Resilience under Sustained Attack from the City Police: Will Informality Survive?

Abstract

Since the general elections of Zimbabwe in 2018, there has been a sustained blitz by the police against informal activities in the central business district (CBD) of Harare, the country capital city. Initially the blitz was motivated by a desire by authorities to avoid the spread of cholera. Although the cholera scourge appears to have been contained, the municipal blitz against informal business activities in the CBD did not relent. It seemed to be the most sustained onslaught that the city had undertaken against informality in many years both in terms of duration and the magnitude of manpower resources used. The Harare Municipal Police undertook this blitz in collaboration with the Zimbabwe Republic Police. Previous research has focused on the extent of informality in Harare, the regulatory framework, the measures informal traders were taking to evade the police, and how they were surviving in these contested spaces. The continuing blitz against informal traders has seen many traders giving up their places in the CBD and relocating to ‘designated’ new spaces elsewhere. U sing a mixed methods approach, this research sought to examine the status of informal retail trading activities in the CBD of Harare as the municipal onslaught on informal enterprises has exacerbated. The study sought to answer several key questions: What has become of informality in Harare? What old and new strategies is Harare municipality using? Are the informal traders surviving the onslaught? How are they coping? What is the extent of their presence in the CBD? What are the affected informal retail traders saying? What has become of the documented vendors’ resilience in central Harare? The paper argues that the authorities’ failure to acknowledge the reality of informality is causing unsustainable pain to traders as well as to themselves.