Build the Market, Not the Battle: How Harare Ends the Vendor Crisis by 2030 — by Design
Harare is clearing its street vendors again. The sanitation worry is real; so is the congestion. But here is the truth no clean-up will ever fix: since the stone city of Great Zimbabwe, no one has built our people a proper African market in the heart of the capital. The vendor is not the disorder — she is a whole economy with nowhere to stand. This is not a complaint. It is a builder’s plan: four markets, north, south, east and west, finished by 2030.
Ngatitaure zvakajeka, pachiremerera — let us speak plainly, and with weight. This is Entry 62 of the Economic Journal, written not to condemn but to help — addressed to the Mayor of Harare, to the city council, to the Ministry of Local Government, and above all to every Zimbabwean engineer and planner who can read a map. The vendor crisis that returns to our streets every few years is not some riddle beyond us. It is one of the most solvable problems this nation has. We have only been reaching for the wrong tool — the bulldozer, when we should have reached for the drawing board.
First, let me give the government its due, for a fair argument concedes what is true. When the Minister of Local Government ordered this month’s clean-up, some of the worry behind it was legitimate: in places, uncontrolled trading has blocked walkways, strained a sanitation system in a city that still remembers cholera, and choked the flow of the centre. The Minister was also right to say plainly that informal trading is “a recognised avenue of livelihood.” Chokwadi — that is true, and it matters. But if it is a recognised livelihood, then it deserves a recognised home. So the whole question becomes one simple thing: where is that home? Where, in the heart of Harare, is the market built for the African trader? Answer that honestly, and you have already begun to solve the crisis.
The Vendor Is Not the Fringe — She Is the Economy
Before we speak of markets, weigh the scale of what is being swept off the pavement. In Zimbabwe today, the informal economy is not a corner of the economy. It is the economy. The formal, salaried job is now the rare exception; the hustle is the rule. To clear the vendor is not to tidy the edges — it is to strike at how the majority of the nation eats.
■ The formal, salaried sector — the shrinking minority.
When four in five people work this way, the “informal” trader on the pavement is not a nuisance at the edge of the economy. She is standing at the very centre of it.
And who is on that pavement? Not only the grandmother with her tomatoes. Increasingly it is our graduates — the very young people this country spent its scarce money to educate. Remember the photographs that shamed us all: Zimbabwean graduates, in gowns and caps, selling airtime and sweets at the robots because no job waited for the degree. That is who the 300 municipal police were sent to chase. Engineers, teachers, accountants — reduced to hawking on the very streets their own city refused to build a market on. When you clear that pavement, you are not clearing filth. You are clearing the future you trained and could not employ.
A City Still Built for the People Who Left in 1980
To see why the vendor always returns the moment the police leave, read the map — and the map is an old settler’s map, never redrawn for the free nation that inherited it. Harare’s trading places were fixed for a segregated city, and never moved when the city changed.
Zvirevo zvangu ndezvipi — here is my plain point: in over a century, Harare has never built a proper African market for African business in its central business district. Mbare Musika — mighty, beloved, feeding the whole nation — is a township market, born of segregation, sitting at the old colonial edge. When the people moved to the centre in 1980, the market was never designed to follow them. So the trader does what she has always done under such neglect: she carries the market to where the people are — to the pavement, to the robots, to the shopfront — because the pavement is the only “designated place” the city centre ever truly gave her. Hausi kutyora mutemo — she is not breaking the plan. She is finishing a plan the city abandoned halfway.
We Built Great Zimbabwe in Stone — Ndokudii Ikoko?
Now the question that should sting a proud people — and I ask it with love. This is a nation that graduates engineers by the thousand every year. We are the descendants of the masons who raised the walls of Great Zimbabwe without mortar — walls that still stand after eight centuries, at the heart of a civilisation that traded gold and ivory with merchants from the Indian Ocean to the East. We are, in our very bones, a nation of builders and traders. And yet, in the modern capital that carries that ancient name, we have not built our own traders a single proper marketplace.
So I ask it plainly, in our own tongue, because it cuts deeper that way: mungaite engineer papepa shuwa? Ndokudii ikoko? Will you be an engineer only on paper — a certificate framed on the wall — while the city your training should have built stands unbuilt around you? A degree that cannot design a market for its own mother selling vegetables in the rain has served the graduate’s pride, not the people. Kudzidza kusina basa kuvanhu hakusi kudzidza — an education that does not serve the people is not truly education. This is no insult to our engineers. It is a summons to them. The talent is here; the stone-building genius is in our blood. What has been missing is not the skill. It is the decision to point that skill at our own people’s needs.
The Kumasi Standard: African Trade Done Right
And we need invent nothing, nor borrow from the West. Our own continent has already solved this, and solved it beautifully. I have walked it with my own feet. On field study in 2017 I stood inside Kejetia, the Kumasi Central Market in Ghana — tens of thousands of traders under organised roofs, laid out by section, serviced, clean, thriving, dignified. I walked the great Makola and the markets of Accra. And I will say it without hesitation: that is the finest African small-business trade I have seen anywhere on earth — organised, proud, purpose-built. No one sends 300 police to chase those traders. Because the city built for them.
