Zimbabwe will never develop without industrialization: street vending is not an economic strategy

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Tendai Ruben Mbofana

The government’s latest ultimatum ordering street vendors off the pavements of Harare by September 9, 2026, is a familiar play from a tired playbook.

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Authorities frame the impending blitz as a necessary intervention to restore urban order, clear blocked pathways, combat drug abuse, and improve public sanitation in line with Vision 2030 aspirations. 

Yet, this heavy-handed approach ignores a fundamental truth: street vending is not a criminal lifestyle choice, but a desperate survival mechanism. 

Sweeping human beings off the streets will never erase the structural failure that forced them onto the tarmac in the first place.

Zimbabweans have not taken to hawking second-hand clothes, imported trinkets, and tomatoes on dusty pavements because they lack ambition or skill. 

They are there because the formal economy has collapsed beneath their feet. 

Decades of deindustrialization, policy inconsistency, currency instability, and economic mismanagement have hollowed out the nation’s productive capacity. 

When factories close their doors and corporate retrenchments become the norm, the street becomes the only remaining workplace. 

The ubiquitous presence of informal traders across every town and city is a direct, visible indictment of the country’s real economic health, completely contradicting official narratives of a thriving, booming economy.

Official statistics frequently boast of robust growth, claiming the country is on a steady march toward becoming an “upper middle-income society by 2030”. 

But when over 85 percent of economic activity is trapped in informal trade, such claims ring hollow. 

A nation cannot trade its way to upper-middle-income status through micro-transactions on street corners. 

The informal sector is characterized by hand-to-mouth survival, zero social security, low productivity, and non-existent tax revenue for public infrastructure. 

Relying on hand-to-mouth hawking traps ordinary citizens in perpetual poverty, ensuring that any personal economic gains remain fragile, unrecorded, and incapable of generational wealth creation.

Furthermore, the government’s economic triumph narrative relies heavily on two deeply flawed pillars: capital-intensive mining and inflated informal sector estimates. 

Extractive industries like gold, lithium, and platinum generate headline export figures, but they operate as enclave economies. 

Mining yields minimal local processing, few direct jobs relative to the population, and little trickle-down benefit for the average citizen. 

Meanwhile, statistics celebrating the vibrant informal “miracle” are essentially plucked from thin air. 

By definition, an unregulated, untaxed sector yields no reliable data; calculating its true output is pure conjecture. 

Celebrating a massive informal sector is not proof of economic dynamism; it is the glorification of organized coping.

The stark reality is that an economy relying primarily on informal trade can never deliver improved livelihoods. 

Selling imported goods on a pavement adds almost no real value to the domestic production chain. 

True development requires sustainable, decent-wage employment—jobs that offer healthcare, pensions, and stability. 

Sitting on a dusty pavement under the hot sun, constantly watching for municipal police, is an act of sheer resilience, not a viable national economic strategy.

Zimbabwe can never genuinely develop without meaningful industrialization. 

History offers no example of a nation transitioning from poverty to lasting prosperity without building a robust manufacturing base. 

Manufacturing creates backward and forward linkages across the entire economy. 

It processes local raw materials—turning agricultural produce into processed foods and raw minerals into manufactured goods—creating millions of direct and indirect jobs along the way. 

Industrialization builds national supply chains, generates reliable tax revenues for schools and hospitals, and fosters technological innovation. 

Without factories, value addition, and secondary production, a country remains a mere exporter of raw wealth and an importer of finished poverty.

It is time to abandon the illusion that police raids and cosmetic street clean-ups will fix an underperforming economy. 

True national progress will not be delivered by chasing desperate traders off pavements, nor by fabricating statistical economic miracles. 

What Zimbabwe urgently requires is genuine, production-driven development that respects the dignity of its people and creates real jobs in real industries.

Pavement survival is not national development.

• Tendai Ruben Mbofana is a social justice advocate and writer. Please feel free to contact him on +263715667700 or mbofana.tendairuben73@gmail.com