|
|
|
|
| Features |
| Vendors eviction: Who benefits? |
|
by
Taonga Sabola, 27 April 2006
-
06:58:22
|
It is now 11 days since government ordered vendors off the streets of major towns and cities in the country. The move came after government earlier showed reluctance to kick-out the vendors who crowded the streets. Taonga Sabola looks at who benefits from the controversial exercise:
Goal posts had been shifted more than once on the deadline for street vendors to move to either flea markets or trading areas designated by respective local assemblies.
This year alone, the deadline was changed twice. And when Local Government and Rural Development Minister George Chaponda said the vendors would finally have to move—come rain, come sunshine—on April 15, most Malawians waited with bated breaths to see if this time around such a call was not mere political rhetoric as had been the case before.
In one instance, President Bingu wa Mutharika neutralised his own administration’s order to remove vendors. Mutharika accused the then Blantyre City Mayor John Chikakwiya of using his position to advance the agenda of the UDF to tarnish the image of the Mutharika administration.
Apparently, Mutharika had just unceremoniously ended his romance with the UDF, the party that had sponsored his presidency in the May 20, 2004 general elections.
During the 1999 election campaign, the UDF used the vendors as a campaign tool. UDF officials accused then MCP president Gwanda Chakuamba of plotting to infringe on their right to engage in economic activity of their choice within the borders of Malawi. Chakuamba had reportedly said he would kick vendors out of the streets to restore order and the beauty Malawian cities like Blantyre were renown for far and wide.
Former President Bakili Muluzi put his weight to the vendors’ cause when he unofficially declared himself Minister Vendors.
It was against such experiences that most people were skeptical that the government could evict the vendors as they were regarded untouchables.
Even most of the vendors were defiant. They declared there was no way they could move out of the streets and that they were ready to die in the streets.
No one could question their defiance. Who knew, they had some political godfathers behind the curtains.
So when Chaponda said the deadline had been shifted from April 15—a Saturday during the Easter season—to Tuesday, April 18, to allow Christians peaceful observance and celebration of Christ’s resurrection, many thought it was just another gimmick to run away from taming the monster created by the politicians themselves. After all, Easter had not come so sudden.
But come the d-day, police officers armed to the teeth took their positions in the streets to ensure no-one traded there.
Both government and the vendors need to be commended for carrying out the exercise peacefully without any significant blood shed or without a single loss of life contrary to the fears.
Today, as the dust is settling down and all the tension associated with the eviction is now slowly subsiding, one cannot pretend that life is the same without vendors in the streets.
To be honest things have changed as evidenced by the clean and quite streets.
You walk out of a shop with a lot of baggage in your hands, that little boy with plastic bags is no longer there to sell them to you.
If you are a smoker, there is nobody to sell you cigarettes in the streets the way they used to do. Today, all of them have been confined to one place.
Now that the vendors are gone, the question we need to ask ourselves is: Who is the overall beneficially of the whole exercise? Is it the government? Members of the Asian business community who own most of the shops in town? Or, is it the consumers and the vendors themselves?
Allan Mbewe, 34, is one of the vendors who used to sell second-hand shoes in Blantyre.
He left his home district of Chikwawa six years ago to seek fortune in the streets. Through his selling of second-hand shoes he has managed to pay secondary school fees for his two brothers who are now in college and supporting his family.
Mbewe argues that there is no way he can manage to raise enough money in the new trading areas to satisfy his financial needs.
He feels the system has cheated the local Malawian at the expense of the traders of Asian origin.
“We are now operating far from the central business district. There is no real business here. Business has been left in the hands of foreigners. Government has betrayed us,” he mourns.
George Matemba, another vendor selling clothes in Limbe, believes the eviction of vendors will raise up unemployment figures.
He believes nobody will benefit from such an exercise including the Asians and government itself.
He argues that most of the wares that the vendors were selling were from the Indian-owned shops and that most of the vendors were on their payroll.
“Have you ever wondered where the huge wares were going every night. Most of them were being kept in the shops of the Indians. Some of us could get the wares without any capital and could sell them and get the profit and give the Asian his money. Most of us have been surviving on that.
“So the presence of vendors in the streets was of mutual benefit to us and the Asians. We were getting something and their wares were also selling fast,” says Matemba.
He says the eviction of vendors will mean that government must create more jobs to absorb most of the people engaged in vending.
A couple of Asian traders opting for anonymity confessed that business has never been the same without vendors.
They say for the few days that they have opened full-time since the vendors were chased the trend in business has been going down.
But the Consumers Association of Malawi (Cama) believes the consumer is the overall beneficiary of the whole process. It says by putting the vendors in one place it will enhance competition which will in the end lead to cheaper prices as everybody would like to sell.
“Above all, with the system of registration it will be very easy for the consumer to trace the vendor if there is a problem with the purchased item. This will also make it easy for us to trackdown unscrupulous vendors,” says Cama Project Manager Burton Phiri.
In the past people were hesitant to buy things from vendors as there was no proper system of tracking down the vendors in the event of the purchased item having a defect.
Definitely the registration of vendors and confining them to one place will make life hard for those tricksters who used to masquerade as vendors by selling to consumers urine in place of perfume, cardboards in place of bed-sheets, saw dust instead of flour and bars of clay instead of chocolate bars, just to mention a few.
Indigenous Businesses Association of Malawi (Ibam) Acting President Mike Mlombwa believes government needs to do more than what it has done to the vendors in terms of providing the necessary infrastructure.
Mlombwa, who claims to be a product of vending, says government should not neglect the vendors by just dumping them in a crowded environment like that.
“These vendors have a potential of doing great things to our economy and need not to be neglected. What the government should do is to pump in money and give it to the Malawi Housing Corporation to construct big and comfortable markets like the ones we see in South Africa,” says Mlombwa.
Currently, vendors in Blantyre have now occupied the K20 million flea market constructed with funding from the public charity—Press Trust while those in Limbe have been relocated to an open space close to Limbe Produce Market. In Lilongwe, some vendors are at Tsoka Flea Market also funded by Press Trust. In Mzuzu, a flea market is yet to be constructed but vendors have been moved to a designated trading area pending the development.
Some vendors argue that there are no toilets or water in the new trading places excluding the flea markets. But the question one asks is: Where were the proper sanitation facilities in the streets? This is the question which even the vendors fail to answer.
So, when all is said and done: Who has benefited and who has got a raw deal? A bit more time should tell. |
| |
|
|
|
|
|
