The blame for who is responsible for keeping vendors on Kampala streets has for years been a centre of debate among ordinary Ugandans and leaders.
Appearing on NBS TV’s Barometer show on Tuesday, Social entrepreneur also motivational speaker Frank Gashumba blamed Kampala City Lord Mayor Erias Lukwago of being one of the people who have kept the city rowdy and crowded due to his support of vendors street operations.
“I don’t agree with Lord Mayor Erias Lukwago on street vendors. Time has come for sanity to prevail in the city,” Gashumba said, adding that Ugandans need a trade order in their capital city and street vendors should go to the markets, where they belong because they have turned every place in Kampala to look like a marketplace.
However, Gashumba’s comments rubbed the Lord Mayor a wrong way and on Wednesday he was prompted to respond to the former.
Lukwago said he takes full cognizance of the frustrations many Ugandans endure by having a capital city with a clutter of merchandise strewn in almost all the streets, pavements and walkways. He however begged people condemning the poor state of the city to come to terms with the reality that the issue of trade order shall not be sustainably addressed by mere use of iron-fist methods by the state. He added that it is more complex than the majority of people imagine.
“Just accept the fact that having an orderly city we all crave for under the prevailing socio-economic environment where the bulk of youth and women have resorted to informal business (“nekolela gyange”), as opposed to structured employment, is a far cry. Kampala, in its current shape is a city of “banekolela gyange,” which complicates the issue of trade order. Macroeconomic interventions are urgently needed to integrate the myriad of youth and women roaming around the city into the structured economy,” said Lukwago in a Facebook post.
He added that the situation is compounded by the ever-soaring rent tariffs in arcades, malls and other business premises yet the regime has flagrantly refused to allocate adequate funds for the construction of city markets and other common user facilities for the urban poor.
“We, the elected leaders in the city have been regrettably turned into a punching bag for the age-old mess we never created. The least I can do is to pick a stick and hound the poor people struggling to a living into the wilderness in a manner akin to the way the government chased the locusts that invaded the country into Eastern Kenya and South Sudan.”
Lukwago called on his critics to address the problem right from the source rather than tinkering on the edge with the symptoms.
“Ask yourself as to why these intermittent brutal operations have not succeeded in permanently driving vendors off the streets?”
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