Enforcement teams and heavy machinery have spent the past week clearing vending sites in Harare and Chitungwiza, leaving thousands of informal traders counting destroyed stalls, confiscated stock and lost daily earnings as fresh operating hours come into force nationwide.
The restrictions, introduced alongside the government’s National Cleanup Campaign, limit street trading in central business districts to the hours between 6am and 6pm. In residential areas, including the high-density suburbs where many Harare traders operate, vending is permitted until 8pm. The rules apply across all 92 local authorities, several of which are simultaneously reviewing their bylaws — 113 in total — to align with the new framework.
What the new timetable means for traders
- Central business district vending: 6am to 6pm only
- Residential and high-density suburb trading: permitted until 8pm
- Enforcement applies to all 92 local authorities
- 113 council bylaws currently under review
Officials insist the measures are about regulating where and when trading happens rather than banning it outright, and say designated vending zones will remain open to licensed traders.
Opposition says the poor are paying the price
The operations have drawn sharp criticism from opposition parties, which argue that the state is targeting the symptoms of a distressed economy instead of the conditions that pushed so many Zimbabweans into street trading in the first place.
MDC Secretary for Information and Publicity and presidential spokesperson Lloyd Damba described the past week as one of tears for residents of Harare and Chitungwiza, accusing municipal police of destroying traders’ stalls, seizing their goods and subjecting them to rough treatment.
Damba rejected the framing of vendors as lawbreakers, describing them as working citizens whose livelihoods are being dismantled in public. He traced the growth of informal trading to the contraction of Zimbabwe’s manufacturing base, arguing that many of those now selling in the streets once worked in factories in Willowvale, Graniteside, Msasa and Chitungwiza’s industrial sites as engineers, clerks and machine operators.
He also accused the ruling party of abandoning traders it had previously mobilised for political support, saying the same groups that were once publicly associated with Zanu PF and the presidency are now being removed from urban spaces. Damba warned that other constituencies aligned with the ruling party could eventually face similar treatment, and said an MDC administration would instead formalise informal trading through serviced vending bays, registration, low-interest loans and clearly demarcated trading zones.
The claim that today’s vendors are overwhelmingly former formal-sector employees is a broad assertion that has not been independently verified across the sector, and informal trading in Zimbabwe has many entry points.
A shift in the political timetable
Zimbabwe Communist Party general secretary Ngqabutho Nicholas Mabhena placed the crackdown in a longer economic arc, arguing that informal trading expanded rapidly after the Economic Structural Adjustment Programme of the 1990s and continued growing as retrenchments mounted.
Mabhena questioned the government’s changing characterisation of informal traders, noting that vendors were previously counted among the economically active when unemployment figures were discussed, only to be treated now as a problem requiring removal from city centres.
He linked the timing of the enforcement drive to constitutional changes signed by President Emmerson Mnangagwa on 7 July 2026, which extended presidential terms from five to seven years, replaced direct presidential elections with a parliamentary system for choosing the head of state, and pushed the next national poll beyond 2028. In Mabhena’s reading, the altered electoral calendar has changed how useful vendors are seen to be politically.
He urged traders to organise along trade union lines, recalling a 2015 International Labour Organisation resolution encouraging vendors to join unions so they can ally with the wider working class.
Government defends its approach
Authorities have maintained that vending is not being outlawed, only reorganised, and that the cleanup campaign responds to long-standing complaints about congestion, uncollected waste and unsafe trading conditions in urban centres. Councils have been directed to speed up bylaw reviews so that enforcement has a clear legal footing.
For traders in Harare and Chitungwiza, however, the immediate questions are more practical: where to sell, how to replace confiscated goods, and how to absorb the cost of the disruption. Vendor representatives say clarity on designated sites and a workable licensing process will determine whether the new timetable stabilises trading or simply pushes it further underground.
With the cleanup campaign set to continue and election timelines now redrawn, the dispute over Zimbabwe’s informal economy looks set to remain one of the country’s most combustible political flashpoints.