MORE than 100 vendors have been injured by the police in the Central Harare with some being hospitalized following the directive last month by the government to evict informal traders selling food in the CBD, Vendors Initiative for Socio-economic Transformation (VISET), has said.
Government last month formed a ministerial taskforce on controlling the further eruption and spread of typhoid and issued an ultimatum to vendors selling food stuffs in the streets countrywide to cease their operations.
Harare vendors were blamed for the outbreak and spread of typhoid.
However, vendors refused to move and obtained a High Court order which interdicts government from evicting them. As a result, the informal traders say they are being brutalized by the police who are forcefully evicting them.
Samuel Wadzai, who leads VISET, said more than 100 of their members have sustained serious injuries as a result of police brutality.
“As I speak we have 109 vendors who are nursing wounds they sustained from police brutality for selling their wares in the CBD some of whom are still detained in hospital, a thing which should not happen to poor people who are in the streets not by choice but because of the economy,” Wadzai told a stakeholders meeting which was attended by the Zimbabwe Human Rights Commission (ZHRC) in Harare this week.
“It is our appeal to the ZHRC that they assist us by ordering the police to stop harassing people who are trying to make ends meet through vending because we are not thieves, but mere desperate ,unfortunate victims of the depressing economy,” he said.
ZRP officers, in conjunction with the Harare municipal police, harass and arrest vendors often resulting in scuffles and punch-ups.
Last year, the ZHRC published a damning report detailing the harassment of vendors by armed police officers.