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Bulawayo City Council has now taken a decision to relocate informal traders operating along Fifth Avenue to Bhaktas at the corner of Lobengula Street and Second Avenue.

This was already on the drawing board but council has now taken a with-immediate-effect approach.
“Priority will be given to the first 600 trading bays at Bhaktas for those traders who were operating legally at 5th Avenue,” we cite Town Clerk, Mr Christopher Dube as saying elsewhere today.

Mr Christopher Dube

“The additional 460 bays will be allocated to traders who had previously been assigned bays at Bhaktas and have fulfilled all licensing and rental obligations.”

This action will open Fifth Avenue up to vehicular traffic thus ease the congestion that has been frustrating motorists for so long. Removing Bulawayo’s busiest market from its heart to its periphery will ensure more order in the city centre as well. It represents an additional street for motorists to use.

A vendor selling cabbages and other vegetables along Fifth Avenue and George Silundika Street in Bulawayo

Fifth Avenue is Bulawayo’s filthiest lane given the dumping of vegetable waste along it by vendors and traders operating on it. Therefore, we expect the removal of the traders from there and their resettlement at Bhaktas to make the city centre smarter.

We expect traders to comply with the council order. Yes, there have been concerns that Bhaktas is too far away from customers but that concern does not really count. The customers will have no alternative market so they will follow the fresh vegetables to Bhaktas.

In the event that some traders resist the relocations, we are sure that law enforcement would be on top of the situation in enforcing the directive.

However, relocating vendors and other informal traders from Fifth Avenue to Bhaktas is just a tiny part of the big job that council has to do to order the city. The city is heavily populated by people selling all manner of items just everywhere, along pavements, at every street corner and so on.

The Government recently ordered local authorities to clean themselves of illegal vendors, noting that some of them are engaging in criminal activities. The deadline that the Government had set for councils to have done the evictions passed a few days ago with councils dithering and vendors staying put. We implore Bulawayo to act now.

Indeed, we appreciate that some of our people are surviving through the incomes they earn from illegal vending but vending must be done in an orderly fashion. These, too, must find spots at the various spaces designated for more organised informal trading – at Bhaktas, Egodini and so on. We urge council to designate more new spaces as we anticipate the existing ones will not meet demand.