Clearing the CBD is the easy part. Finding a place to relocate vendors is the difficult one

TWO men, two Harare suburbs, one policy.

Their stories, set side by side, say more about vendor clearance in the city than any official statement has.

In Glen View 7, Kefasi Maluwie trims hair, sells clothes and runs an EcoCash booth.

He calls the claim that there is no market in the suburbs “a lie”.

In Glen Norah, Wilfred Mudzenga sells soap, snacks and small plastics from a wooden stand on the roadside.

Where he once made US$40 to US$60 on a good day near Market Square in the central business district, he now sometimes goes home with US$5 or US$8.

It would be tempting to read this as a moral tale: one man worked hard, trusted the process and kept the rules, while the other did not adapt.

Maluwie, to his credit, tells it almost that way. If you follow the rules, he says, no one will bother you.

But that reading is too comfortable, and it lets the city off the hook.

Look at what actually separates the two men.

Maluwie is a skilled tradesman who spent more than four years learning under tutelage of someone else before opening his own shop.

He sells a service, a haircut, that people walk across the neighbourhood for and some of his clients travel from other areas.

He has the papers to trade in his community and he pays tax.

Mudzenga sells basics to neighbours who are as cash squeezed as him.

They ask for credit and he finds it hard to refuse because he understands them.

His capital ends up being tied up in debtors that take weeks to be paid. He has no permit and he says that is not for want of trying.

Council wants registration fees in US dollars, he says and when he asks about designated vending bays in Glen Norah, he is told there are none yet or the waiting list is endless.

So one man is operating legally, is skilled and has a loyal clientele.

The other is unlicensed, selling a commodity and has been left in the dust with no shelter, no water and no bay to trade from.

Their different fortunes owe less to character than to circumstance.

Maluwie is right about much of what he says.

The CBD had real problems: litter, noise, touting and pavements that pedestrians barely use.

Plenty of residents will cheer the clearance and they are not wrong to want a cleaner, safer city centre.

Maluwie deserves credit for something rarer than talent, which is a willingness to formalise.

If every vendor could get a permit as he did, the city would collect more revenue and have few confrontations.

But that is the whole point.

The route Maluwie took must be open to the Mudzengas of this city.

A policy that tells vendors to go to the suburbs, without building the bays, water points, toilets and shelters to receive them, is not relocation.

It is removal.

And removal that arrives with trucks and teargas, as Mudzenga describes, leaves behind a man who lost more than US$150 in stock in a week and now eyes every municipal officer and vehicle with fear.

His request is not radical.

He is not asking to return to Market Square.

He wants designated zones with shelter, toilets and water, a licensing process at district offices with monthly rates a vendor can afford, and help to rebuild the capital he lost.

“Treat us like citizens trying to survive,” he says.

That is a modest ask of a city that says it is restoring order.

There is also a lesson for the suburbs themselves. If thousands of displaced traders settle in Glen Norah, Glen View and other suburbs, the market will not grow to meet supply.

Neighbours will not suddenly have more money.

Maluwie’s confidence that customers are everywhere holds for someone with a skill and a following.

For the 15th person selling the same packet of salt on the same road, it may not.

Order is a worthwhile goal.

But order that depends on pushing people into the dust and then pointing at the one man who made it work as proof that the rest are not trying, is not a policy. It is an excuse.

Harare should build the bays first, issue permits fairly and then enforce the rules.

Until then, the difference between Glen View and Glen Norah is not faith or effort.

It is a piece of paper and a roof.