6 May 2008
Maputo — The Maputo City Council has decided to abandon coercive methods in its drive to move informal vendors off the city's pavements and into the municipal markets.
For years the Council has launched sporadic campaigns by the Municipal Police to drive the illegal vendors off the streets, but once the police relax, the vendors return, often selling foodstuffs under deplorably unhygienic conditions.
Since coercion has not worked, maybe persuasion will. At least that is the hope of Eneas Comiche, mayor of Maputo, who has signed a memorandum of understanding with the Association of Informal Sector Workers (ASSOTSI), the purpose of which is to recruit ASSOTSI into the task of organizing the vendors properly.
Comiche said he wanted the vendors to understand that not only the municipality, but even their own association wants to see them off the streets. "We are going to use persuasive measures so that the street vendors go and occupy the empty stalls in the markets", he declared. "For this we are relying on the support of ASSOTSI".
One of the challenges facing the City Council, he admitted, is improving conditions in the informal markets so that the vendors will prefer to sell their goods there, rather than on the streets.
ASSOTSI chairperson Ramos Marrengula agreed that the problem is not what the vendors do, but where they do it. However, he had no specific ideas as to what ASSOTSI would actually do to persuade the vendors (many of whom are not ASSOTSI members) to move. He merely promised to help the Council.
"The city council has the duty to carry out campaigns to organise the vendors and we, in ASSOTSI, will support it", he said. "We depend on what the City Council decides".
The council has repeatedly pointed out that there are thousands of empty stalls in the city's 59 markets. Yet the city streets are full of vendors, often blocking the pavements. Sometime they are selling goods in front of formal sector shops, much to the annoyance of the shopkeepers who regard them as unfair competition.
The vendors' standard excuse is that they sell on the streets in order to be closer to potential clients. The reality is that they sell on the streets because in the markets they would have to pay taxes, whereas on the streets they pay nothing.
A campaign of mere persuasion thus looks doomed to failure.
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