OPINION / GOVERNANCE: Power Without Reform — What Arresting Powers Will Actually Cost Business

By Simbarashe Namusi

Thursday, July 30, 2026

Mai Chido has sold tomatoes on the same Harare street corner for eleven years. She knows the routine. A truck arrives. Whistles. Baskets overturned. She runs, comes back an hour later, sets up again. She has never called it harassment. A game with no winner, played every week, for over a decade. Versions of that same game are running right now in Bulawayo's Lobengula Street, in Mutare's Sakubva market, in Gweru's Kudzanai terminus. Different corners, same script. That script is about to change its rules, nationwide.

The Municipal Police and Courts Bill: Expanding Enforcement Powers

Cabinet has approved the principles of the Municipal Police and Courts Bill. Once Parliament passes it and the President signs, municipal officers in every city and town council will be able to arrest, investigate, and prosecute; not just issue tickets and wait for the Zimbabwe Republic Police to finish the job. Municipal courts will be created to process the cases. Justice Minister Ziyambi Ziyambi has called it a strengthening of local authorities' ability to enforce by-laws and improve service delivery.

On paper, that is a reasonable ambition. No city can function with vendors returning to the same pavement an hour after every raid, or pirate taxis loading at the same forbidden rank every single day. The ZRP has murder cases and armed robberies to worry about. It should not also be the only body that can arrest a man for selling airtime on the wrong corner. But this is where the business case and the street reality start to pull apart.

By-Law Enforcement Across Zimbabwe Cities: Harare, Bulawayo, Mutare, and Gweru

This is not a Harare-only pattern, and the record shows it. In Bulawayo, a by-law enforcement raid on 5th Avenue left about a dozen vendors injured when officers confiscated merchandise without offering the chance to pay a fine on the spot; council denied any violence took place, and vendors described it as heavy-handed. In Mutare, vendors and municipal police clashed in a running battle in the city centre. The specifics differ by city. The pattern does not. And the clearest evidence that even sympathetic officials know the current force is not ready came from Bulawayo's own mayor, David Coltart, who this month argued that council law enforcement officers remain "powerless" to enforce municipal by-laws and should be granted arrest powers; an admission, from the very people asking for the powers, that the existing operation cannot currently do its job, let alone a bigger one.

Here is the part that should worry the wider business community, more than the politics of it. A functioning enforcement system is not just a law-and-order question. It is an economic signal, and it reaches further than street vending, and it has a price tag. A 2021 survey of five major local authorities found ratepayers owed councils a combined debt running into tens of millions of dollars. Harare alone owed roughly US$24 million, Bulawayo about US$9.6 million, Mutare US$4.8 million, Gweru US$3.6 million. Every council in that survey pointed to the same consequence, water purification chemicals unbought, refuse trucks ungassed, services collapsing for lack of the very revenue by-law enforcement is meant to protect. That is the real cost of an enforcement system that raids and confiscates but never builds a durable base of compliance money formal ratepayers ultimately cover through repeated tariff hikes while informal operators cycle in and out of the same uncollected fees.

Economic Impacts on Formal Business and Informal Sector Regulation

Formal retailers who compete daily with unregulated informal trade have a direct stake in whether by-laws are applied consistently rather than violently. Manufacturers and industrialists depend on rates collection that funds the roads their trucks use and the water their factories draw.

Tourism and hospitality operators, already facing their own compliance crackdown from the Zimbabwe Tourism Authority this year, know how quickly a reputation for heavy-handed enforcement can sour an investment climate that depends on predictability. Transport operators, cross-border traders, and small manufacturers all read the same signal, does this country apply its own rules fairly, or does it apply force instead of rules? Handing arrest powers to a force with a documented, multi-city pattern of heavy-handedness against the same informal traders who make up a large share of urban commerce does not answer that question well.

Capacity, Training, and Institutional Reform in Local Governance

There is also a harder, more practical problem sitting underneath the politics: capacity. Municipal officers today are trained for administrative compliance, checking permits, writing tickets. Arrest carries with it the demands of criminal procedure: chain of custody, constitutional rights during detention, the standard of evidence a prosecution needs to survive a court challenge. None of that is taught by passing a Bill. South Africa's metro police, the model Zimbabwe is reportedly drawing from, did not arrive at functioning arrest powers overnight.

They came with training pipelines, oversight structures, and budget lines built for the job over years, across multiple metros, not just its capital. Zimbabwe's version, as proposed, borrows the powers without any visible sign of borrowing the accountability systems that make those powers survivable in cities that are already short on public trust and, if Bulawayo's own mayor is to be believed, short on basic operational capacity too. The revenue argument for reform is real, and the debt figures above show it applies to every council in the country, not one.

Uncollected vending fees, unregulated ranks, by-laws nobody enforces; these cost municipalities money every single day, money that should be going into roads and refuse collection and the basic services businesses and residents already pay rates for. Nobody serious disputes that municipal enforcement across Zimbabwe is broken. The question this Bill answers badly is not whether enforcement needs fixing. It is who gets trusted with more power to fix it, and what happens to Mai Chido, and to the formal businesses operating around her, when that power arrives in every city without the reform that was supposed to come first.

She will still be on that corner next month. So will the shops behind her, the transporters passing her, and the factories whose rates are supposed to be paying for a system that works. The only question is whether the person approaching her that morning will still be playing a game, or something with far higher stakes for all of them.

Simbarashe Namusi is a media expert, peace, leadership, and governance scholar writing in his personal capacity.

Municipal Police and Courts Bill Zimbabwe