via Hondo isingaperi – The Zimbabwean 11 February 2015
The war between the powerful and the people continues, with all the old colonial campaigns against people’s dignity and livelihoods continuing as if we had been projected back into 1965 and the darkest days of the Smith regime.
Ignatious Chombo is trying to ban most street vendors, just as the RF did. Their failure should tell him something. He even uses the same arguments; they are an eyesore for the rich, the high and the mighty. They will be given alternative sites in the (presumably distant) suburbs; but has he ever tried to sell airtime or cigarettes? How is a vendor expected to sell anything when s/he has been removed from contact with his or her customers?
OK, the pavements are getting a bit crowded in some streets, but we know the vendors must make a living and we know who destroyed formal employment. We don’t find them a nuisance; in fact it is remarkable how quietly they conduct their business. You need to travel in India or parts of west Africa to experience what a nuisance vendors might be to ordinary citizens pursuing their ordinary business.
A Harare mayor elected on the MDC ticket should be more sensitive to poor people’s plight. The present mayor has taken up the colonial campaign against “urban farming”. Now, I admit that maize growing too close to the verge of the road on a dangerous bend obscures drivers’ view and increases the danger of accidents. It should not be there, but where in Harare’s metropolitan area has anyone planted maize in such a position?
I’m not convinced it is bad to plant on wetland; it’s certainly not as bad as building on it, and what are Chombo or the city council doing about that? I suspect all the talk about this issue is a prelude to mass slashing of maize in the style of colonialism and of the former Zanu (PF) city council.
Then when someone starts painting the pavement in prominent places, I wonder what else they are trying to distract us from. When I hear a foreign NGO helped to fund the new “artwork” near the Town House, I start sniffing and soon pick up a trail. Just as in Mbare during HIFA, there’s something they’re not putting right in the most basic service. As I get older, I become more aware of the accessibility or otherwise of public lavatories, and we all know that has deteriorated. We’ve seen the era in which the cleaners closed all of them at the same time in order, we presume, to extort bribes. Now, it may be more official, but we all have to pay for what should be free.
As an elderly urban male, I can usually find a way round this problem, but lots of people don’t know these dodges. Imagine, for example, the plight of a young mother with two small children who has just arrived by bus from Kotwa.
Toilets you have to pay to use are bad enough, but if she and her kids, who do get quite fractious in situations like this, get an eye-full of the work of our official pavement artists, that must feel like salt rubbed into their wounds. “No room for the likes of you in our nice clean and artistic city”.
It is clear that some faceless “they” are waging war on the public, and especially on those least able to defend themselves. In my book, that’s a sin crying out to Heaven for vengeance; it is condemned pretty strongly in the Bible, too. Right from the time of Moses, you can’t escape the exhortations to care for the widow, orphans and the stranger, and there are threats of serious sanctions if you ignore these basics of our life as a nation.
It may not always be clear who the anonymous “they” who order these measures are, but one thing is clear; if you are one of them, these strictures apply to you.
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