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Harare's hawkers go undercover
The Sunday Independent (SA)
July 31, 2005

http://www.zwnews.com/issuefull.cfm?ArticleID=12439

Harare - "Hello sister," says the vendor quietly, beckoning a potential customer closer and looking around furtively as though he is selling stolen watches or drugs. "I got strawberries," he says. The strawberries, small and sour, are tucked underneath his jacket, which is frayed and dirty, like the man himself; and he has lost weight in the past three months. On Wednesday he went back to his turf, a street outside a shabby shopping centre in Harare's northern suburbs, for the first time since May 27 when he was arrested for hawking. Some shoppers, also edgy, buy his strawberries. And the naartjies and the unripe tomatoes and the bruised bananas. Only the shelled peas look bright and fresh. The vendor's goods are stored in a box under aluminium trolleys lined up outside a supermarket. His prices are double what they were when President Robert Mugabe decided two months ago that tens of thousands of street sellers were "filth" and forcibly closed down their operations. A white-haired shopper pats the vendor's back and smiles: "Good for you. Glad you're back. See you tomorrow." Outside the old Scout Hall, now used for aerobics classes, vendors gather near the door, as there are rich pickings here.

As she forks out hundreds of thousands of dollars for avocados, spinach and petunia seeds, one of the aerobics women says: "Before the "tsunami" (as Mugabe's purge of the poor is called) hawkers were a bit of a nuisance. Now I am pleased to see them back. Everyone was touched by this, even us. We all know someone who was affected." The sellers and the buyers of the pitiful, not-so-fresh produce have now become co-conspirators against the state. Mavis, 40, is one of the most professional of the city's "legal" hawkers and boss of three colleagues, all single mothers who have been selling under a tree at another Harare shopping centre for eight years. She stores her hawker's licences from the City of Harare inside her bra. They show that she pays about R2,50 a month to sell on the streets. During periods of shortage during the past five years Mavis has often been able to source mielie meal, sugar and cooking oil. She also extended credit when banks ran short of notes during regular runs on the Zimbabwe dollar. She even takes cheques, when many shops won't, from regular customers. Mavis sits on the pavement watching the 4x4s, looking out for buyers she knows. Her day starts at 4am so that she can get to the city's main market in Mbare, on the southern edge of the city, when it opens.

Licensed she might be, but she is still part of the "filth" Mugabe referred to when he ordered the demolition of the homes of at least 700 000 people, according to the United Nations, and put tens of thousands of gainfully employed vendors out of business. Mavis's turnover has plunged to less than 10 percent of what it was before the tsunami, while rent for a room for her two youngest children in Kuwadzana township has doubled in the same period. "We cannot sell under the tree now because they may take our stuff again, and we are not covering costs because everything has gone up," she says. Mavis grabs a rough-skinned paw-paw from under a bush, covers it with her skirt as if it is weapons-grade plutonium, and sprints towards a bakkie circling the car park. Another clandestine transaction takes place. A security guard employed at the shopping centre says police arrived the previous afternoon on bicycles to check that no vendors were selling and no customers were buying. "They are short of fuel, but still they come."

Economist Tony Hawkins roughly estimates the volume of informal trade to be about $2 billion (R13,4 billion) a year, or a third of the economy. Many informal traders are former artisans who lost jobs as the formal economy collapsed. Isaac Gonese, opposition Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) MP for Mutare, in eastern Zimbabwe, says many people are still living in the open or are crammed into the homes of relatives and friends. "They take out their things at night so there is enough room on the floor to sleep. There is no house construction here. The churches are helping with blankets and food. There is nothing from the government." Blessing Chebundo, MDC MP for Kwekwe in central Zimbabwe, says the government has not begun to build any new houses to replace those demolished in any of the small towns between Harare and Bulawayo. "There is misery and suffering. No food, no fuel, no work, nothing. It is unbelievable what has happened in the past two months to people who were already poor." He says the MDC's five-roomed office in downtown Kwekwe was demolished earlier this week. "It was set on fire before the presidential election in 2002. This week the bulldozers finished it off."

Municipal trucks in Harare, immobilised by lack of fuel, rarely collect refuse. The stench in some city streets is sharp and rubble lies on many sidewalks from buildings flattened in Mugabe's clean-up campaign. About 15km west of the city, earth-moving equipment and graders are parked near the former Porta Farm informal settlement of about 15 000 which was bulldozed in June. Former residents who lived there for 15 years and were forcibly removed say police planned to level the site so that even the rubble from last month's demolitions would disappear. The last of the Porta Farm residents was moved to Hopley Farm, east of Harare, on Wednesday night. "There are eight army trucks at Hopley to take us to rural areas. There is nothing at Hopley for us, nothing. We were not allowed to take our stuff from Porta Farm; the police called it 'rubbish', so we have nothing. Some of us have jobs in Harare and no relatives in rural areas," an anguished man said in a telephone interview. A baby was whimpering in the background. "Please help, this baby is only two weeks old," the man said before the line went dead.

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