allAfrica.com: Sierra Leone: Beneath the Veil of Street Trading, Can We Think Again? (Page 1 of 1)

I suspect some hypocrisy in the way we tend to address very important social issues. Most people tend to portray street trading in a very negative light and are ready to scold government for not urgently addressing it. But honestly, given the scale of street trading in and around the city, and our participation in it, does it not make one wonder whether any government will be able to curb it? As usual, many people see an easy solution to street trading; government must create new markets around the city and traders will be persuaded to go to those markets. Yes this is indeed plausible given the recent achievement in other African countries. But street trading in Sierra Leone will take much more than just creating markets and forcing hawkers to move to those markets.

Probably even the entire army deplored at the city centre cannot stop hawkers, because it is much more an issue of survival as it is cultural.

If we are honest with ourselves, it probably may be less than one percent of the population that does not buy from hawkers. Every now and then, in taxes, poda-poda and private cars, we anticipate the traffic slow down or deliberately break traffic rules just to buy a few essentials from hawkers. We find it less burdensome to buy from street traders than taking time to go to the often busy and unhealthy markets to buy our stuff. But we are simply being rational to behave that way given the fact that no reasonable human being prefers inconvenience to comfort, although buying from hawkers itself is fraught with some risks. We would prefer to buy from the streets and avoid the threat of pickpockets that now occupy the few crowded markets around town. Thus culturally, we have been used to the idea of hawkers going around announcing their goods at our homes. In the villages and many big towns today (perhaps to some extent the city where "Ernest power" is fluctuating) we are still familiar to the cries of small boys selling kerosene in the evening. We like to be heralded to goods; fish dae! Ah geh dee sawa sawa!

Yes this is what we have been used to and this is what we very much enjoy.

But the activity of street trading can be place within political economy theory; the theory of space-grabbing. Whether for political participation or economic endeavours we are informed that various groups out of ingenuity and mostly due to social forces like poverty or population growth are forced to grab any political or economic spaces available.

Business should be an innovative enterprise.

Businessmen go in search of new markets. Where they are certain that more sales can be made in the streets, people go for it. When people know they cannot afford to rent shops in the unregulated housing industry in the city, they find the tinniest space around to squat and establish their shops.

With a good many of Sierra Leoneans devastated and impoverished by war, people need some capital to restart their lives. This was very much conspicuously absent. And hunger kills! People without formal education and few and far between employment opportunities needed to challenge and fend for themselves. Again we are fond of saying, "man dem nor wan wok", "man dem too lazy", what is more difficult than standing in the streets all day just to change coins? What is more difficult to sit on top of very nasty gutters selling sweets? For God sake this is hard work and survival at its extremes. People are barely eking out a living to make ends meet. These people need to eat and live, and there is no government or charity out there to put food on their table at the end of the day. There is no one there to send their kids to school and give them a better future at the end of the day.. If these people were not industrious enough to hawk around Freetown, the army of beggars would have been twenty or more times what we now see as an unavoidable eyesore. This figure is not inclusive of the phalanx of armed robbers wrecking havoc on innocent civilians at night. The people engaged in street trading are rational human beings who also dream of a better life just like the politician or other citizens. They are not by their own design the dregs of society, but victims of an inglorious political governance history of this country.

This is not an apology for a menacingly troublesome street trading. It is simply an attempt to let us see the other side of what everyone seem to be confused about. Indeed street trading is the source of congestion but don't tell me it is the source of traffic jams. It may contribute to petty crimes but don't forget that they help the economy go round. And for those of you who are eager to reach simple conclusions on social phenomenon, Sierra Leone is a country hunted by its past. We are facing a crisis of several decades of bad governance and we cannot expect overnight that everything will sail smoothly. Consider for a moment, a country that was held in prison for over four decades, dancing in the chasm of corruption and dictatorship, war and destruction. Have you ever wondered how many people were born within these years who never had the privilege of a formal education or the opportunity to develop their talents and secure life saving skills? We are talking about entire generations of uneducated and unskilled fathers and mothers and sons and daughters. Most people only even knew Freetown, courtesy of the civil war. These people are our missed generation and our fellow citizens that deserve the same opportunities like us. They have no hope and see no future in a formal economy that is not only small and congested but they are also equally and totally marginalised from a state that struggles painfully to provide basic services.

There was hardly any conscious attempt or policy by government (after the war) to transform our missed generation into productive citizens even before we start looking for big companies to absorb them. What these people really are at the moment, can only make Sierra Leone boast of manual labourers who are desperate to work even in a death zone as Iraq.

Government, irrespective of its colour should not play politics with street trading. They should translate their political rhetoric into meaning social policies for people who have missed out on the inadequate opportunities provided by the state in the past and even today. Government must realise that street trading is a matter of basic survival and government is already guilty of depriving such a large population of a normal and productive life. Is it not the responsibility of the state that every citizen be educated or skilled to be able to contribute to socio-economic development?

Addressing the issue of street trading should go beyond simply building new markets. Under the present socio-economic climate only few people can afford to rent tables not even shops in markets. This is so because the thousands of hawkers do not have a genuine desire and acumen for business; they have been forced to sell a few sweets because they have to survive and are unable to afford the time to go back to the workshop to learn new trade. Their energy can only produce food for their stomach. So a choice between hawking and going to learn new trade like carpentry just does not exist. Government should not only build more markets now and urgently, but to save the country from degenerating into extreme lawlessness and violence, it should design and implement an elaborate manpower development programme focusing on reskilling; a programme that will ensure that at least a good number of our fellow citizens in the street hawking are systematically trained in useful socio-economic endeavours without the fear of dying of hunger.

And for the general public, we should have a rethink on street trading. We are equally guilty as the hawkers. While a more preferred response would have been to call for a boycott of street trading, yet we should instead urge government to take a more proactive response to solving the problem of street trading.

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