Increased vending points to failed policies
Author: Andrew Bakoraho
What you need to know:
- Sensitive to cost of doing business, I think this new style of selling outside one physical location is equivalent to hawking.
While in my rural district last year, I witnessed Kampala based manufacturers and processors helped by mobile vans, some with fixed loud speakers, vending goods.
Like street hawkers, these ones too drive rotating the entire city with workers clad in uniforms that disembark from mobile vans/trucks, and keep knocking on shops as others sell to bypassing pedestrians.
Sensitive to cost of doing business, I think this new style of selling outside one physical location is equivalent to hawking. Such is disruptive to regional or district based wholesale traders as they face unfair competition from firms that don’t pay rent and local taxes of the area.
Vending in buses traveling up-country appeared scarily as it involved unqualified personnel selling medicines and drugs to ill-informed passengers.
Unfortunately, the recent government’s ban on vending and renewed KCCA cruel evictions appear to be targeting small fish as crocodiles swim freely countrywide in the name power house processors and manufacturers. Whether authorities succeed in their agenda or not, renewed evictions have, however, exposed corrupt and opportunistic tendencies that tolerated vending for personal gains.
Like several times before, KCCA chase venders only when formal and tax compliant traders refuse to pay local fees and taxes. I am certain venders will be back shortly after enough revenues are collected from the said category. Additionally, KCCA ought to know that even more developed cities like London have venders too except that our number is exaggerated by extortionists who exploit the unemployment situation in the country. Otherwise, how did these illegal kiosks swell in number at the heart of City centre? Another dilemma with Kampala is that it’s a city that turned an industrial hub due to less stringent law on water and environment(wetlands) which insensitive profit – driven players exploited and reclaimed for setting up slums, factories and industries all of which are attracting all categories of people.
This too explains the presence of congestion, lawlessness and high crime, deadly floods and housing problems in the city.
Previous governments invested heavily at regional or district centres through co-operatives unions which processed home-grown crops into exportable commodities like cotton, tobacco, dairy and coffee, purposely to contain rural-urban migration and rural lawlessness and unemployment all of which are rampant today.
Following NRM’s liberal policies, buying and processing of named crops is largely in hands of profit-driven capitalists ( Ugandan middle and foreign Investors) who sadly ended up centralizing buying, processing and selling (export) in Kampala and Mukono wetlands. Turning it an industrial area by default, overtaking Jinja, Kampala is no longer a city and a mere commercial hub that attracted highly educated and skilled personnel required in her advanced formal social and economic sectors but something else never meant to be.
Authorities attempting to decongest Kampala are destined to fail because they are applying short-term measures when the challenge requires long-term solutions, including relocating the Capital City like it’s been done in Nigeria and Tanzania. Bundling capital –strained people selling inhomogeneous goods in one location with less concentration of people is likely to fail.Unless Kampala based venders are restricted to rural markets, even zonal industries being built by private companies with minimal government subsidies will struggle.
Lastly, since NRM government strategy of building key infrastructure for structural transformation borrowing from China whose state-owned companies followed and tapped into similar loans via contracting said capital intensive projects, it’s high time Uganda considers equipping its ministries to take up such capital draining projects and further decentralise manpower as well to create jobs in construction at district level.
Following migration of regional agro-processing factories to Kampala, the Central government ought to reconsider its liberalisation policy so that it allocates substantial taxpayers back to rural areas for betterment of rural people who are flocking to Kampala at speed of “light”.
Mr Andrew Bakoraho is a writer and advocate equitable and progressive policies.
