By Wisdom Mumera
The government has once again enacted a decree prohibiting street vending, this time extending the ban to include nighttime operations.
The poster boy for these actions is Local Government Minister Daniel Garwe, who has lately also been in the news for his 2030 campaigns.
This combination of an illegal political campaign and a frivolous attempt to curtail an almost natural economic phenomenon betrays the core vulnerability of government.
Here is a cluster of limited minds forever caught in a loop of redundancy, acting and reenacting the same script without gaining new insights or crafting creativity!
Banning Vending For Millionth Time
Garwe said that street vending, particularly at night, is fueling illegal activities, undermining formal business enterprises, and contributing to the disintegration of urban order.
“Night vending has brought with it illicit drug and substance dealings, which is a threat to health, economy and national security”.
“Importation and selling of second-hand clothing is banned, and consequently, street and night vending activities are equally banned. The time to act is now, not later.”
The decision is eerily similar to Tafadzwa Muguti’s tint faux pas, linking the darkness of windows to the problem of drugs in a tragicomedy of absurd levels.
Perplexity arises when one considers the futility of yet another anti-vendor intervention in a cycle long characterised by its repetitiveness.
The expectation of a different outcome from measures that have proven ineffective in the past is indeed confusing.
This situation echoes the age-old adage about folly, persistently engaging in the same actions while anticipating divergent results.
The Permanence of Vendors
It is abundantly clear that the presence of vending is not likely to diminish, regardless of prohibitions imposed during the day or night.
In 2017 Harare issued a 48-hour ultimatum for all illegal food vendors in the city to stop operations as it stepped up efforts to contain a typhoid outbreak that had claimed two lives.
The move by the local authority followed a typhoid outbreak that began in December 2016.
Authorities cited poor water and sanitation, uncollected refuse and uncontrolled vending of foodstuffs as the major factors behind the outbreak.
It didn’t work as vendors remained in the streets.
In 2018, the Zimbabwe Republic Police added its own directive banning food vending and public gatherings.
In 2022, it was the turn of the Provincial Affairs and Devolution secretary, Tafadzwa Muguti.
(The dude loves decrees!)
He outlawed illegal vending in parking bays and other undesignated places.
“In response to the increased level of indiscipline and lawlessness, we shall no longer allow any trading or operation of flea markets in parking bays and undesignated places,” Muguti said in a statement.
That again never worked, and Garwe has just joined the queue of shame in advancing a futile initiative.
Breeding Another Coup
The same applies to his fronting of the 2030 campaign.
An unhinged, illegal and combustible gimmick that threatens to burn up the highly sensitive normalcy of the country.
This 2025 is the morning after the upheavals of 2017, when military actions encroached into democratic politics to stop the creation of a dynasty.
How the present government, which engineered the former actions, has quickly forgotten that and set itself on a similar path is confusing.
The reason is, theirs is a mission of expediency, lacking ideological, intellectual or moral underpinning.
It’s why Garwe can juxtapose his continued failure to realise the futility of fighting vendors with a political campaign that is contrary to the Constitution.
Garwe and the government have, over the years, failed to realise how their performance has created the ‘problem’ of vendors.
Instead, they are going ahead in seeking an extension of their rule without providing feasible solutions to the challenges they have created.
The scenario and its causality are so stark that for Minister Garwe to be so brazenly at the centre of both issues is disturbing.
