Vendors buying trouble

Barely a week after running battles with police over city council ban against vending in illegal sites, the vendors are back to seek another lot of attention.

During the week, they descended on unsuspecting women in the cities, stripping them of miniskirts and trousers.

What do these vendors have that gets them feeling higher than anybody else?

One wonders from who and where did such cowards derive the power to watch over the nation’s yet unwritten dress code.

Suddenly, have the vendors found their way to a moral high ground?

On what pedestal do they stand taller than the law and it’s freedoms of dressing? Are vendors the highest moral, cultural or traditional authority best placed to take women to trial and subsequent sentencing?

To say the truth, most of the adjectives to do with vendors in this country are worse than a miniskirt.

Until I am corrected, I wish to maintain that vendors in this country, over the years, through their actions, have proved to us that they are synonymous to rowdiness.

Venda, in vernacular, is almost a description of the absence of orderliness.

Bwanji ukukhala ngati venda? Bwanji wavala ngati venda? Amene aja amamwa [mowa] ngati venda! Nzeru za venda pano ayi!

Tell me, what do these sentences mean if not a display of lawlessness and shortage of manners?

This is a deep cutting insult to the vendors that are true to the nobility that legal and careful vending offers.

One, therefore, believes that the rowdy type of a vendor is now overestimating its importance.

I bet something needs to be done—and quick. This small population is simply forcing it’s way to the apex of lawlessness.

And the name we reap from this is a national embarrassment. We need to rise up to shear this ego to its rightful size; you, me.

Vendors were once a bunch needing protection and sympathy. They looked to us for support. We gave it to them.

Remember Ben Michael Mankhamba’s song Street Vendor that listed the ills yoking the vendor?

Today, they are ready to torment our mothers and sisters?

Society and the law must tuck these vendors into their places.

The celebrated poet Mutabaruka could have urged to get the vendors trimmed to size “by the Bible or by the gun.”