Informal stallholders in battle with Maputo Council – AIM

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Informal stallholders in battle with Maputo Council – AIM

9:38 CAT | 19 Jan 2018

O País

Maputo City Council is in yet another dispute with stallholders in an informal market who are refusing to abandon their stalls unless they are paid compensation.

The dispute concerns stalls built beside the jetty in the outlying urban district of Katembe, which is used for the ferry service across the Bay of Maputo between Katembe and the centre of the city.

The stalls are in the path of a road the City Council wants to build between the jetty and the Marisol Hotel. So in May 2017, the Council told the stallholders they would have to move. The Council offered them land elsewhere, but they refused to move, saying the new site is “too far away”.

The stallholders hired a lawyer, and put the case before the Maputo City Administrative Tribunal. When the Tribunal asked the Council for its reaction, the Council defended its right to the land, and issued a second notification for the stallholders to leave.

They still refused, and on 5 January a third and final warning was given. They were told to leave by 19 January, or their stalls would simply be demolished. According to a report in the independent daily “O Pais”, the council insists that the stallholders have no right to monetary compensation.

The stallholders claim that the Council is behaving illegally, because the matter is still before the courts.

“All we want is justice and money to resume our business. And we want a good space”, declared one of the traders, Samuel Nhaca.

Another of the stallholders, Katia dos Reis, said some of the traders have sold goods beside the jetty or 20 years. “How are these people going to support their children?” she asked.

There has been a trend for informal markets to spring up on unused land, and although they have no legal right to the land, the stallholders have often been tolerated and so become part of the urban landscape. The tolerance then backfires when the municipal authorities want to use the land for something else, and the stallholders refuse to move,

The current dispute in Katembe follows a lengthy battle over the Nwankakana informal market in Maputo, which was blocking the northern access road to the suspension build being built over the Bay of Maputo. These stallholders too were offered an alternative market, but turned the offer down and refused to leave without compensation.

Eventually the public company in charge of the bridge, Maputo-Sul, paid compensation, though not as much as the stallholders had demanded – but by then work on the bridge had been held up for six months.

Source: O País