The Clean-Ups That Never Clean Anything: Zimbabwe’s Urban Whack-a-Mole
By Simbarashe Namusi
Zimbabwe appears to have developed a peculiar fascination with cleaning up things that never seem to stay clean.
Every few years, we embark on another grand campaign to restore order to our cities. Vendors are chased from pavements. Illegal structures are demolished. Informal settlements are cleared. Streets are emptied. Officials issue stern statements. Pictures of bulldozers doing their work circulate on social media.
For a brief moment, it looks like something has been achieved.
Then, months or years later, we are back where we started.
The Cycle of Displacement
Zimbabwe needs clean-ups. Of course our cities need order. Streets should be passable. Buildings should comply with planning regulations. Trading spaces should be properly designated. Waste should be collected. The real issue is what our clean-ups have actually achieved.
Consider Operation Murambatsvina of 2005. It was presented as an exercise to restore order and eliminate illegal structures and informal trading. Yet the underlying pressures that produced informal settlements and informal economic activity did not disappear.
People still needed somewhere to live.
People still needed somewhere to trade.
People still needed to earn an income.
And so the informal economy, like water finding a crack in a wall, simply found another route.
Mai Chiedza was one of the vendors swept off Julius Nyerere Way in 2005. She sold tomatoes and onions from a wooden table near the old bus terminus. The bulldozers came, the table was confiscated, and for a few weeks the pavement stayed empty. Then she found a spot two streets over, outside a hardware shop whose owner didn't mind.
She was moved again ahead of the 2024 SADC Summit when Harare cleared its pavements to present a pristine image for visiting heads of state. Mai Chiedza relocated to a side street near a church, out of sight of the main delegation routes.
She has been swept up again this year in the clean-up currently under way in the Harare CBD—framed around the government's Vision 2030 ambitions. And with Zimbabwe set to host the COMESA Summit on October 22, 2026, she will likely be moved a fourth time so Harare looks its best for another visiting delegation.
Twenty-one years later, she is still selling the same tomatoes. Only the pavement, and the occasion for moving her off it, keeps changing. Twenty-one years later, we are still demolishing structures and chasing vendors.
Symptoms vs. Systemic Solutions
If the same problem keeps returning after every clean-up, the problem is unlikely to be the people being cleaned up.
It is more likely the system. We seem particularly comfortable dealing with symptoms:
Visible Symptoms: A vendor occupying a pavement, a house built on undesignated land, or a crowded market.
Invisible Root Causes: Structural unemployment, affordable housing shortages, failing urban planning systems, unserviced land, and municipal failure to provide formal trading spaces.
Fixing root causes takes considerably more effort than sending in a bulldozer.
There is also something politically attractive about a clean-up. It produces photographs. It produces headlines. It allows authorities to demonstrate decisive action. A demolished structure is immediate evidence of work; a cleared pavement looks impressive on social media.
Building affordable housing, reforming municipal governance, creating functioning markets, and expanding employment opportunities take years, patience, investment, and economic transformation. None of it photographs well.
A Clean-Up Without an Alternative is Displacement
Remove the vendor without providing a viable trading space and the vendor will eventually return, the way Mai Chiedza did, three times over.
Demolish the informal house without providing affordable accommodation and the family will build somewhere else. Clear an informal settlement without addressing housing demand and another settlement will emerge. The location changes; the problem doesn't.
There is nothing inherently wrong with enforcing planning laws—a functioning city depends on them. But enforcement must be accompanied by functioning systems:
Accessible Trading Spaces: Affordable, serviced areas for vendors to operate legally.
Serviced Residential Land: Affordable land for legitimate homebuilders.
Formal Housing Supply: Adequate housing stock to eliminate the demand for informal settlements.
Otherwise, we are simply playing an elaborate game of urban whack-a-mole.
Zimbabwe should stop measuring the success of a clean-up by how many vendors were removed, how many structures were demolished, or how empty the streets looked the following morning.
Success should be measured six months later: Whether Mai Chiedza is still trading illegally. Whether displaced families have decent alternative accommodation. Whether the underlying problem has actually disappeared. If the answer is no, then we need to stop congratulating ourselves for cleaning up. We may simply be getting better at moving the mess around.
Simbarashe Namusi is a media, peace, and governance scholar writing in his personal capacity.
Zimbabwe urban clean ups
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