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The frequent fires at the Glen View 8 home industries complex over the last few years highlight the need for having adequate facilities, with enforced safety standards, for the many small manufacturing businesses around Harare.

This is primarily the responsibility of Harare City Council, but obviously the council is not really interested in even setting standards, let alone in providing suitable facilities and generally ensuring the premises are properly run.

The proposal put forward by a private investor, which we highlighted yesterday, for a modern workshop complex with proper ablution facilities and a canteen, is one solution, although whether this should be built on other land or be part of a conversion of the Glen View home industries could be debated.

One problem is that the workshops need to be affordable to the small businesses that occupy the site. There are several industrial property investors who have built or converted existing factories to the sort of small units that many require when starting off in business, or which are unlikely to grow much in the near future.

But there is need for the initial incubation workshops, and there is need for the workshops that businesses in a suburb need to service the requirements of the residents of that suburb.

Several other schemes have been proposed to bring the Glen View 8 site up to the minimum standards required for health and safety, many of which seemed quite inexpensive and the rents would have to cover little more than the water supply and some basic services. 

None of these has progressed further than meetings with a lot of talk and zero action.

It appears that the fires in Glen View 8 are caused by equipment left switched on and other basic faults should be easy to prevent. Because of the way the complex has been built and run, the fire does more than just gut the business where the problem occurred and spreads very fast through the complex, gutting the many businesses that might well be properly run.

The sort of money that those using the complex are losing every year when the fire occurs must be more than what it would cost to have a better designed and better run complex with at least some standards when it came to construction, so that a for a start a fire does not spread. 

Other matters probably need to be fixed to reduce the risk of a fire starting in the first place.

We need to remember that those in this complex, and it was zoned as a home industries by the city council, are productive workers who make things, and these are the sort of businesses we need to encourage rather than vendors selling second-hand clothes on the side of the road and the like.

If the city council is totally unable to think what could be done, then it could at least call in others who might have good ideas or even approach the central Government, probably through the ministry responsible for SME development, to see what sort of solutions might work.

The private sector could well be able to help work out solutions. As the council is aware, a lot of private property owners in the city centre have created complexes of small shops and collections of businesses like tailoring establishments that do work and which do not lack tenants so have rents that the businesses find affordable. 

We get these small industry businesses operating in several areas on private land. There is a strip of them in Msasa, for example, that seem to be both safe and productive, in fact sufficiently so that several private developers have been building better units for renting out and at least one non-profit organisation has moved in to establish the needed incubation space.

These industrial incubators are not meant to be permanent premises, but rather a space where a small business can operate until it gets a big bigger and then has to move into the full commercial world.

The workshop space at a suburban complex like Glen View 8 does not need to be very fancy, and something in the line of a very basic factory shell might work. 

But it does need to be safe, and it does need operating standards that make fires a lot less likely, and if one breaks out makes it easy to control quickly, or at least not able to spread.

The informal sector is not an evil to be ignored, or something to be permitted without controls while the better off pretend it does not exist. When you get down to the basics it is a collection of very small businesses, and some that these days are not so small, and with people who are trying to make a living using their skills and living within the law. 

A degree of regularisation would be beneficial, and on council-owned land this should be fairly easy to implement, especially if all the businesses had the right forms to fill in. It does not seem impossible to create a model complex. An innovative and efficient city council should be able to come up with a model that works and can be built and run within budgetary constraints and within the means of those using it. 

Unfortunately this sort of innovation and imagination has been strongly lacking in Harare City Council, which has tended to bend its imagination on the enrichment of councillors and officials, both of which fairly obviously do not see being a productive business person within Glen View 8 as worth anything.

We see this lack of imagination in the past with plans to make all buses drop off passengers several kilometres from the city centre, or which think that vendors can be moved to markets far from where their customers live or work. 

All these past mistakes are simply signs that too many in the council think of us and them, and those designated as “them” should be out of sight and out of mind.

A major change is needed, and the present reconstruction of Glen View 8 should have been an ideal opportunity to see what could be done a lot better, without pricing the tenants out of the market.