We need legal, safe selling spaces for vendors

CHOLERA infections have clearly broken out of the household level and into the community in Harare Metropolitan, posing a major threat to the highest concentration of people in Zimbabwe and requiring a major public health campaign.

Figures given after this week’s Cabinet meeting show that the national cholera cases almost tripled in the reporting week from November 9 to 15 from 437 new cases the previous week to 1 259 suspected cases.

Besides the spread to some new districts, the most worrying explosion in cases was in Harare Metropolitan with 323 new cases in Harare city and 206 in Chitungwiza, a total of 529 and almost half the national total.

Buhera, the previous epicentre and still a cause for concern, had just 68 new cases as public health measures advance in that district.

Initially cases triggered from Buhera would largely just affect a single family or single household, as someone who visited Buhera fell sick and infected those they live with. With reasonable public health in place that is where the Harare outbreak should have stopped, and it should not have spread to neighbours and communities. Yet it has.

So the Government now wants the chain of infection stopped, and one important route for infections of this sort has always been the food and vegetable vendors, or as Minister of Health and Child Care Dr Douglas Mombeshora made very clear this week, the conditions in which the vendors operate, which can make the food and vegetables they sell contaminated with cholera bacteria.

Harare City Council, and we hope Chitungwiza Municipal Council and the Epworth and Ruwa Local Boards, have been told to stop this food vending outside the approved spots within a week, with the Minister making it clear that what caused the danger and increased the risks of infection was the lack of sanitary facilities and lack of washing facilities.

Vendors without access to these facilities were selling vegetables and food on the pavements, at roadsides, in shopping centres at terminuses and other dubious places and this was simply an invitation for the cholera outbreak to spread and affect far more people.

Dr Mombeshora was not against people selling fruit, vegetables and food, but is insisting that minimum public health standards are enforced, which is a major part of his mandate as Health Minister.

We have reached the stage where the cholera outbreak is a serious public health danger and this requires special measures to reduce and then eliminate that danger.

There is the social problem that a lot of people earn their very modest incomes as vendors and despite the Government pleading with urban authorities to set up safe and convenient markets near potential customers, very little has been done, which is why so many resort to the pavements and the streets. Harare City Council has had proposals in the past to create markets far from any potential customers, and has been curiously astounded that the vendors think little of these efforts.

Of far more practical benefit in the non-food lines has been the innovation by private property owners who have redeveloped buildings into small shops and market stalls, taking quite a bit of the non-food vending business off the streets.

Vendors obviously service a need, since they get customers who are looking for vegetables and snacks that are cheaper than those in many shops and are frequently fresher. What is needed is ways vendors can legally operate and do so without endangering the lives of their customers and threatening a full-blown cholera epidemic.

The need to get them off the street and then keep them off the street appears essential for health reasons, and getting other vendors off the street and into the flea markets and subdivided shopping arcades that have sprung up everywhere needs to follow so that at least pavements can be usable and the proper traders need not face unfair competition from those who pay now rent or licence fees.

But that said, we can still have viable small traders providing the sort of services that food vendors now offer, yet doing so legally and safely.

We can keep the desirable part, the need for people to be able to enter business at the bottom, the micro level, and offer services that a lot of others want, yet do so safely and legally.

It should be possible for the urban authorities to find some places where proper stalls, which need not be large, can be erected with ablution facilities readily available and sinks for washing food.

But they do need to be near where customers are available and where the vendors now cluster. Anyone walking around the city centre or a shopping centre will soon note where we can find many places where there are half a dozen vendors operating close together.

This also opens the doors for the private sector to play a part. A smallish shop could easily accommodate half a dozen food vendors and still have the minimum hygiene standards of access to a bathroom and a sink with a functional tap.

If the unsafe, as well as unfair, competition from the pavements was eliminated such little clusters of vendors in a small shop would probably be viable.

Their prices would need to be a bit higher than the streets, but not outrageously so, which would retain the customers so long as the city councils were keeping the unfair competition off the pavements and out of the terminuses.

It might even be possible, since the food vendors are overwhelmingly women, for organisations dedicated to women’s welfare to help set up the first such legal clusters of vendors in a proper market or shop, choosing sites that were very close to where by trial and error clusters of vendors already operate and customers know where to find them.

Harare City Council, as it obeys the public health directive to move these food vendors off the pavements, could at the same time fix up some temporary, but legally safe stalls, and then lay down adequate if not luxury standards for groups to follow if they rent a shop, or if a shop owner wants to use the premises for a small produce market.

The licence for someone renting a square metre of table top can be different from the licence for someone wanting to run a supermarket and it should be possible to accommodate the micro-businesses, allow them to flourish, and so end the vendor menace for good while still keeping the door open for people to start their business careers, or make a small income, by renting a square metre of market space.