fact and fancy in Nigeria

Two stories from Nigeria, one with spurious charges, the other with some significant thought.

1. The government of Edo state will prosecute street vendors because they are "miscreants who want to deface the city," The Vanguard newspaper reports. This is just more of the usual crazy talk. Street traders are too busy doing business to be defacing the city. They are the good guys.

2. The Daily Trust newspaper reports on the yam cartel in Jalingo, a small city in the Northeast of the country. The cartel apparently exploits women hawkers, giving them just 100 or 150 Naira per day to sell the tubers on the streets of the city. Hassana Audu, one the yam sellers, told the paper, "Everyday, I leave home as early as 7am to hawk yam tubers on the streets of Jalingo. Sometimes I make sales of between N5,000.00 to N7,000.00 per day. But by the end of the day I go home with only N150.00 as my commission." That's an income of little more than $1 a day.

call central casting

The government of Nigeria's Oyo state has demolished the long-standing Bodija Market in Ibadan and plans to replace it with a parking lot, This Day reports. The market had at least 700 stores and a 2006 census listed 15,000 residents.

Why? Blame the usual suspects:

Ademola Omotoso, the chairman of the Ibadan North Local Government Council of Oyo State, told the newspaper that the government "decided to pull down illegal structures in the market to save residents from criminals" adding that people were "carrying out illegal businesses like prostitution, drug peddling and gun running in the area" and taht "the place served as hideout for hardened criminals who found it a safe haven after terrorising neighbouring areas."

And here's a real gem: "It was widely reported that a man called Dogo allegedly slashed the throat of a man in this particular area and took away his intestine for whatever purpose."

hawkers fight back

Ivan D'Souza, who represents the 3500 street hawkers in Mangalore through the Goodangadi and Raste Badi Vyaparigala Okkuta (Petty shop and roadside vendors Federation) notes that there have been so many police actions against street vendors that his organization has "served criminal notices to the Mangalore City Corporation for destroying the sheds and vehicles that belonged to the vendors." Mangalorean has details.

Here's a wonderful stat from the article: according to D'Souza, there are 10 million street vendors in India. That means that one of every 100 people in the country is a street hawker.

He and others in Mangalore have suggested that the Indian constition has provisions allowing informal merchants to have a right to eke out a livelihood. They propose the creation of 'Hawking Zones' where both unorganized and organized shop keepers can do business in peace without trespassing into one another's interests.

informal sector better than the private sector?

Yes, it's true. The New York Times reports that Cairo, where garbage had been collected by informal workers and sorted so pigs could eat the organic waste, is much dirtier and less sanitary now that the government destroyed the informal system and handed contracts to private carters.

The Times reports that the government killed all the pigs in a misguided attempt to prevent swine flu. But the pigs were the key component in digesting (literally) the city's trash.

The government "failed to understand the ethos of the community. People do not take their garbage out. They are accustomed to seeing someone collecting it from the door. For more than half a century, those collectors were the zabaleen, a community of Egyptian Christians who live on the cliffs on the eastern edge of the city. They collected the trash, sold the recyclables and fed the organic waste to their pigs — which they then slaughtered and ate....The pigs used to eat tons of organic waste. Now the pigs are gone and the rotting food piles up on the streets"

both sides of the mouth

Three recent news items from Africa.

1. Hawkers in Ghana are still on the street, just in a much more precarious position, after a government attempt to arrest all street vendors, The Ghanaian Chronicle (via Modern Ghana) reports.

2. The Standard reports that Kenyan street hawkers are now doing business in Botswana since the Nairobi City Council drove them out of the downtown area. At the same time, Capital News reports that the Kenyan government wants to provide health insurance for Kenya's 11 million members of the informal economy.

3. Nigeria, which has seen efforts to criminalize street selling in Lagos, is also talking of providing social protections to informal workers, according to the Business Day newspaper.

Why are these African countries so afraid of street sellers and other informal workers. The Nigerian article points out that 80 percent of the workforce is informal. So why are these governments criminalizing the work done by the majority of their population, while at the same time asserting that they want to provide incentives and social protections? That's called talking out of both sides of your mouth. What will the incentives and insurance be worth if people can no longer work?

immigration vs. informality

Britain's Independent newspaper, which ought to know better, seems to assert that illegal immigrants are the only ones working in the informal economy.

"The informal economy is comprised chiefly of those who came here illegally – often in terrifying circumstances – and those who applied for asylum but didn't get it, and haven't been deported yet. It grew particularly sharply between 1997 and 2002, when an economic boom enticed many people to Britain."

The article suggests that illegal migrants work mainly in construction, cleaning, catering, and hospitality services. Offering no proof, it asserts that "nationalities bind workers: Ghanaians pick litter; Nigerians clean toilets in the City; Romanians and Poles work in plumbing and maintenance."

Then the article goes on to suggest something sensible: an amnesty for illegal migrants to the UK.

Still, it is not only illegal arrivals who are working in the informal economy in the UK. Statistics I've seen suggest that the informal makes up approximately 12 percent of the UK's gross national product. The article suggests that there are about 600,000 illegal residents in the UK, out of a working population (courtesy of the Central Intelligence Agency Factbook) of more than 31 million. That means illegal immigrants comprise about 2 percent of the working population. Either they're all earning high wages picking litter and cleaning toilets, or the Independent needs to re-educate itself about the number of British citizens working in the informal economy.

sales strategy from a street hawker.

"If you can’t yell loudly, you’ll starve," a Beijing street recycler tells The New York Times. "No one really knows what I’m yelling, but they remember my song and this brings them out of their house."

Great marketing advice!

But the government is making life tough for the vendors.

Stringent laws and urban management officials, known as chengguan, keep them on the run with fines and harassment. “The best time to be out is lunchtime, when the chengguan are on break,” said Meng Xiandong, 54, a vendor of dried sweet potatoes, as he nervously scanned the crowds.