Brutalising food vendors hits Africa’s growing cities where it hurts
Violent clamp-downs on informal food vendors serve nobody; methods for ensuring food safety and financial compliance are available
In January this year, the Harare City Council in Zimbabwe accused informal food vendors of spreading typhoid. The council then attempted to confiscate, and destroy, all perishable food items being hawked in the central business district. Many vendors fought back, resulting in deadly clashes over a series of days in the opposition-run capital city. Sadly, such violent treatment of workers in informal markets is all too common in African cities. Indeed, based on calculations from the Armed Conflict and Location Event Data project, such treatment dramatically increased over the past decade. In 2015, there were more than 250 incidents of violence against informal workers in Africa reported in the media, a more than four-fold increase since 2005. Other examples of these so-called clean-up operations were carried out in Malawi in 2006 and 2015, in Nigeria in 2009, in SA in 2013, and in Zambia in 2007 and 2015. These represent just a few examples of concerted "decongestion" efforts to push...
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