Hawkers face harsh street life in the name of enterprise

The difficulties presented by Kenya's unlicensed street traders, or hawkers, have been pointed up by recent, violent clashes in the coastal city of Mombasa and their banning from the centre of Nakuru town, in the central Rift Valley.

According to press reports, 65 percent of jobs in Kenya are in the informal sector of the economy, and informal street trading is among the most vibrant activities. Many of the hawkers deal in second-hand clothes, household utensils or foodstuffs, laid out on handy gunny sacks which are easy to roll up and run off with when council officials approach.

Much as the practice has become a key survival mechanism for thousands of people in a situation where the formal economy has not been able to provide sufficient employment for those not working the land, hawking has also become a recipe for frequent, often low-level confrontations between the traders and local officials.

In Mombasa just before the New Year, the demolition of roadside business structures by council workers and hired youths ignited running battles which brought police in riot gear to the streets, claimed one life and left scores injured. Many of the traders' stalls and kiosks lay in ruins, and much of their stock was ruined or looted.

Religious leaders condemned the chaotic, violent clearance operation which some local political sources suggested was undertaken on behalf of powerful business interests in Mombasa, the independent Daily Nation newspaper reported.

In Nairobi, scenes of hawkers being whipped and bundled into lorries by regular and administration police are all too frequent. While some are rounded up and charged with hawking illegally, others have perfected the cat-and-mouse game of escaping police and officials, according to news reports.

"Some of them also buy their freedom by greasing the palms of council officials and armed regular and administration policemen who are sent to arrest them," Adieri Mulaa, a Kenyan journalist with the country's Nation media group, told IRIN.

The situation had even become something of a business partnership between some council officials and hawkers, with certain local councillors also involved in keeping hawkers on the streets, according to Mulaa, who specialises in reporting local council affairs. "They fear that forcing the hawkers out of the streets might prove politically invidious," he added.

In Nakuru last week, hawkers were banned from the town centre as council askaris (guards) patrolled the streets and confiscated goods from defiant traders, news organisations reported.

At the same time, more than 2,000 petty traders claimed that the local council was planning to demolish their kiosks to prepare the town for its elevation to city status. However, District Commissioner James ole Serian said he was unaware of the feared demolitions, saying that the government was concerned over an increased number of hawkers in the town, the Daily Nation reported.

It quoted a local, pro-government political activist, Jesse Karanja, as saying that the government should formulate a policy on the issue. "Harassing hawkers is a temporary solution to the problem," Karanja noted.

"Since early last year, scenes in which hawkers have clashed with the provincial administration have been worryingly common," Mulaa told IRIN, attributing the trend to a surge in the number of hawkers in Kenya’s major towns, in defiance of the bylaws of city and municipal councils.

"Though hawking is deemed a public nuisance by the council bylaws, some of the politicians in the councils are wont to issue populist remarks allowing hawkers to ply their trade in the streets," he told IRIN.

In Nairobi last year, an announcement that hawkers could operate in certain streets and lanes in the Central Business District (CBD), pending a plan to allocate them permanent business places, encouraged hundreds of hawkers to take to the city streets. Since then, removing them has been a tall order and a spot check by IRIN revealed that virtually all pavements and many streets in downtown Nairobi were thronged with hawkers.

A similar situation prevails in major towns like Nakuru, Eldoret, Kisumu and Thika, where trading right on a major roundabout poses considerable road safety hazards, while lesser congestion occurs on the streets of smaller towns.

The problems posed by petty street traders have been exacerbated by the phenomenon of a surge of street children on the streets of Kenya's towns and cities, many of them orphaned as a result of the HIV/AIDS pandemic, according to humanitarian sources.

The situation affecting casual and street traders in Kenya to some extent resembled the problem of informal settlements - often slums - in urban areas in that the central government had devolved responsibility to local authorities, but they, in turn, had no set policies or practices in the matter, observers told IRIN.

Last year, hawkers demanded official recognition through their various unregistered associations. Several petitions to the government and the city council by the Nairobi Hawkers Alliance, one of the unregistered bodies, proved fruitless, according to Ngugi Njuguna, leader of one of the lobbies.

"We still demand recognition, because we cannot be wished away or clobbered off the streets. We want to sell our wares in the Central Business District without restrictions," he added.

"We know that people are faced with economic hardships and have to survive, but the city bylaws must be observed to protect the interests of all residents," said Nairobi Town Clerk, Godfrey Mate.

Various efforts by nongovernmental organisations and other parties to assist these itinerant traders by way of establishing hawkers' markets or stalls in town centres or other lucrative trading areas have foundered because the law still outlaws the practice, according to humanitarian sources.

"We are trapped in the cycle of poverty. Hawking is the only legal business we can do," Maria Waithera, a stationery hawker along Tom Mboya Street in Nairobi, told IRIN. She said she had been arrested several times but would not cease trading because she had no other source of income.

"All these so-called law enforcers just come to steal our merchandise, arrest, beat, injure and even kill us," she said.

"Some of us have academic credentials from local universities, yet there are not jobs. We have to survive... so I decided to give hawking a whirl and, except for constant raids by council officials, things have not been bad," said Wilson Karanja, a trader in the Nairobi suburb of Westlands.

Among the suggestions that have been floated to improve the situation is giving weekend trading zones to hawkers, allocating them open places from which to operate and charging daily rates, but none of these has been implemented, according to the traders.

As matters stand, hawkers have taken over many town and city streets, obstructing passers-by and motorists, and lowering the tone of these areas in a manner that annoys rate-paying official traders and local authority officials.

Whether central or local government legislation will be amended to include and accommodate this resilient band of petty entrepreneurs - ever-increasing in number - remains to be seen.