×
NewsDay

AMH is an independent media house free from political ties or outside influence. We have four newspapers: The Zimbabwe Independent, a business weekly published every Friday, The Standard, a weekly published every Sunday, and Southern and NewsDay, our daily newspapers. Each has an online edition.

Street butcheries sprout in Harare CBD

News
SOME enterprising but daring Harare street vendors have set up mobile butcheries on pavements where they are selling various meat products oblivious of the health and security implications of their move.

SOME enterprising but daring Harare street vendors have set up mobile butcheries on pavements where they are selling various meat products oblivious of the health and security implications of their move.

By Phyllis Mbanje

The vendors are popular around the highly-congested Copacabana bus terminus in Harare where they are making brisk business from an equally undiscerning clientelé.

They normally display their products after 5pm when municipal police would have knocked off duty.

The highly innovative youths normally accost potential customers and in an outpouring of pleas, try to convince them that their meat is cheaper and that they will save time instead of going into a nearby supermarket where queues were longer.

“It’s fresh, tasty and 100% beef. It would be a mistake if you don’t buy from me. For only a dollar you will get all this mince,” one lad said, trying his luck with a customer who had asked about the quality of the mince at his makeshift stall.

The vendors only display about three packets of meat and the rest is stashed in some secret place (most likely a filthy drainage), just in case the municipal police pounce and confiscate their wares. Council health director Prosper Chonzi recently admitted that food peddlers were a growing menace and that it was difficult to deal with them.

“We have not been able to get these off the streets because there are so many of them. They are everywhere,” Chonzi said.

“They leave a trail of garbage on the street and this contributes to disease outbreaks which become expensive to manage.”

The practice used to be confined to high-density suburbs before vendors migrated to the central business district.

Health experts have warned that consumers risked contracting bacterial and fungal infections by buying contaminated food from the streets.

“It often takes a crisis for the collective consciousness on food safety to be stirred and any serious response to be taken,” World Health Organisation Food Safety and Zoonoses director Kazuaki Miyagishima said.