The Sunday Mail
Illegal vendors are on the run, finally. Someone had been misleading them into believing themselves more equal than others, to have super rights trumping those of law-abiding residents.
Rangu Nyamurundira
The city finally stirs and wakes to cleanse the lawless deeds that have been creeping upon it.
It is after all a city named after great authority, its Chief NeHarawa/Haarari.
Chief Haarari’s legacy is of enemies that could never attack his land clandestinely.
They always found him waiting upon sunshine to repel their creeping ill-intent!
We are privileged to dwell upon that land called Harare, the “Sunshine City”.
Today, whimpering illegal vendors threaten to vandalise Ha-a-rare in their retreat, thinking threats will dissuade its cleansing. If only they knew their threats hasten the mandate and objective of the city’s new custodian minister who does not take well to intimidation.
But before we get into that subject matter of the day, I find myself distracted by a headline, which must irk any among us that are committed to our country’s development and understand that image and perception are a critical component and stimuli to our rising and aspiration for prosperity.
The headline is simplistically reckless, its assertion divorced from our complex truths.
The story by New Zimbabwe, plucked from Global Magazine, reads, “Zimbabwe now poorest country in the world.”
I am no economist and claim no expertise greater than those educated and informed by Western capital’s designed economics, but cannot be convinced we are the “poorest country”.
Let’s for a moment reason as economic lay-persons, and enquire if, indeed, Zimbabwe is the poorest nation.
We know our beloved country to be richly-endowed in all sorts of natural resources coveted by the very shareholders in the IMF whose data is used to weigh us to be the “poorest”.
We have diamonds, platinum, tungsten, natural gases, coal, chrome, gold and rich soil nourished by the best sunshine.
We have it all and more so much that the Americans must declare such endowment oversized for a people as us, whom they deem undeserving of it, to give it all up for their own American dream.
The charge of “poverty” surely must be asked of us, the indigenous people, and not the land and boundary blessed upon us that is Zimbabwe.
We must ask ourselves how we are an impoverished people settled upon such blessings of wealth.
Are we a poor indigenous people because we lack capacity, know-how and conviction to “judiciously exploit” our land’s vast endowments as called upon by an urging President Robert Mugabe?
Are we too simple-minded to fathom the vision of “an empowered society”?
We are considered at the top of Africa’s learned, only to find ourselves at its bottom in the measure of our economic wealth?
Shall we allow ourselves to be summed up then as, “A richly endowed nation of the poorest most literate people unable to fathom and reign over the full extent of our national wealth”?
Shall we accept such condemnation as being at the bottom of the wretched of the earth?
If so, let us also accept that we are our own poverty, really, in spite of whatever sanctions they have imposed.
They are as good as sanctions, which the very Ian Smith we defeated for political independence was able to bust and give the British Pound a good run for its value using Zimbabwe’s rich natural resources!
And yet, upon our economic revolution, we find ourselves compromised, weakened by a self-impaling and sabotaging chronic condition.
We inflict internal injuries upon our nation’s rich economic persona, injuries inflicted most by an aggressively hostile and treacherous political opposition, but worse, still, to be denied timely and effective remedy by an unsure and ideologically backsliding ruling Government.
And it brings us back to the matter of illegal vendors who have become evidence of a “poorest” people in their nation with oversized wealth.
Illegal vendors are a Frankenstein attesting to the ill-intent of a malicious opposition that has bred them in a nation whose wealth they have long had sanctioned!
It is to this city of wretched illegal vendors that we welcome you, Local Government, Public Works and National Housing Minister Saviour Kasukuwere.
We hear the illegal vendors threaten to withhold their 2018 vote against Zanu-PF now that the nation demands adherence to and enforcement of long-neglected by-laws, to restoring order and the city’s “sunshine” status.
Such are impoverished minds, and no better handlers, that miscalculate such an electoral threat.
Their minds have not put into their 2018 equation the denominator of a greater urban electorate of law-abiding residents who have simply had enough of the lawlessness that has clouded their “Sunshine City”.
The illegal vendors have opened the door to a political arena in which arena their handlers must contend with Cde Tyson who understands quite well the brawl to be had.
He needs only to put his gloves on, on the side of an urban majority that wants no more than service delivery.
The real “change” is coming upon the hand that guides service delivery.
The minister understands too well matters of empowerment. Harare must be empowered, must be made shine again.
Whichever way MDC reacts in the political minefield it has created, it shall fall upon its sword.
If they resist and seek to sabotage Tyson’s call for order and service delivery, they will only increase his ruling party’s political capital with urban dwellers weary of MDC’s authorities found wanting. Should the MDC-T do the right thing and comply, credit still will lie with a Zanu-PF Government that has finally weighed in for the urban resident to remedy the gross degradation of their basic social services.
The illegal vendors and, through them, their handlers have opened a Pandora’s box with their 2018 electoral threat, placing themselves between a rock and hard place.
The good Mayor, Mr Bernard Manyenyeni, thought it wise to distance himself from the enforcement of by-laws entrusted to him. He claims he “never spoke” to municipal police who finally do their job of enforcing the city’s by-laws so contemptuously violated under their noses.
And why must he have spoken to them first? What clearance should they get from him not already clearly written in by-laws enshrined long before the mayor’s term of office?
Or does he believe himself above such lawful provision that it first seeks his approving nod.
Doesn’t it all reveal his and his party’s long standing complicity in the gross violation of the city’s laws?
What is there to be asked of him by a Harare so greatly offended by the stink of matumbu arikusvinwa along its paths and choked by smoke from roasting maize rising into adjacent boardrooms meant to have clarity of mind to plot our economic revival?
Is this what the illegal vendors threaten to vote for come 2018, all to the apathy of long-suffering law abiding residents?
MDC’s urban councillors have made a statement (June 6, 2015) in defence of the unlawful conduct of illegal vendors, arguing “the collapse of employment in the formal sector”.
They forget that such collapse is the child of Morgan Tsvangirai’s sanctions dissertation to the West.
Having caused the founding harm, they now say illegal vendors must be left to “their chosen places of trade”.
Their reasoning is warped, amounts to saying one’s hunger entitles theft or worse, that strong lusts of the flesh permit adultery. No wonder that party’s sexual afflictions.
Dear Hararians, we must know that cities mirror the souls of their nations, set the pulse. Harare must reflect “an empowered society and a growing economy”, not chaos and debauchery.
Cde Tyson, Zim-Asset must be implemented to bring back Ha-a-rare’s sunshine.
Zimbabwe must have improved standards of living, adequate shelter and healthcare, in modern cities.
Zim-Asset calls on the Ministry of Local Government, Public Works and National Housing to guarantee 25 000 housing units, including providing serviced land for housing and adopting new building technology, to refurbish, upgrade and construct health facilities.
Let the MDC’s local authority dare sabotage that in the name of 2018.
President Mugabe, in his wisdom, has appointed a new custodian to our cities, one well-versed in empowerment, which must break our urbanites free from the sanctions trance, which MDC’s voodoo dance with Western economic interests has put them in.
Rangu Nyamurundira is the acting corporate secretary of the National Indigenisation and Economic Empowerment Board and a member of the Zimbabwe Youth Council Board. His views are his own and do not represent the views of institutions he is associated with.
