THE Bulawayo City Council (BCC) has started rehabilitating Bhaktas Market as it prepares to provide more than 1 000 vending bays for the relocation of informal traders operating from undesignated areas across the city.
The move comes as the local authority intensifies efforts to restore order in the city following a directive by Local Government and Public Works minister Daniel Garwe.
City valuer and estates manager Thabani Ncube recently told stakeholders that the local authority was working to expand the number of vending bays at Bhaktas Market to facilitate the relocation exercise.
Ncube said the council had pegged 1,060 vending bays at Bhaktas Market in 2024, but only about 700 were taken up.
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“As we have seen with the City of Harare, efforts to clean up and restore cities to their past state are ongoing and the exercise will be cascaded to Bulawayo as well,” Ncube said.
“In the meantime, the city is working towards providing additional vending bays at Bhaktas Market. In 2024, we pegged 1 060 bays at Bhaktas Market, but only 700 bays were taken.”
Ncube said rehabilitation works, including paving the remaining portion of the market, were under way and the facility was expected to accommodate a significant number of informal traders when the clean-up campaign is launched in Bulawayo.
“As it stands, we are in the process of paving the other portion and we are hoping that when the minister comes for the launch of the clean-up campaign in Bulawayo, Bhaktas Market will be ready to accommodate the informal traders,” he said.
“We are confident it will accommodate most of the informal traders on the streets.”
The Bulawayo Vendors and Traders Association (BVTA) has described the move as long overdue but urged the council to broaden the programme beyond Bhaktas Market.
BVTA executive director Michael Ndiweni told Southern Eye that formalising the traders would enable authorities to account for them, provide business training and improve compliance with municipal regulations.
“We can train them to adhere to basic business ethics and ensure that our city is at least organised with that one thousand. I think it's a good starting point for BCC to deal with the controversial Fifth Avenue issue where there is so much that has been said and nothing has been done in terms of bringing sanity on that street.”
Ndiweni stated that the council should consider identifying additional trading spaces in areas such as Nkulumane, Ntumbane, Kelvin and Cowdray Park to accommodate traders currently operating in unsafe or undesignated areas.
He highlighted that some traders were operating under electricity pylons and along roadsides, exposing themselves and the public to unnecessary risks.
Ncube also raised concerns over the continued challenges in relocating commuter omnibus operators to designated facilities, saying the first phase of the Egodini Taxi Rank had been completed but was underutilised.
He said the council had provided holding bays for kombis awaiting their turn to load passengers at the rank, arguing that operators should not load passengers from undesignated points.
