Did KCCA achieve its goal in evicting vendors? A Six months’ report card

On the morning of the first Monday in September last year, green and yellow coloured graders bellowed and puffed onto Kampala’s streets, crashing trading kiosks and merchandise stocks into piles of debris. It was not the first Kampala vendors’ eviction. But this had a strange sense of determination about it.

Newly created Kampala Capital City Authority (KCCA) swept off a reported 7,000 vendors off the streets. KCCA said it sought to decongest the city and allow legitimate traders get a decent shot at honest trade.
And six months later, the eviction has largely been a success, for the vendors have mostly kept away since. The streets feel lighter. They are less noisy. But the city is still congested.

Also, the evicted vendors’ fate remains unknown because they are untraceable in the markets they were sent to. And as KCCA drops plans to further decongest the city by banning bodaboda cyclists from the city centre, there are questions whether the city’s leadership is starting to dance to the tune of vote-wielding political king makers, just like their predecessors did.

Field report – cat and mouse
At between 8.30am to 9.30am of every working day, a vendor, who chooses to be identified as Kate, wraps up her saucepan filled with steamed cassava and beans and heads back home, somewhere in the Kampala slum of Kanyogoga, Namuwongo. “As you know after they chased us away from here, I only work in the evenings and mornings,” she says.

Kate used to run an open-air food-joint along the railway lines adjacent to Mukwano Roundabout. “I used to make most of my money at lunch time. That is when a lot of the workers up there (Mukwano Industries) came to eat. Now I cannot serve lunch because by that time, those (KCCA) officials are already moving around,” Kate adds.

Hers is the case of a section of vendors who have chosen the option of trying to beat the system. There are the fruit sellers who hawk mangoes and bananas in baskets. There are the hand equipment vendors who hawk their wares on the streets, especially at specific spots clogged by traffic jam. And there are those that sell consumable goods like sugar at prices way lower than those in shops.

For instance, when the price of sugar dropped to Shs4,500 in most stores three weeks ago, these vendors were selling similar packs of the sugar at Shs3,000 along Nakivubo Road. There are also those who have erected posters on the streets proclaiming discount prices for certain goods, below which they leave a telephone contact.

Kate flees for her life at about 9am. But if the marauding teams of KCCA field officers show up earlier, she is forced to flee immediately. Some days, she returns in the evenings to sell steamed maize. The other vendors play even a more exciting game of cat and mouse. One vendor will shout out in police-car-siren-like sounds as soon as they see the green-T-Shirt wearing KCCA teams, warning off the rest who will then scamper into thin air, to safety.

Restored sanity
There is no better place to see just how much the eviction of vendors has changed Kampala than in the down-town business district, especially along Luwum Street, and from then on, slopping down on to Namirembe Road and the Kikuubo conurbation. The walkways adjacent to the plazas near Kikuubo had long been a noisy affair, with touting roadside traders hitting shoe soles against each other. The concrete tiles on the pavements that were once invisible, covered by the indefinable mix of traders and merchandise, are now fully exposed, giving the streets a cleaner and smarter look. Traders who crowded walkways with merchandise to keep vendors away, have since returned them to the shelves, save for a few areas. And traders are only too glad. “It is obvious that people (traders) are now happy. The streets are clear and customers can branch to any shop. There is some sanity at the end of the day,” says Everest Kayondo, chairperson of Kampala City Traders’ Association (Kacita).

Key strategy
Because this was not the first time city authorities were attempting a vendors’ eviction, it’s important to question what trick worked this time round that had failed before. KCCA’s manager, Treasury Services, Julius Raymond Kayondo, says, “The success is because we involved the vendors in the process. We ensured that we have the spaces, called upon key participants like the in-house law enforcement team, and involved political leaders, before the actual evictions. We even offered vendors transport to the markets.

“Sometimes you do something and then you relax, we did not relax. We acquired our enforcement team and are engaging police every now and then. We try as much as possible not to allow the few remnants from coming back,” he adds.

Where are the vendors?
At the eviction last year, KCCA said it had gazetted enough spaces for the vendors to take up in the city’s markets. But although KCCA’s Mr Kayondo says the vendors were relocated to these markets, it has been nearly impossible to locate any of the 7,000 vendors in markets we surveyed in the city.

