Vendors Initiative for Social and Economic Transformation (VISET) takes note of comments by the Minister of Health and Child Care in a post cabinet briefing on November 21 2023, pertaining to vendors operating in Harare.
The capital city’s suburbs and districts around the country are currently struggling to deal with the cholera pandemic, with revelations that there are 1259 new cases in the week November 9 to 15, as opposed to 437 the previous week. These sobering statistics indeed call for action and we applaud the activation by government of the Civil Protection Unit (CPU) in hard-hit areas such as Kuwadzana.
Our concern as an organization is the comments attributed to the Minister of Health and Child Care Dr. Douglas Mombeshora, where he says government has given Harare City Council a 7 day ultimatum to deal with vendors operating from undesignated spaces. There can be no doubt that there is need for vendors to be operating within the confines of the law, particularly those selling prepared food items. Public health should never be compromised if the fight against diseases such as cholera is to be won. The main challenge from our perspective as an informal economy association is that the focus is on vendors being identified as the main agent of the spread of cholera, yet this cannot be more further from the truth.
Suburbs such as Mbare, Chitungwiza, and Kuwadzana have long reported high incidences of burst sewers, owing to an increase in population, without the attendant upgrading of sewer infrastructure. Water shortages have also bedevilled many local authorities, with many town and cities now entering three if not four months without water supplies. In other areas, water bodies such as boreholes and wells have been found to be contaminated, yet these are alternate sources of water that residents will have resorted to. In short, the Cholera outbreak is a social service delivery question more that in is street vending!
Market infrastructure, something we have constantly spoken to, is clearly an issue in need of urgent redress if authorities are serious in eradicating diseases and safeguarding public health.
It is criminal that Harare City Council on a daily basis collects money from Mbare Musika, yet has not bothered to upgrade the market in all these years. Given it’s centrality to trading for both farmers and vendors, we exhort government and the city of Harare to urgently attend to the improvement of the market, if public health is to be safeguarded in a sustainable manner.
As the foregoing shows, there are many factors behind the surge in cholera cases, and we urge government and other stakeholders to desist from seeing vendors as convenient targets to ascribe the pandemic, but to rather see them as ambassadors that can be used in the dissemination of information on preventative measures that can be employed against the spread of the disease.
As VISET, we have in the last week engaged the city of Harare on responses to the pandemic such as dissemination of information to communities, and we avail ourselves to all well intentioned initiatives that seek to ensure that the spread of this medieval disease is arrested.