By Farai Maguwu
Listening to Mayor Jacob Mafume talk about vending and filth in Harare really broke my heart. In his talk, he reduced a whole sector providing livelihoods to millions of Zimbabweans to the act of throwing faeces around and urinating in the City Centre.
Brother Jacob Mafume I still consider you a brother and a colleague, hence when you get it wrong we call you out, not to spite you, but out of brotherly love.
Cde, vending is only a symptom of a far bigger problem which the vendors did not author. Vending is a sign of a dysfunctional, underground, failed economy. It is about people trying to survive in a chaotic, disorganized, and informalized economy. It is about poor people trying to survive after abandonment by the State. The filling of our streets with vendors is a culmination of decades of bad state policies that led to de-industrialization, unemployment, currency collapse, and ultimately near-total collapse of the economy.
Nothing is functioning in our country. There is filth at every level of government. There are scores of millionaires and billionaires who do not produce anything – they are fraudsters. The country is overflowing with drugs, which you can’t blame on vendors – otherwise they would not be vending anymore.
Even the Harare City Council is not clean. In 2024, President Mnangagwa, after an outcry from the public about corruption at Town House, set up the Cheda Commission of Inquiry into Local Governance by Harare City Council. During the inquiry, you failed to locate your own house. That is not a sign of cleanliness. The report was submitted to the President on the 17th of June 2025. Residents’ trusts like the Harare Residents Trust have been calling for the report to be made public, one year after its submission.
However, addressing the media after submitting the report to the President, Justice Maphios Cheda remarked about the dirtiness within the City of Harare: “Let me say in conclusion, there were too many dirty hands in the cookie jar. Too many dirty hands in the cookie jar. They are still there.” This dirtiness is more deadly than faeces and urine. It results in poor service delivery, including sewage coming out of taps and mountains of uncollected garbage piling up all over the city.
Mayor, we need an expanded and holistic definition of filthiness. It is more than littering in the city. It is corruption, ineptitude, poor service delivery, and outright failure to uphold the decorum of a certain office.
In conclusion, vendors are not your problem. They are the voters and the owners of the City of Harare. Directing them to go to rural areas was reckless. Perhaps you were too excitable.