At Parkyard Market, Owino, a KCCA official, Suleiman Lubega, said 460 slots were filled up by street vendors right after the eviction. But he contradicted the market’s chairperson, Hamza Kalema, who said although 120 slots have been filled up in the market since the fire, he could not confirm that any of these were among the evicted vendors. Mr Kayondo said the vendors’ return to markets has increased KCCA’s revenues. In Nakawa (market) for instance, where we used to collect less than Shs1m, we now collect more than Shs1.5m(per day),” he said.

But he contradicted Nakawa market’s chairperson in part, who denied any vendors ever joining his market. “For us, we have not got any street vendors into our market. They despised the place, saying they would spend here say three hours and get only one customer,” said Lutaaya Senkungu, vice chairperson of Nakawa Market.

It was a similar story at the Wandegeya, Bugolobi and Luzira markets. That thus raises concern as to where exactly these vendors went to if they are not in the markets where they are alleged to have been resettled.

Turned to criminality?
One of the market chairpersons contacted, said, “They could be among those mobile vendors who shift from market to market, vending their stock on a specific market day. But also, we cannot assume that they all returned to trading. They could be part of the criminals we have around now. You know some of those vendors were not easy.”

Some of the criticism to the eviction last year came from some quarters who suggested that sweeping vendors off the streets would allow criminality to creep back into Kampala. It is not clear whether events have tended to this direction. But the elusiveness of the vendors after eviction makes their welfare and current modes of survival a genuine concern.

Street Vendors vs Bodaboda cyclists: politics of dispensability?

Hardly a week after evicting vendors from the streets in Kampala, it was reported that KCCA was proposing to evict bodaboda cyclists as well, although, only in the central business district.

But KCCA seems to have backtracked. Julius Kayondo, KCCA’s manager, Treasury Services, says, “We are not getting rid of them because the public needs them. We don’t want to remove everything and make it very hard for the public. The issue is not removing them. The issue is on how they operate in a decent manner so that you and I can actually enjoy them, while they offer some employment opportunities to the riders.”

This would play straight into what Dr Frederick Ntale Kisekka, a social research fellow at the Institute of Social Research at Makerere University, calls, the political indispensability of bodaboda riders in the city. Dr Kisekka says it was easy for the government, which now supervises Kampala, to get rid of vendors because they had become a political risk. Bodabodas however, are a much more difficult group to deal with, he said.

“After the elections, vendors became a pawn within the political power-game. They became easily swayed, most decried the economic hardships and became easily inclined to the side of walk-to-work protests. Because of their numbers, they constituted a force that upheld the demonstrations long enough. As a way of cutting down the possibilities of turning our city into some kind of Egypt-like Arab Spring, it was wiser for the regime to see how to deal with the presence of these vendors and reduce their presence in the city, because they were day by day, contributing to the spontaneity of the demonstrations,” he adds. Dr Kisekka says the fact that subsequent efforts by Activists 4 Change to protest in Kampala have lucked momentum, is proof that this move paid off for the state.
Bodaboda riders however, are yet to suffer political fatality, according to Dr Kisekka.

“Bodabodas, just like vendors, constitute another political pawn. This one is likely to be worse than vendors. It is extremely organised. They have a very high social capital, a high level of trust, of collegiality. They have higher and predictable incomes. They have good will of financial institutions, an organised group from which institutions know that they will recover their money, they constitute a big political force,” he says.

Dr Kisekka says the assumption that the city’s new authorities, who are not politically answerable to voters, would rid the city of politicking was an illusion. “A capital city is a political city. Because of this, it would be an illusion to think you could lose politics in this issue,” he said. Kayondo however denies that politics had anything to do with either action.

“Even the vendors appeal to both political centres, both the government and opposition. l,” he says.
KCCA, upon realising that “bodabodas are very important” and that “the public needs them”, is now in plans to gazette spaces in Kampala’s central business district for bodaboda parking, and after that, the authority will then set a maximum number of bodaboda cyclists that can operate within the city centre. It should however be noted that other cities in the region like Nairobi have locked cyclists out of the central business district, limiting them to the outskirts.

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