By MUBANGA LUCHEMBE
FOR decades, street vending and trading has been a flourishing informal business sector in Zambia more especially in big towns – albeit previous and current administrations have allowed this informal activity to take root and become a political matter to end. Evidently though, a few days ago, the Minister of Local Government Garry Nkombo caused a public stir and debate when he told vendors on the streets of Lusaka that he did not come to: ìnegotiate with them but to tell them to vacate the streets with immediate effect.î
As expected, opposition and other civic leaders took to the mainstream and social media platforms to air their views for or against the removal of street vendors from the streets of Lusaka or Zambia in general citing previous governments of UNIP, MMD and PF as having tried but failed. That raises the question: How comfortably does the rise of street vending sit with the newly-elected UPND government?
Clearly though, you cannot avoid street vendors in Zambia. They are ubiquitous and growing and their trading sessions are both rapturous and vociferous. Largely originating from the post-independence UNIP era and encouraged by the liberalization of Zambia’s laws in the 1990s allowing freedom of business formation and trade, informal traders jam into any available trading space in the country’s city streets.
Historically, more and more women and youths had to informally trade to help support their families, amidst an economic predicament in Zambia. Even before the MMD’s takeover in 1991, hundreds of thousands of urban women and youths were forced to earn a living in the streets because of widespread socio-economic challenges. However, before the MMD came to power, international funding had been largely cut off. Western sanctions had also been partially-imposed and, as a result, unemployment began rising.
If you now listen carefully to the words spoken from the informal business sector, in reaction to Mr Nkombo’s directive to street vendors, you could be forgiven for thinking that its traders have an undeniably political agenda. So, are informal traders in Zambian city streets being used as political pawns?
Not quite. The fact is Zambia’s politicians are at worst, just a little uncomfortable at the astonishingly popularity of this kind of business. But at best they are actually rather grateful that street vending was happening in the country. This is because the main goal of street vending is, officially at least, provision of alternative livelihoods and business opportunities for the jobless youths rather than criminal activities.
Besides, in late 2017 and early 2018, Zambia’s capital city faced a widening cholera epidemic. In response then-country’s President Edgar Lungu called in police and the military to raze makeshift food stalls in the city. In addition, then-Minister of Local Government Vincent Mwale added stricter provisions to Zambia’s Street Vending and Nuisances Act. This was due to fears that substandard food safety among informal traders was fuelling the epidemic.
By early July 2019, however, the then-minister’s approach was notably different. He declared that police across the country’s district councils should immediately stop confiscating products from street vendors and the vendors should be treated humanely. Food safety concerns remained. So what changed? One suspected factor was that local government by-elections were scheduled at the end of July.
In a polarised, partisan atmosphere, cultivating goodwill among urban traders is a politically strategic move. They constitute a large share of voters and historically have been a critical source of support for then-ruling PF. This is just one example of how informal food vendors in cities across the country contend with volatile policies that, at best, lead to poor working conditions and, at worst, result in harassment and confiscation of merchandise. And, it is strongly believed that policy inconsistencies are not necessarily arbitrary. Rather, they reflect varying underlying political dynamics and local governance structures.
In Lusaka as well as Ndola, Kitwe, and Livingstone, the UPND government is battling to manage the demands of a burgeoning middle-class along with those of a still large constituency of urban poor. These urban poor disproportionately rely on livelihoods in the informal sector, either as street hawkers or in open air public markets.
Common sense suggests that the way local authorities in these cities deal with vendors can be attributed to several factors. These include the extent of political decentralisation, administrative decentralisation, and vendors’ partisan affiliations. Political decentralisation refers to whether mayors are elected or appointed. Administrative decentralisation reveals whether laws give cities a high level of autonomy to regulate informal trade.
The key take-away from the foregoing is that urban informal traders operate in a complex, multi-level governance system in which party politics, electoral rules, and legal authority over trade, food, and public space collectively interact. By better understanding the politics and governance of Zambian cities and variations across cities, one can identify feasible opportunities to improve informal traders’ livelihoods.
The central government has more scope to intervene countrywide, and it may initiate or halt crackdowns depending on whether the city is controlled by the opposition and whether vendors are critical to the opposition’s electoral fortunes. This third scenario best typifies the dynamics in Zambia. Whereby, crackdowns increased as control of Lusaka shifted to then-opposition PF in the mid-2000s. If the country’s cities are to be inclusive and sustainable, while still ensuring that urban food safety is enforced, innovative policies are crucial. These must ensure humane and effective governance for some of Zambia’s most vulnerable urban residents.
All of this puts the Alliance for Zambian Informal Economy Associations (AZIEA) in an interesting position. Although on the surface an umbrella association which represents vendors and other informal workers in Zambia, it has been said that the newly-elected UPND administration would prefer to deal directly with street vendors. Could this be a considered case of the ruling party’s unawareness that AZIEA was founded and registered in2002 by one of the Zambian trade unions, the Zambia Congress of Trade Unions, and the British NGO Workers’ Education Association of Zambia perhaps?
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