By Tione Andsen
Lilongwe, February 16, Mana: Lilongwe City Council (LCC) has admitted that removing vendors for the City’s streets remains a toll order for them.
Director of planning and development (DPD) for LCC, Hillary Kamela made the admission Wednesday in Lilongwe during a Medias briefing ahead of City Summit scheduled for March 15, 2023.
He said vendors have over crowded the City’s streets with different merchants and now it was proving difficult to remove them.
“The council should be providing designated places for them to conduct their businesses freely but they are not utilizing them,” Kamela noted.
The DPD said the influx of street vendors in the streets have been attributed to City resident’s willingness to providing them with steady market on the streets.
“If all residents adhere to trading regulations not to provide a market for them, they will be forced out of the streets and the streets will look smart,” he said.
Kamela pointed out that LCC once tried to remove the vendors from the streets but the initiative has been receive back clash from the residents because some preferred buying from the streets in order to save time.
He hoped that the forthcoming city summit to be organized for the City Council would be able to come up with interventions which would help to remove street vendors.
The DPD said the council would largely rely on the residents to come up with new innovations which could help to bring sanity in the City’s streets.
Area 49 residents, Jack Chonzi said the council need to implement their trading regulations into force and they need to increase their man power in order to deal with the problems.
He said the issues of street vending have always been a political where vendors have used to threaten that they would use their voting powers to express their disappointments of being removed from the streets.
“All the councils in the country have failed miserably to deal with the issues of street vending and street begging. If they want the streets to be overcrowded with vendors they need to stump up their authorities and stop playing politics with the issue,” Chonzi noted.
He suggested that the council need to provide free markets in most townships in order to do away with street vending because residents would have the right places to do their purchases.
Mayor for LCC, Councillor Richard Banda said the City Summit would be staged under the theme, “My City my responsibility, together building the city we want.”
He said the issue of street vending needs collective efforts by all stakeholders in order to come up with tangible solution to it.
