If trucks will block roads, let’s not chase vendors please!

Since the poor man’s freedom fighter in these pages has chosen a barrage of questions for this week, I’ll take great pleasure trying to fit into his shoes this week – dear reader, you ought to know they are big, hollowed out and have quite the collection of dust on them so pardon me if you catch a sneeze from my stamping.

The country was mourning a big man this week so half the roads leading to the state funeral location were blocked. One of them, rather sadly, is the road that leads to my office. I conjured up excuses to not show up to work and even contemplated telling the poor man’s freedom fighter, who doubles as my boss, that work from home yields equal productivity except that for a television, people must see the meat of your work otherwise ‘they will pass eyes in you’.

So I grudgingly took my commute to work. The roads were packed and traffic ground to a stationery parking lot on many roads. As is the custom, vendors walked by the car offering a cocktail of products from rat killing poison to ‘gucki’ belts, I’m positive, had the events I will narrate shortly hereafter not happened and we stayed long enough in the snarl, I’d have been able to haggle an uzi machine gun; what with the range of products!

But the parking lot - rather traffic jam - was quickly disrupted by a swirl of vendors and street children running helter-skelter. On their heels were well dressed police officers and KCCA enforcement teams. The sprints were consequential – get caught, you wind up in jail, evade the law and you make a buck to feed on for the day.

It did get me to wonder though, what does the enforcement officer tell his children when, with sweat and a brow of dirt on his shirt, he walks into his home. “I was hard at work today” I presume he would say, “Doing what?” again, I presume they’d ask. “You know, catching vendors and street kids.”  

I even wondered how the Key Performance Indicators for the job are structured and how progression in that career goes; the more you catch the higher you go? Or the bigger the trade quantity of the swoop the higher you go?

While we are still at it, the question that I really intend to ask here is what is wrong with vending in Kampala?

I’ve heard the biggest argument fronted for the crackdown of vendors being trade order in the city. But order, as defined by the city authority, rewards the few. It gives those with power access to snatch livelihoods from the powerless. The city lacks either the aesthetic for order nor strives to it. The roads to markets are unmanageable, parking spaces – at these ‘orderly markets’ are part-time taxi stages and no enforcement of standards, sanitation or even unionization of market workers is being carried out.

Kampala was designed with a white gaze. Carefully architected to lock out natives. Kololo, Nakasero and CBD where Imperial subterfuges resided and plundered the hard-earned cotton, coffee and hut taxes of the masses was barricaded with security outposts that would limit access to elite markets – except with approval of the imperialists.

What we see today as sprints between vendors and enforcers were, years back, sprints between graduate tax ‘defaulters’ and Nubian police men acting on orders from Kololo.

KCCA must start to see the ‘problem’ of vendors not as a ‘trade-order’ problem but rather a political-economy problem that requires political solutions. For starters, unionizing vendors to give them bargaining power will start their willful push for space in markets and create a long term self-enforcing order. Unions will eat into the market pie of monopolist trickstars that have held city markets hostage and make it politically and economically dangerous for them to remain exclusive.

But as we continue to work towards that, what moral authority do you have to chase a vendor because of trade order when you close off roads with vagary and impunity? What compensation plan exists for the trade license holder on this road who loses days of business? Isn’t the conduct of state functions, stripped of officialdom, vending for legitimacy?

This is my hard work this week on the freedom fight frontline of the poor man. See you all in the slums.