In the last 21 years Zimbabwe's urban centers witnessed a phenomenal growth of illegal street vending (ISV), particularly in Harare. It is estimated that 5.9 million people out of a total of the 6.3 million working in Zimbabwe work informally (Zimbabwe National Statistics Agency, 2015: 82). On the other hand, in 2016 the total number of street vendors in Harare was estimated to be 20,000 for the Central Business District (CBD) alone (Daily News Staff Writer, 2016; Moyo, 2017). Both central government and the Harare City Council (HCC) have time and again abortively attempted to get rid of ISV activities through the forcible eviction of the street vendors. In resisting the attempts to push them away from the streets, the street vendors mainly argued that they lacked other means to survive (Kadirire, 2017). The sincerity of the street vendors' argument has seen political players seeking to deviously instrumentalize it and rendering futile the need to maintain the “sunshine status” of Harare. This has generated the curiosity to articulate the link between ISV and politics and the concomitant effects on urban governance and human security in Harare.

Though informality has been conceptualized in diverse ways (see, Chen and Carre, 2020: 4–5), this article discusses ISV as a particular part of the informal sector. In this study, ISV refers to the unlawful selling of goods and services on the streets by informal traders. It is not the same with formal or lawful street vending which is a registered activity, and works within a government or local authority regulated framework (see, Roever, 2020: 173–174). For Jimu (2004: 19), street vending is whereby people sell goods and services to the public from non-permanent or movable structures which can temporarily be set up or relocated. The Urban Councils Act of Zimbabwe (Government of Zimbabwe, 2002) defines ISV as the public selling of goods from one or several fixed places.

It is noteworthy that ISV is discussed in this study mainly as the outcome of economic and political interplay and is illegal solely because of political decisions. According to Chen and Carre (2020: 1), “Historically, all employment, businesses and economic activities were informal until policies and laws were introduced that created a divide between formal and informal, that is, between economic units that are registered with relevant administrative authorities and those that are not and between workers with employment-based social protection and those without.” While this study predominantly has a legal and normative view of street vending as part of the informal sector, it also considers ISV, akin to other informal practices, as an outgrowth of a formal economy's failure to accommodate everyone and continues to be seen as unlawful and insignificant by (misguided) authorities. Progressive and contemporary conceptualizations of street vending and informality suggest that:

Scholars have increasingly focused on the interface between urban governance and politics in Zimbabwe (McGregor, 2013; Magure, 2015; Muchadenyika, 2015a,b; Muchadenyika and Williams, 2016, 2017; Kamete, 2017). This study complements the few scholars who have delved into the effects of the politicization of urban government, particularly ISV (see, e.g., Ndawana, 2018; Hove et al., 2020). Other previous works largely focus on evictions, relocations and daily struggles in the informal economy in Zimbabwe (Kamete, 2006, 2010; Potts, 2006; Musoni, 2010). This article discusses how political parties have sought to abuse ISV to achieve political gains and the concomitant effects on human security. It largely focuses on the positions of the ruling Zimbabwe African National Union Patriotic Front (ZANU-PF) party and the opposition political party, Movement for Democratic Change initially led by Morgan Tsvangirai (MDC-T) regarding ISV.¹ The central argument in this article is that though the politicization of ISV is not the primary cause of its emergence and proliferation, it has contributed to the lack of effective solutions with detrimental effects on both urban governance and human security. The ISV development is mainly a result of the economic downturn and loss of formal jobs and livelihoods. The article concludes that ISV is an integral part of African and many other developing countries' urban societies serving different needs in the local economy. Consequently, the politicization and human (in) security of the illegal street vendors in Harare can partly be mitigated when formal employment is generated and political parties stop interfering in the running of the city for the furtherance of their selfish agendas.

The study is relevant for broad discussions on informality by scholars and policy makers, especially those working on debates on the intersection of politics and informality and urban governance in Zimbabwe and beyond. Academic work seeking to understand some of the complexities around ISV as part of the informal economy is important in many ways. Among others, none of the four dominant schools of thought on the informal economy debate, namely: the dualists, structuralists, legalists and voluntarists, is adequate on its own to explain the heterogeneity and intricacy characterizing the sector. Although each school articulates the informal economy's causes, configuration, nature and possible solutions differently and has merit, each just reflects a small part of the entire story [for a summary of different analytical positions on informality, see, Women in Informal Employment: Globalizing and Organizing (WIEGO), (n.d.); Marinescu and Valimareanu, 2019]. Furthermore, all the aforementioned schools of thought view informality with concern emanating from, among other issues, poor working conditions, disregard of the rule of law and low-productivity enterprises characterizing practices in this sector (Perry et al., 2007: 1, 21). This has partly hindered the mobilization and development of the sector's potential with far reaching effects on human security.

