Friday, March 29, 2024

It’s important to see Street Vendors as a part of the Small Business Community

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By Fred M’membe

Vendors along Lusaka’s Cha Cha Cha and Cairo roads have appealed to government to reconsider its decision to remove them. One of the vendors talked to by Diamond News, Alick Mafuleka, says he has no other source of income apart from trading along the streets. Another vendor, Timothy Mugaza, says business is difficult in the markets as compared to trading in the along the streets.

Meanwhile, Lusaka mayor says government has not backtracked on its decision to remove the vendors and there’s need to have a clean and healthy city hence the need to move the vendors. But is it not possible to have a clean and healthy environment with vendors on the streets? Are the two really mutually exclusive?

Our politicians love to say how they love small businesses but there’s not so much respect for street vendors. It’s important to see vendors as a part of the small business community. And historically, they have been. Some of our successful retailers started out as street vendors. Vending should be considered a valid starting point for businesses, and more should be done to encourage it.

On removing vendors from our city streets, our politicians are usually only looking at things cross-sectionally, not longitudinally. They’re not considering that over the long run small investments that people make in themselves and their families can sometimes turn into large paybacks in entrepreneurial activities. Not always; small businesses fail all the time. But sometimes they pay great dividends.

These are people who add life to our cities. And our cities can find ways to comprehend them and their purposes and integrate them more completely into the city’s larger purposes. There’s a variety of ways that commerce can occur on the street, and I think that cities should clearly be interested in encouraging across that spectrum. That means getting the city more involved in working with vendors.

Cities like Lusaka need to use their business development arms to do more to help vendors understand the rules and to develop their vending operations into sustainable and even expandable businesses. A city that has the money and has the resources to do it should be doing it. Instead of driving vendors from the street it is better to help them understand how to work within the city’s regulations and to improve their business standards.

There’s need to help vendors in our cities secure their rights and function as legitimate businesses.That’s going to be good for the city. It’s going to get vendors to comply with the rules, and it’s hopefully going to let vendors grow their businesses. And that grows the tax base

17 COMMENTS

  1. Upnd is a party of elite wannabes. We warned you about voting for them. Look at your sad lives now. You are being chased out of your trading spots and losing your sources of income. Meanwhile upnd members and officials are eating 10 meals a day and growing fat and ugly

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  2. In Kitwe there was an arrangement where vendors were given a trading place on Chisokone Road by the road from Central Police. In addition the vendors were allowed to operate in the corridors after business hours. This worked very well until months before the last elections. The then opposition incited these traders to defy the authorities and poured into the shop corridors. Like I have said before the Upnd has put these people under the bus. How else can you explain it.

  3. Mr. Membe,

    1. The vendors are in front of shops and block the entrance. These shops pay rates etc and how do you expect them to survive?
    2. There is space in the markets but they do not want to trade from there to save money. How do you expect marketeers to survive ? They sell the same things.
    3. What about cholera outbreak ?
    4. As far as I am concerned vendors and marketeers are the same thing – so build more markets and let them all trade and at the same time get so sanity in the city.
    5. Have you driven around and seen the rubbish ????

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  4. The streets are for vehicles and pedestrians.
    Not for trading.
    If I visit a country and know there will be people selling on the street, I avoid that place.
    Also, in most countries with illegal sellers on the street, the police always make sure they are removed once seen,

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  5. Mr Mmembe can you allow people to encroach on your land on the premise that they don’t have any where to build their homes?
    Let’s be serious, we expect better checks and balances from you grey haired politicians, no this nonsense of supporting Street vendors, this is the same spirit that has led to Lsk being a shanty compound.

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  6. Mmembe ,Sean and company have unfortunately choosen cheap politics.
    A sort of politics for appeasing the affected masses.
    No normal person can claim to say the levels of street vending in the central business district wasn’t a danger to public health.
    We have shops and markets for a reason.

  7. If this is type of politicians aspiring for leadership I Zambia then we going backwards. Zambia is filthy. Period. And if an aspiring leader sees that as normal, then there is no hope. We are scr3wed.

  8. We all must live within the law, otherwise chaos prevails. To say that street vendors are being denied trading opportunity on the capital’s two main streets, is to grossly miss the point! The author appears to be siding with an unlawful situation which shouldn’t even have been here had consecutive governments channelled citizen’s commendable industriousness correctly. No one wants to stop people selling their goods at all; it’s the setting up of stalls anywhere, any time – at vendor’s whim regardless of pertaining laws. This is not progressive business running and doesn’t contribute much to the economy. People need to set up in designated areas – that’s what orderliness entails.

  9. Street vending means chaos,blockage of walkways,unfair competition for formal retail,cholera transmission,tax evasion and trashy streets.Let’s NOT accept the madness.

  10. Just turn the whole CBD into a hudge open air market , like kariako in Tanzania……..

    And build a new CBD fit for purpose ……….

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  11. #12  Enka
     December 29, 2021 At 8:35 pm

    “Iwe #10 Spaka that’s a very rotten bad and mightily expensive idea.”

    If you realise the CBD was built for a 1970s Zambian population ,………….

    You will know that CBD can not expand anymore and can not accommodate any more traders………..

    Other countries have designated whole sections of their old CBDs as open air markets………..

    The Lusaka CBD is too tight and is only good as a market………

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  12. So sad that in 2011 MCS and PF normalized this chaos & filthy street vending culture in the name of winning elections.The result is mass chaos,the 2018 cholera and loss of tax revenue.

  13. Kaizer who is regretting voting for upnd, only you fool. Kaizer. Beating up people, in your thinking capacity it was normal beating people. Ifwe, tuleteka, elyo, tawakabwelelepo, you are done and dusted with your party.

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