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Mugabe's clean-up fails to drive off vendors from streets
ZimOnline
June 28, 2006

http://www.zwnews.com/issuefull.cfm?ArticleID=14664

"You must be literally on your toes every minute"

Bulawayo - Hordes of vegetable vendors scream themselves hoarse imploring potential customers to buy their vegetables and tomatoes along the busy Lobengula Street in Zimbabwe's second biggest city of Bulawayo. But suddenly, an ear-splitting whistle pierces the early night sending the vendors scurrying in all directions with the few goods they could salvage as the police come in hot pursuit. At least 10 unlucky vendors fail to make it and are soon bundled into a police truck together with their vegetables, fruits, some washing soap and cooking oil that they sell on the streets to eke a living. "This is how we survive," says 32-year old Sihle Dube, as she re-emerges from the crowd to defiantly set up her table again after the police had driven off. "You must be literally on your toes every minute and listen for the signal. Most of those who have been arrested are still new in the trade. They have not yet mastered the art of survival," she told Zim Online.

Dube is among thousands of vendors who had been driven off the streets of Bulawayo under a controversial government urban clean-up exercise last year. But a year after President Robert Mugabe ordered the controversial clean-up in cities and towns, vendors here in Bulawayo are back on the streets with a vengeance vowing to continue defying the government in a desperate bid to keep body and soul together. Mugabe said the clean-up exercise was necessary to restore the beauty of cities and towns and to smash an illegal but thriving black market where vendors sell anything from fruits to contraceptive pills to foreign currency, hard to find in Zimbabwe. The United Nations said the clean-up left at least 700 000 people homeless and directly affected another 2.4 million people. The UN said the exercise was a violation of the rights of the poor. To parry away criticism by the UN, Western governments and local human rights groups, the government unveiled a new ambitious project to build modern houses and vending stalls for families whose homes and informal business kiosks had been razed down by police bulldozers. But analysts predicted that the reconstruction project would flop given Harare's lack of resources and cash.

Twelve months down the line, those predictions are coming true with government Small-scale Enterprises Minister Sithembiso Nyoni having for example commissioned to date only 50 vending stalls in Bulawayo, a bustling city of more than 1.5 million people. International relief agencies also report that many of the families displaced by the clean-up exercise still live in the open because the government has failed to build the houses it promised them. Here in Bulawayo, a hotbed of opposition support, vendors accused the government of arrogance saying first it decided to build too few stalls and then placed them far away from the public such that it was unviable to do business from the new stalls. "It does not make sense for us to leave people here and go down there. Who does she (Nyoni) expect us to sell to when the people we are targeting are found right here?" said fruit seller, Thubelihle Moyo. She added: "That is the problem with this government. They always want to do things their own way without consulting those involved."

In a way to prove official arrogance, Bulawayo Upcoming Traders Association spokesman Edward Manning, said his organisation had secured a court order barring the council and the police from raiding their members until a solution could be found but he said the order was being routinely ignored. "We were granted a reprieve to continue trading without disruptions by both the police and council security guards by the Bulawayo High Court last year but the police have continued to raid us despite the court order," Manning said. Bulawayo City Council spokesman, Pathisa Nyathi, however insisted the local authority would continue sending police after vendors because it could not just sit by while the country's second capital was being turned upside down by the informal traders. "We raid them because they are doing their business in a disorderly manner. That cannot be allowed," Nyathi said defiantly. But it is a threat that will move very few among these young men and women vendors out to earn an honest living despite the odds staked against them by a seven-year economic crisis that has seen inflation shooting to more than 1 100 percent and shortages of food, fuel, electricity and just about every essential commodity. As 25-year old vegetable vendor Tinashe Shumba sums it: "Some of us still have a conscience and we will rather be raided than steal from our fellow men who are already suffering like the rest of us."

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