The article consists of seven sections. Apart from this introduction, the article discusses the role of the state in influencing the nature and extent of urban informality in third world countries. This serves as the conceptual framework of the study. The third section discusses the methodology used for this study. The fourth provides the evolution of Zimbabwe's economy since 1980 and the challenges that have hindered the growth of formal employment. The fifth section examines how political parties in Zimbabwe have treated urban informal workers, especially those in ISV as assets or liabilities over time and the related consequences on urban governance and human security. The sixth section provides some alternatives to the criminalization of ISV activities in Harare. The last section is the conclusion.

This study is mainly informed by the ideas of Roy (2011) about how the state “makes and unmakes” informality. Roy (2011) has challenged scholars studying the invention of street vending practices to do so through what she terms “informal urbanism.” This denotes reconsidering the approach scholars engage with and hypothesize from subaltern spaces, because “subaltern” has been identical with poverty, slums, informal settlements and subaltern matters. All these outlines leave the informal remaining identical with poverty and even marginality. It continues as “the territory and habitus of subaltern urbanism” (Roy, 2011: 233). Still, “subaltern urbanism provides accounts of the slum as a terrain of habitation, livelihood, self-organization and politics” (Roy, 2011: 224).

Focusing “on the limits and alternatives to subaltern urbanism,” Roy (2011: 223) presents “peripheries,” “urban informality,” “zones of exception,” and “gray spaces” as different theoretical classifications to main descriptions of the mega city and subaltern spaces, mostly accounts about “slums” and “slum dwellers” in the Third World. Roy's background and scale somewhat shares a lot with the ISV context in Harare (citizens of a global south country in spaces of their capital). This makes Roy's (2011) work on rethinking our understanding of urban informality highly useful in analyzing the effects of the politicization of ISV in Harare on urban governance and human security. Noteworthy is that urban governance as used in this article denotes a relentless process filled with both cooperation and tension over decision making about the designing, funding and management of urban areas by the government (local, regional and national) and interested parties (Ndawana, 2018: 254).

On the other hand, human security simply refers to the protection from lingering threats, including hunger, disease, and repression, as well as unexpected and upsetting disturbances to everyday life patterns [United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), 1994: 23]. Its key objective is “to safeguard the vital core of all human lives from critical pervasive threats” (Alkire, 2003: 22). Many countries have developed different measures of human security including getting responses about context-specific threats such as community, economic, environmental, food, health, personal and political security (Owen, 2003). This suggests that human insecurity is the anti-thesis of human security. Leaning and Arie's (2001) conceptualization of human insecurity as comprising mainly two elements is suitable for the analysis in this study. The first encompasses the essential materials needed for survival such as food, water, shelter and safety. The second one comprises the psychological and social element with three categories, namely, a sense of feeling at home, a connection to community and a perception of optimism. A dearth of the foregoing elements signifies human insecurity. Though the ISV phenomenon has been recognized as “one aspect that has complex effects (both positive and negative) on the survival of both the individual, society (including the business community) and the state at large” (Hove et al., 2020: 73), this study is mainly concerned with its effects on the survival of the individual.

Subaltern urbanization, according to Roy (2011), displays that informality has to be understood beyond subaltern subjects jointly protesting, fighting the state, plus accepting subaltern subjects as courageous entrepreneurs. As an alternative, Roy (2011: 233) challenges urban researchers to hypothesize informality as a “mode of the production of space” and thus not separate from fluid and temporal “formal” state-sanctioned developments. For Roy (2009: 8), informality entails “a mode of production of space defined by the territorial logic of deregulation. Inscribed in the ever-shifting relationship between what is legal and illegal, legitimate and illegitimate, authorized and unauthorized….” Specifically,

This clearly demonstrates that developments of urban informality are not fashioned disjointedly from state-approved formal processes of urbanization or economic empowerment. In this regard, urban informality exposes prospects of understanding legal/illegal developments as active temporal relations that generate uneven geographies.

In addition to the usefulness of Roy's (2011) work on rethinking urban informality in Harare, the study also draws on the work of Potts (2008) on the state and urban informality in Africa. Potts (2008) examined changes in attitudes toward the role of the urban informal sector in sub-Saharan Africa over contemporary decades. The scholar found that there are profound dynamics of the informal sector and the shifting role of the African state in encouraging or discouraging it in which there is a growth in the negative trend in this respect. Specifically, the urban informal sector was originally seen negatively, especially during the colonial era and early years of independence when it was seen as largely “unmodern.” In the early years of the post-colonial era, which is used here to simply refer to the period after colonial rule (for debates and other meanings of the term post-colonial, see Shohat, 1992), there were shifts in the perceptions of the sector in the face of increasing urban poverty, particularly after the adoption of structural adjustment programmes. During this time, the urban informal sector was seen as a potential safety-net resulting in it receiving favorable policy recommendations.

