Have you paid your car guard today?

Hawker's of the world ... get lost

A simple symptom of poverty in any developing country is that labour, which is mobile, moves from areas where there are no jobs to other areas where there are still no jobs but there are lots of other people as well.  This means that people turn up in our cities in droves doing anything they can to try and earn a living.  When they can’t earn a living, some turn to crime.

But the refined, rarefied noses of those with nice jobs rebels at the sight of poor people running stalls on the streets of their nice clean cities.  However, special venom is reserved for the informal parking attendants and street hawkers.  And so the streets are regularly subjected to military-style purges as tables and goods and people are loaded up into vans and “taken away”.  Parking attendants can be subjected to a six-month trial before facing a fine.

Wonderful, isn’t it?  A person who is so poor that they are forced to stand in the street for a few Rand a day is now going to face a fine which would cripple him.  But, cry the rich, why don’t they get a job?

A poll a few years ago by KFM, a Cape Town-based radio station, showed that 90% of people want “them” off the streets.  A representative of the unicity was duly called on stage to explain what was going to be done.  “Well, we’re going to pass a law to ban all activity.”  The song that followed was Bruce Hornsby’s telling “The way it is” which features the line, “There’s a lot that don’t change in another man’s mind when all they can see at the hiring time is the line on the colour bar.”  I don’t think anyone spotted the irony.  The attitude seems to be that “these people” could get “real” jobs if they wanted but they enjoy putting our tempers in a huff.

This type of conflict is normal for a country in transition.  Industrialising England of Charles Dickens’ time held the same horrors for the rich as improved farming methods and land enclosure forced poor, uneducated people out of the country and into the cities.  The responses there were somewhat worse than here – debtors goal, exile to Australia, torture.  We reserve this behaviour for refugees from our neighbours further North.

It’s very easy standing in the middle of one of our genteel suburbs to imagine that the whole country lives this way and forget the teaming, thriving, exciting, dangerous townships just over the horizon.  It’s easy to slip into that colonial nostalgia where the poor could be isolated in their own places and pushed back there when not needed.

We have tried this before, sweeping the streets clean of traders under the guise of reducing crime.  Instead crime goes up as the criminals take over unobserved.

We may object to informal workers as being unsightly but they are real people finding honourable solutions to devastating problems.  People only obey the laws that make sense to them.

You are breaking as many laws and putting the lives of others in danger when you speak on your cellphone while driving.  But you don’t seem to care.  Do you honestly believe that you will stop informal traders by legislating against them?

We all seem to choose the laws we will break based on how the law effects our lifestyle.  Smoking in public, not paying your TV licence, these are the laws the rich break and laugh about.  The poor are going to break any laws that prevent them from earning an honest living.