A nationwide enforcement drive against street traders has spilled over into a bruising political confrontation, with opposition parties accusing the ruling Zanu PF of abandoning the informal vendors it once cultivated as a support base.
Municipal police and bulldozers have moved through parts of Harare and Chitungwiza in recent days, tearing down vending stalls and confiscating traders’ merchandise. Opposition officials say vendors were also manhandled and publicly humiliated during the operations, which coincided with the expansion of the government’s National Cleanup Campaign.
New Trading Hours Across All Local Authorities
Under restrictions that took effect immediately, vending in central business districts is now confined to the hours between 6am and 6pm. Traders operating in residential areas, including high-density suburbs, may continue until 8pm. The same timetable applies across all 92 local authorities as councils intensify a crackdown on illegal vending and other unauthorised urban activities.
Government officials have insisted they are not outlawing vending altogether, but regulating where and when it happens. Authorities say trading remains permitted in designated zones, and that 113 local authority bylaws are being reviewed to align them with the new approach.
Opposition Says Livelihoods Under Attack
The MDC’s secretary for information and publicity, Lloyd Damba, who also serves as the party’s presidential spokesperson, described the operations as an assault on impoverished Zimbabweans whose families depend on street trading. He said stalls had been reduced to rubble, stock seized and traders subjected to violence and humiliation.
He rejected any suggestion that vendors are criminals, describing them instead as honest citizens forming a distinct economic sector. Damba argued that many of those affected were once formally employed in factories in Willowvale, Graniteside, Msasa and the Chitungwiza industrial sites, working as engineers, clerks and machine operators before industry contracted.
He further contended that street trading in Zimbabwe is not a lifestyle choice but a survival strategy forced on ordinary people by economic mismanagement, pointing to factory closures and policies that he said discouraged investment and destroyed jobs.
Damba also accused the ruling party of hypocrisy, claiming Zanu PF had courted informal traders through groups publicly associated with President Emmerson Mnangagwa, presenting itself as their protector while casting opposition-run councils as the real threat. He said traders were urged to back the ruling party on the promise that they would be left alone, and warned that other groups aligned with Zanu PF could eventually face the same treatment.
The MDC says a government it leads would instead formalise informal trading, providing properly serviced vending bays, registration processes, low-interest loans and clearly designated trading zones.
Vendors a Product of Policy Failure, Says ZCP
The Zimbabwe Communist Party’s general secretary, Ngqabutho Nicholas Mabhena, traced the growth of street trading to the country’s economic restructuring, arguing that it accelerated after the adoption of the Economic Structural Adjustment Programme in the 1990s and deepened as workers were retrenched.
Mabhena questioned the shifting language used by authorities towards informal traders, noting that vendors were previously cited as part of the economically active population in unemployment debates, yet are now treated as a problem to be cleared from urban spaces. He argued that constitutional changes signed by President Mnangagwa on 7 July 2026, which extended presidential terms from five to seven years and replaced direct presidential elections with a parliamentary process for choosing the president, had pushed the next election beyond 2028 and altered the political calculus.
With no imminent ballot to contest, he said, informal traders had lost their usefulness in the eyes of the ruling party. He urged vendors to recognise themselves as part of the working class, recalling a 2015 International Labour Organisation resolution that called for informal traders to organise through trade unions so they can join broader struggles over working conditions.
Claims and Contested Ground
Opposition assertions that vendors are overwhelmingly former formal-sector workers remain difficult to verify and cannot be applied to all traders, given the diversity of the informal economy. What is clear is that the crackdown has sharpened political tensions at a time when an economic crisis has pushed thousands of retrenched workers into informal livelihoods.
The standoff highlights the difficult balance facing urban authorities, caught between demands for orderly cities and the reality that vending has become a lifeline for households with few alternatives. For now, traders in the capital and beyond are watching to see whether the enforcement campaign eases or escalates in the coming weeks.
