Let’s Really Talk About This Vendor Situation…

Right now there is a stand-off between Zimbabwe government security authorities and the vendors they want to get rid of.

First the scenario. Urban centres across the country have had an exponential increase in the number of vendors on their streets.

Now just to be clear, vending in itself is not at trial but vending in areas that according to the city council by-laws are not designated for that activity.

The City Councils have been engaging in running battles with vendors and there are so many of them out there, the authorities have resigned themselves to defeat.

In comes the Zimbabwe government via its minister of local government Ignatius Chombo.

An ultimatum is given for the vendors to move or else.

The vendors say screw you.

So an impasse at the moment with a potentially volatile situation. It even has MDC-T’s Morgan Tsvangirai crawling out of the woodworks pretending to care for the same people his council in Harare has been chasing up and down. He wants a bite.

The simple issue is, the vendors can’t carry on the way they are carrying on because there just isn’t space for it. In effect now we find ourselves in a situation where there are more vendors than buyers.

However the reality is, there must be an option for those people. Even if the earn $10 a day, we have to find that $10 so they can survive.

And if they earn $10 a day, are there are hawkers’ licenses than accommodate them? In essence is it commercially viable to be legal? Forget about being commercially viable because we are really being elitist here… how about just surviving?

They can’t possibly be allowed to be illegal for way too long. By the by, remember that the reason why some of those goods are more expensive in shops is because you are paying for the licenses, the rentals, rates. The actual product is immaterial sometimes.

So what now?

No idea. We watch, we wait. See who blinks first. And then we decide what happens next. There has to be a conversation.

The situation did not happen overnight. So it cannot possibly be expected to be fixed overnight (or even over 7 days). Someone slept on the job and this happened. In fact many people including government were not bothered.

It is that intense.