Online Reporter
LAST year’s fire outbreak at Mbare Musika could have left many stakeholders utterly disconsolate and counting their losses but presents a timely chance for key service providers like Harare City Council to review the way business was being done at the country’s biggest market and rectify perceived shortcomings leveraging the new-found opportunity for a positive change.
This mishap now requires those doing the rehabilitations to adopt a positive approach that will address previous inadequacies that hampered businesses from blooming to expected levels and set the stage for more profitable operations when it re-opens.
Meanwhile, it is refreshing to note that the temporary market being constructed to accommodate traders is nearing completion and people will soon be doing their business in a good environment while they wait for the original market to come back to life.
There will be a number of areas that the City Fathers may need to look into to make sure the new structure comes across as an improvement of the one destroyed by the fire.
Upon completion, the most important step is to ensure space allocation is done transparently guided by the category of products that will be sold within particular sections of the structure. It will be important for the new structure to take into account that different commodities have different customers with different expectations, hence the need to have them traded in spaces commensurate with those demands.
Space allocation is usually a contentious issue wherever people congregate to work or even attend some social event. It will require a council official to preside over the space apportionment exercise guided by the nature of merchandise someone will be trading in. This will also make it easy for customers doing their shopping to identify their preferred traders and avoid spending time searching all over the market. It is time the city council does things professionally at the new market. Space barons must not be allowed to claim ownership of space, which they will later lease out for atrocious charges.
The new structure will reportedly have more than two storeys, which makes it easier for city council to designate particular spaces of floors for specific commodities. This will require the team doing the reconstruction work to get input from traders and other stakeholders on how the new structure can be a perfect example of the modernised market place they are targeting to establish.
The fact that Mbare Musika is a unique place with various services that are not available at most markets globally makes it a potential tourism drawcard too.
People should come from different places to marvel at the new structure and its wide assortment of products and services.
One issue that used to stick out like a sore thumb at the old market was the absence of a functional drainage system that saw farmers, traders, visitors and customers alike having to wade through pools of mud to access services each time there were rains or water from any other source.
This was one huge deal breaker, which saw some potential customers preferring to forego some products or source them elsewhere depriving traders there of possible revenue.
The new structure must be built in such a way that water easily drains away and does not remain on the surface to interfere with business.
Over the years, Mbare Musika has been among those accused of being nuclei of water-borne diseases such as cholera and many others.
This is so because discarded fresh produce usually ended up in the pools of mud resulting from the stagnant water that would accumulate over time. The issue of poor drainage has always been accompanied by lack of refuse collection, which has people going about their business having to contend with negotiating their way around rotting mounds of fresh crop produce.
It is an unambiguous reality that hundreds of thousands of people throng Mbare Musika daily for various services, which makes it imperative for the environment to be a clean one. Mbare boasts a multi-million-dollar economy in which millions of dollars exchange hands daily and records huge volumes of human traffic, thanks to the wide assortment of services they access there.
When things finally return to normal, it will be important for City of Harare to deploy people with knowledge on agriculture and ways of both storing and preserving the quality of produce. This will help in the enforcement of proper storage practices for either left-over or just-delivered produce to ensure there are no losses on the part of farmers.
The other thorny issue that will require council to address without fail is on proper storage facilities. Some classes of fresh produce cold room temperatures for safe storage, which is not there at the moment. It will not require rocket science to figure out that colossal losses have been happening as a result of this while the hours of business may also need to be reviewed. If I am correct, farmers have to wrap up their business around mid-day or slightly before that and in the event that they have unsold fresh produce, they will need to re-book it or find storage elsewhere so that they can sell it the following day.
This should not be happening if there were cold rooms for storage. We have heard of disturbing stories in which farmers end up paying for storage space in nearby houses where storage conditions may be good or even otherwise. This is just not a good situation given that nobody knows how the residents maintain their home environments where the produce will be spending the night before getting sold the following day.
On the one hand, indications that the new structure will be built to meet contemporary standards should also be matched by a change in mind sets in the way traders at the market are viewed both by council and the general public. At the moment, most people refer to them as informal traders or vendors, as if to diminish the importance of their trade, yet they are a very important business component in the agricultural value chain.
They are businesspeople that are concerned with food security matters, as they act as a conveyor belt bringing food from the farming communities to consumers. Food for thought!
The long and short of my argument is that when the new market opens, it should not be business as usual but all parties in the matrix should be aiming to do things differently and more profitably.
This will be possible if the current reconstruction works can accommodate suggestions from the eventual users of the structure on the backdrop of strict adherence to professional guidelines on how the market should be run.
daniel chigunwe
