VENDORS operating in Bulawayo’s city centre have resorted to buying whistles for use to alert each other of raids by municipal police officers, as a way to avoid arrest and eke out a living from the streets.
BY NQOBANI NDLOVU
Council in September hammered a peace deal with vendors’ associations to ease tensions between municipal police and informal traders that often resulted in violent running battles.
The raids were temporarily suspended, but recently, municipal police intensified raids on illegal street vendors, forcing the latter to devise circumvention methods like blowing whistles.
“Scores of vendors now have whistles, which they blow to alert others when the municipal officers are approaching, to give us time to pack our wares and run away.
“This strategy has proved to be very effective because since we introduced this system, very few vendors have had their wares confiscated,” Stephen Moyo, a vendor told Southern Eye.
Another vendor, Jairos Nkomo, who sells fresh fruit and vegetables in a push cart, said he has been saved by the whistles on several occasions.
“These days, if I hear the sound of a whistle blowing, I immediately pack my goods and push away my cart to a safe place,” he said.
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“Before the introduction of whistles, a lot of vendors, including myself, used to lose goods almost on a daily basis to the municipal police officers.”
A number of vendors have been injured while fleeing from the marauding police officers who are in the habit of confiscating their wares.
An increasing number of people have turned to vending to make ends meet, as the economy continues to meltdown, forcing companies to either scale down, retrench of close shop altogether.
While the use of whistles is a novel idea to the vendors, it is not entirely new, as at the height of political violence before the 2008 elections, MDC-T supporters blew whistles, as used in sport, to symbolise that Zanu PF had committed a foul.
Bulawayo city Mayor Martin Moyo was recently reported to have expressed his reservations about the raids.
“As council, our stance is that they should not be harassed and their wares should not be confiscated, but we still need to balance by having some resemblance of order,” he said recently, but this has not stopped municipal police from continuing with the raids.