Four Markets for Harare: North, South, East, West
So here is the plan, offered freely to the City of Harare. Not one central market for everyone to fight over, but four purpose-built African market hubs — one in each quarter of the greater city centre — so that every trader and every shopper, from whichever direction they come, has a proper, serviced, dignified market within easy reach.
Each hub built properly — not a fenced holding-pen, not a punishment, but a place a trader is proud to work and a shopper glad to visit: covered stalls arranged by trade (mbeu nemiriwo, hembe, hardware, crafts, cooked food), running water and ablution blocks, drainage, refuse collection, storage, security, lighting for safe evening trade, and open ground for the bigger periodic market days. Built to the Kumasi standard. Built to turn the trader from a fugitive into a businesswoman.
The Cost of Building — Against the Cost of the Battle
This is not dreaming; it is arithmetic. Every past clean-up failed for one reason: clearance without provision leaves the pressure exactly where it was, so the vendor returns the day the police tire. Build the four markets, and the pressure finally has somewhere to flow. Weigh the two roads honestly:
Vaka musika, wozotamisa mutengesi — build the market, then move the trader. Never the other way. Every failure in our long history of clearances shares one cause: demolition came before provision. In 2022 the government itself shelved plans to build vending workstations “as it was yet to secure an investor” — even after the old stalls were gone. Haugoni kukumbira mai kuti vabve panzvimbo yavanoraramisa vana vavo, uchivapa dova rechipurisa chete — you cannot ask a mother to leave the one place she feeds her children and offer her nothing but a retreating police line. Reverse the order, and the crisis reverses with it.
Why Now Is the Perfect Moment — and How to Deliver
And to any who say “no money, no time” — hear this. We are living in the exact moment this becomes easy. The tech era is emptying the office towers: hybrid and mobile work is shedding tenants from the CBD’s older blocks, leaving floors and whole buildings underused across the centre. Rather than let them rot half-empty, repurpose them into market halls. And with tourism rebuilding, a clean, characterful African market is exactly what visitors seek — they flock to Kumasi, to Marrakech, to Zanzibar’s markets. Built well, our markets are not a cost. They are an attraction, a revenue stream, a jewel. Hapana imwe nguva iri nani kupfuura izvozvi — there has never been a better time to build.
The TGRI Roadmap — Four Markets by 2030
- Now — pause, and convene. Freeze clearance where no alternative exists. Bring city engineers, planners, vendor associations and the ministry to one table: policy from below, not decree from above.
- Year 1 — repurpose the empty towers. Audit the CBD’s vacant office blocks and convert the best-placed, one per quarter, into interim serviced market halls. Fast, cheap, immediate relief.
- Year 1–2 — run market days. Introduce scheduled periodic market days in each quarter, as much of Africa does, to organise trade while the permanent halls rise.
- Year 2–4 — build the four permanent hubs to the Kumasi standard, financed by modest stall fees, diaspora and pension investment, PPPs and tourism funding — not the phantom “investor” that never comes.
- Throughout — organise and register the traders. Associations, affordable permits, legal standing and a voice: turning an informal army into a formal, contributing, protected business community.
- By 2030 — a market-city, not a battle-city. Four thriving African markets, pavements clear by choice not by force, a cleaner centre, new council revenue, a tourism draw — and not one more clearance headline.
A Decolonised Leader Decolonises the City Too
I have written this as an offer, and I mean it as one. To the Mayor of Harare, if these words reach you: Tete Getty is here to help, freely and gladly, because this is not a problem that should be defeating a nation of our brilliance. We have engineers who build across this continent. We have planners, architects, quantity surveyors, diaspora capital, and a living memory — in the very stones of Great Zimbabwe — of how an African trading city is meant to be built. What we have lacked is not the ability. It is the decision to see the vendor not as dirt to be driven off, but as a mwana wevhu, a child of the soil, a businesswoman her own city has failed to house.
And here is the deeper thing this platform exists to say. To decolonise a nation is not only to change its flag and swear in its leaders. It is to decolonise the city itself — to redraw the very streets and squares the settler laid out for his own comfort and his own kind. A Harare that still expects its African traders to squat at the edge, or hide on a kerb, or scatter before the municipal police, is a Harare still living inside the settler’s blueprint, no matter whose face hangs on the wall of the Town House. But a Harare that raises four proud African markets in its own heart — that says, in concrete and steel and light, “this city was built for you, the African, to trade and prosper in the open” — that is a decolonised city at last. Iyi ndiyo simba chairo revatungamiri vakasunungurwa: to make the built world itself finally serve the people it was once designed to shut out.
So let us stop fighting the water and build the riverbed. Stop the demolitions where there is nowhere to send people. Call in the engineers and let them be engineers of something, not certificates on a wall. Fill the empty towers with markets, run the market days, raise the four hubs by 2030. Turn the space barons into stall fees, the pavements into gardens, the running battles into ribbon-cuttings. The vendors are not Harare’s problem — ivo ndivo hupfumi hweguta, simba raro, vatengi nevatereri vemangwana — they are the city’s wealth, its energy, its future customers and taxpayers, waiting only for a city wise enough to house them. Build the market, and the battle simply ends. Vaka musika, hondo inopera yega. Chara chimwe hachitswanyi inda — one finger cannot crush a louse; let city and trader build together. Guta rakanaka nderinovakirwa vanhu varo — a good city is one built for its own people. Tete Getty is here to help.
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