684
700
600
500
400
300
200
100
0
337
186
No. of Vendors
189
Registered Vendors
75
Arrest
41
Confiscation
Assault
Goods Burnt
2
Figure 2: VISET Chart on State of Vending in Zimbabwe in July 2015
The table below shows the violated human rights of vendors
vendors; the table also indicates that it was
vendors in the major cities who were most affected.
Arrests
Confiscations
Locality
Registered
Nonregistered
Harare
75
57
Value of
Confiscated
Goods
Value of
Burnt
Goods
Assaults
Registered
Nonregistered
Displaced
Vendors
168
116
$195 908
$690 000
123
136 140
Bulawayo
43
164
$169 000
81
Gweru
32
90
$89 650
54
Masvingo
19
67
$104 681
28
Mutare
28
79
$20 000
51
37 322
Domboshava
7
516
$579 239
337
173 462
TOTAL
75
186
168
$690 000
Figure 3: VISET Figures on the Human Rights Violations for July 2015
The assault of the vendors was reportedly carried out by the Zimbabwe Republic Police (ZRP),
municipal police officers and space barons. As of July only Harare and Mutare had managed to
remove vendors from the CBD.
The vendor crisis coincided with the dismissal of thousands of Zimbabwean workers following a
Supreme Court judgment of 17 July 2015 which set a precedent to allow companies terminate
workers contracts on three
months’ notice. By the end of
July thousands of workers
across the country had been
laid off.. Unemployment is
increasingly recognized as a
driver of instability and a root
cause of conflict. A study by the
African Development Bank
(AfDB) in 2013 on the effects of
youth
unemployment
on
political instability proved with
empirical evidence that youth
Figure 4: Vendors milling around Department of Works offices
2
VISET – Vendors Initiative for Social and Economic Transformation
3
unemployment is significantly
associated with an increase of