Lunchtime raid leaves food vendors with heavy losses

The unannounced raid took place at a time when the vendors were expecting feedback from the City Clerk on negotiations, they claim.

George Mafifi, one of the vendors, is fuming after he was fined P200 by the police on Wednesday. Mafifi wonders why the police picked on food vendors when there were many other unlicensed vendors at the mall.

He says the police confiscated his utensils and kept them at the police station until he paid a P200 fine.

Reports say the police and council officers prevented vendors from selling their food, forcing some of them to destroy it, which resulted in heavy financial losses to the vendors.

The police and council officers could have allowed the vendors to sell the food and charged them thereafter, Mafifi argues.

What particularly angers him is that this 'action' comes when the vendors were under the impression that negotiations were still taking place between Thusanang Bagwebi, an association representing vendors' interests, and authorities.

In a letter in February this year, the council warned the food vendors to stop trading, giving them two weeks to wind up their 'businesses'.

The vendors took the matter up with councillors and the City Clerk, who told them he had been directed by the Ministry of Environment to remove them over concerns by the ministry that the vendors had turned the Mall into an eyesore.

But Kutlwano Matenge, the City Clerk, was persuaded by their pleas to 'stay the execution' and promised he would communicate their concerns to the ministry and subsequently report back to them.

Mafifi claims that in the meeting with the councillors, former mayor Nelson Ramaotwana even told Thusanang Bagwebi the vendors to continue in their businesses.

He says the City Clerk never gave them the feedback he had promised. 'We have been waiting to hear whether our plea has been considered, but we are raided instead. They know we have an association; they should have approached the association instead of raiding us as individuals.'

To rub salt into the wound, the council chose month-end to launch the raid: 'That is peak time for us,' Mafifi says. 'They came at 11.00am, just before lunch.'

He says with their business disrupted, they are at a loss as to how to honour their credit terms with suppliers and pay their employees. 'Are our employees not entitled to work as Batswana?' Mafifi asks.

'They (the council and the police) are acting like a bunch of sadists: 'Let's hit them where it hurts the most.' Such sadism is what motivated them.'

At month-end, the vendors bring more food in anticipation of brisk business. 'Tonnes of good food were put to waste in that raid,' Mafifi continues. 'But we are not criminals; a civilised person would have allowed people to sell their stuff first.'

He claims the sadism was epitomised by the callous remarks of one council official who said the vendors should open a restaurant if they didn't want any more trouble.

'We deserve a bit of respect from civil servants, don't we? What they did yesterday did not show any respect for us at all.'

Mafifi says trying to reason with the officials was met with the cold response that 'the law' had to be implemented. 'Sounds rather like apartheid South Africa when black people were not allowed downtown at night,' Mafifi remarks with a measure of his own sarcasm.

Mafifi claims when a Btv crew appeared on the scene near the University of Botswana (UB), the raiders fled. If what they were doing was lawful, he wonders, why did they run away from journalists?

Mafifi says there are burning issues like unemployment, poverty and crime in Botswana.

'Yet here are Batswana who are trying to fend for themselves and in the process create employment. But what does the government do? It finds it fit to harass them.'

The police should be looking for criminals instead of chasing food vendors: 'We are trying to alleviate poverty in our homes. We are trying to put food on the table. But the government is treating us like common criminals. Does this make sense? No, I don't think so. I think we deserve a bit of respect.'

Food vendors at the Gaborone West mall have also been under constant raids by the police.

In the midst of all this, the Mayor Harry Mothei says he is not aware of what is happening because he has been out of town. However, Mothei says in so far as he knows, his councillors never took a decision to evict the food vendors.

Even so, the Mayor says, council employees can decide to stage such an operation on their own. The City Clerk was to brief him in due course.

In the meantime, Mafifi has stopped operating for fear that he will face steeper fines if he does. He says they have been warned that if caught again, the fine will be P500.