Rubble where market stalls once stood has become the latest battleground in Zimbabwe’s strained politics, after enforcement teams moved through Harare and Chitungwiza this week to demolish informal trading structures and seize merchandise. The operations, carried out by municipal police supported by heavy machinery, have been folded into the government’s National Cleanup Campaign, which is now being rolled out across all 92 local authorities.
New hours govern street trading
Authorities have confirmed that vending in central business districts is now restricted to the window between 6am and 6pm. Traders in residential areas, including high-density suburbs, are allowed to operate until 8pm. Officials have stressed that street trading has not been outlawed, only reorganised, and that vendors may continue working in designated zones while 113 local authority bylaws are reviewed.
For thousands of households that depend on daily sales of vegetables, airtime, clothing and cooked food, the change has been abrupt.
Opposition cries foul
The MDC’s Secretary for Information and Publicity and Presidential Spokesperson, Lloyd Damba, described the events of the past week as an attack on impoverished citizens rather than a matter of urban planning. He said stalls had been destroyed and stock taken, and accused enforcement officers of roughing up traders.
Damba insisted the people affected are not criminals but working Zimbabweans, and argued that many of them lost formal jobs when factories in areas such as Willowvale, Graniteside, Msasa and the Chitungwiza industrial sites shut down or shed labour. Former engineers, clerks and machine operators, he said, now sell on the pavements to feed their families.
He framed vending as a coping mechanism produced by years of economic decline rather than a lifestyle choice, and said a genuine solution would involve registering traders, providing properly serviced trading sites, offering affordable credit and clearly demarcating where business may be conducted. His party, he added, views vendors as entrepreneurs let down by the state, not as refuse to be swept away.
Ruling party accused of discarding supporters
The sharpest edge of the dispute is political. Damba accused the ruling party of cultivating informal traders during past election campaigns, when groups publicly identified with President Emmerson Mnangagwa were promoted, only to turn on them once their votes were no longer needed. He warned that other constituencies loyal to the ruling party could eventually face the same treatment.
That argument has been echoed by the Zimbabwe Communist Party. Its general secretary, Ngqabutho Nicholas Mabhena, traced the growth of street trading to the Economic Structural Adjustment Programme of the 1990s and the retrenchments that followed, describing vendors as a product of failed policy rather than a problem to be removed.
Mabhena also pointed to what he called an inconsistency in official language, noting that informal traders have at times been counted among the economically active when unemployment figures are discussed, yet are now described as a nuisance requiring clearance from urban spaces. He called on vendors to organise collectively, recalling the International Labour Organisation’s 2015 position that street traders should be brought into trade unions and treated as part of the working class.
Election timetable shifts the ground
The confrontation is unfolding against a changed political calendar. On 7 July this year, President Mnangagwa signed constitutional amendments that extended presidential terms from five to seven years and replaced direct presidential elections with a parliamentary system for choosing the head of state. The changes also pushed the next national poll beyond 2028, a move that critics said weakened democratic accountability.
Mabhena argued that this shift helps explain the timing of the crackdown, suggesting traders lost their value to the ruling party once elections were no longer imminent.
Government position and the road ahead
Officials maintain that the campaign is about public health, order and the decongestion of city centres, and that trading continues legally in approved locations and during permitted hours. Harare’s central business district, however, remains the country’s busiest marketplace, and any restriction there is felt immediately in household budgets.
Not every claim in the debate is easy to verify. Opposition assertions that today’s vendors are overwhelmingly retrenched factory workers have not been supported with comprehensive data, and the composition of the informal economy is likely more varied than any single narrative allows.
What is clear is that the enforcement drive has converted a municipal housekeeping exercise into a national argument about jobs, dignity and political loyalty. With the cleanup campaign set to continue in towns and cities across all provinces, and with traders vowing to defend their pitches, the pressure on both local authorities and the ruling party is unlikely to ease soon.
