are willing to enter the market, and you try and group similar businesses together so that between them they probably have the required ranges of stock.

This is one reason why so many small businesses selling car parts congregate in Kaguvi Street and even why car sales like to line Robert Mugabe Road as it passes through Eastlea.

A customer can move easily along the line until they see something that catches their eye. This is, in some ways, how cities develop: whole streets devoted to one sort of business, and that can go right up the line. Madison Avenue in New York is the centre of the global advertising business for example.

Some of the areas where the present verge clearance was in progress show a similar grouping and open the opportunity for the councils to establish proper markets, either by themselves, or by enabling the private sector, or by developing public-private partnerships.

For some reason Zindoga on the edge of Waterfalls grouped informal takeaways. The hygiene standards are very basic and that grouping is a health disaster waiting to happen.

But it would be easy to find some space in the area where the same grouping could be allowed to operate in safe conditions, and with the city council rather than the space barons or corrupt officials collecting the rents from the small properly-built stalls.

There is need, in many suburbs, for a small market for building materials and where go-ahead traders can sell the pillars, flower pots and the like that they make.

Again a council that was trying to be helpful could set up such markets, and prevent the mess and obstruction that arise when unplanned vending takes place.

This requires local authorities, and Harare and Chitungwiza is particular, to be pro-active. These two councils allowed land barons to create a planning disaster and cheat thousands, rather than do their job and stop unauthorised development as it started.

Admittedly, considering what it now going through the criminal courts, it looks as though a lot of senior and middle officials were involved, either as land barons themselves or by taking bribes from the barons.

And now we find this corruption goes right down the line, even to chiselling $50 or $100 a day in bribes from someone with a push cart.

The “associations” and NGOs that like to proclaim they are there to help the “little people” do not put pressure on the urban councils to clean up their act and provide honest services, possibly because these councils are run by opposition parties and so are deemed to be automatically on the side of angels, even when they steal or do nothing.

But what it does mean is that the present clean-up or obstructions on road verges probably needs to be extended to cleaning up the councils that allowed the mess to arise in the first place and whose staff are probably the major beneficiaries of that mess.