Nobody voted for Munhumutapa Day

I should declare my position. I work in South Sudan, and I have been in Harare only a few days, here for a piece of personal business that matters more to me than anything I will write here. A few days is not long enough to know a city and I will not pretend otherwise. It is, however, exactly long enough to see what residents have stopped seeing, because nobody can sustain outrage for twenty years.

So. The infrastructure has given up and the people have not. Pavements broken where they exist. Grass through the kerbs. Rubbish you navigate by. Potholes that are no longer defects but terrain. Yet I paid for everything with OMari and InnBucks, crossed town on InDrive, and bought supper from a woman who took a mobile transfer without pausing her conversation with the customer behind me. Fast, cheap, improvised, and almost none of it built by the state.

On 9 September the government sent about 300 municipal police to clear that woman off the street. The Minister of Local Government gave a seven day ultimatum. Street vending, he said, was intolerable, a threat to the health and security of the nation, a home for drugs. The operation would be peaceful. It is now to be repeated in every city and town in the country.

That same day the government gazetted a notice making 15 September a public holiday called Munhumutapa Day. The date is the President's birthday. The power to do it came from a Rhodesian law of 1969, older than the country it now governs. No vote in Parliament. No consultation. A national holiday conjured in less time than it takes to tell a tomato seller which market she has been reassigned to.

Hold those two facts together, because they are the whole story. It was the 148th statutory instrument of the year, and the year is not three quarters done. That is about four a week. This is not a slow state. The machinery works beautifully. It simply never points at you.

And do not blame Rhodesia for the clearing. The traders were moved under vending by-laws this city wrote in 2014, under an Act its own Parliament passed in 1995. Behind those stand two genuinely Rhodesian laws, on planning and on shop licences, both from 1976, both still on the books. The planning one has been amended nine times since independence. Nine chances to write a law for the economy Zimbabweans actually have. Nine times the choice was made to keep the one written for an economy they were shut out of.

The official figures put informal work at 86.4 per cent of all employment, and the informal sector at around 64 per cent of the economy, the second highest on earth. The woman with the mobile transfer is not a nuisance at the edge of the economy. She is the economy.

So consider what the same government could have gazetted that same afternoon and did not. A vending permit at a token fee. One municipal registration instead of two licensing regimes. A rule that no trader be asked twice for a document the state already holds. A business registered in a single day. None of it needs a committee or a donor. It needs a notice, and notices are cheap this year. Government by decree is instant when it flatters the centre and unavailable when it would serve a citizen. The speed is real. The direction is the confession.

I spent the previous fortnight in meetings in Nairobi, where you can see the money. Highways, bypasses, cranes. Nairobi is still choking, and everyone I met said tax was strangling their business and their salary alike. Kenya spent the same week closing foreign run shops. Both governments have worked out that it is easier to decide who may sell than to build a country where selling is easy.

Also on 9 September, at a tourism expo in Masvingo, the President observed that when the event returns to that province in nine years, he will still be in power. That is 2035. In July he signed an amendment moving the election from 2028 to 2030 and stretching terms from five years to seven. This month the Constitutional Court hears the argument that this stripped citizens of the right to choose their own President. In traffic I passed a party vehicle flying a banner calling for a Munhumutapa dynasty. A banner is not a succession plan and I will not pretend it is. But dynasty is an ominous word to paint on a car, and the holiday was not painted on a car. It was gazetted.

Backsliding is never announced. It arrives as errands, each with a reason ready if you ask. Congestion. Public health. Heritage. Efficiency. Nobody can ever name the day it happened.

And they did not clear the vendors. Most simply did not go. They cannot be cleared, and any success lasts a fortnight, because nobody stands in the sun selling tomatoes as a lifestyle choice. They are there because the formal economy has no door they can afford to walk through. Build the door and the pavements empty themselves. Until then the state will keep sending 300 officers to police the 86 per cent, and calling it order.