In recent years, African governments have reverted back to viewing the urban informal sector in the negative sense—something that points to questions around social justice. Social justice in this context entails an unambiguous commitment to equality in different urban domains, including but not limited to economic security, health and housing, that constitute what Weaver (2018) has described as social citizenship. Informality remains tied to state policy in Africa and other parts of the world not necessarily because the state is weak or fragile but its deliberate policy. The state “decides which aspects of the informal economy to turn a blind eye to, which to tolerate or which to get rid of; and which aspects of the informal economy to support or promote” (Chen and Carre, 2020: 24).

The case of ISV in Harare raises useful debates about the state's power to make and unmake urban informality and that this process is not politics free. The term political exploitation is used in this study to describe the use of the vulnerability of a section of people for political gain by political parties and officials. Though the term exploitation generally refers to the use of an individual's susceptibility for one's own good, it is not always negative (for details, see, Mitchell and Munger, 1993; Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 2016). Still, in Harare, the dominance of politics has not only rendered the role of the state in urban governance problematic to find durable solutions to the challenge of ISV but furthered human insecurity.

This study is also informed by the deep-rooted dualist school-inspired understanding of the involvement in the informal sector as representing a survival strategy poor people adopt as a desperate measure to support their families economically. According to Potts (2006: 288), dependence on the informal sector by the urban poor is not optional, but absolutely essential, particularly when formal jobs could either be not found or are found but paying inadequately to meet basic costs of urban living. It was in these circumstances that urban informality emerged and proliferated in Harare and Zimbabwe in general thus poverty was the central root cause and driver. Consequently, it is foolhardy to embark on state or any other form of interventions targeting eliminating urban informality, especially ISV, and its related negative effects without addressing the macro-economic environment that generated it in the first place. Similarly, Brown (2011) observed that because urban space is a vital resource for underprivileged households it should not be overlooked in the perspective of sustainable development. It is the failure of official policy and regulations to identify its (urban space) significance that hinders the ability of the urban poor to benefit themselves. Many state policies deliberately exclude the informal sector through totally ignoring and overlooking or undervaluing informal workers' invaluable contributions to urban economies and human security. For instance, informal workers significantly contribute to food security and wellbeing of the urban poor through selling food and other goods and services at cheaper prices and convenient locations and city revenue when they pay market rents and operating fees as well as value added tax (VAT) and related sales taxes charged on the inputs they buy in their efforts to eke a living (Chen and Carre, 2020: 25).

As this study shows, the ZANU-PF government vacillates between being tolerant to urban informality and outlawing it informed by the political conditions on the ground but all meant to ensure its continued rule. Though the politicization of urban informality is not the primary instigator and its reversal the guarantor of the realization of effective solutions to the ISV development and concomitant negative effects on human security in Harare, it has also contributed to the challenge. Accordingly, both the central government and the City of Harare's efforts seeking to simply outlaw ISV, among other forms of urban informality and their connected consequences, without addressing the root causes of urban poverty, that is, shortage of gainful formal employment, that initiated and is sustaining it, should be seen as misguided and the main reason for their failure and worsening of street vendors' human insecurity.

This study utilized a qualitative research approach and a case study research design. The former was adopted mainly for offering a rich and in-depth account of the social phenomenon under inquiry apart from being associated with the latter (Yin, 2014: 19). The single case study research design was chosen for the reason that it allows concentration on a specific case resulting in the development of in-depth and extensive data about it while remaining with a comprehensive and real-life viewpoint (Yin, 2014: 16). The study's data was collected through the analysis of both primary and secondary sources of data. Documentary sources of data used in this study were not synonymous with secondary sources but included primary sources. This is because they not only consisted of published academic works but non-governmental organizations and government published reports and newspaper articles from both private and state owned media that captured official statements, speeches and interviews of both street vendors, political parties and government (both local and central) officials regarding the complexities of ISV in Harare. Both primary and secondary sources were analyzed to get relevant data on the background to the current study, and this helped the researcher to tap into what other existing published case studies connected to the topic say (Yin, 1994: 85). This allowed the collection of data beyond Harare, the geographical area of study whose map is shown in Figure 1. The collected data was analyzed thematically focusing on the developments, changes and continuities and challenges and prospects on how the main political parties and government deal with ISV in Harare and the concomitant consequences on urban governance and human security.

Some of the limitations of the collected data include the researcher's failure to conduct own face-to-face interviews and reliance on newspaper articles, which partially capture the voices of the concerned people in this study. These limitations have been mitigated to the extent possible through the use of a combination of newspaper articles from both private and public media and peer reviewed works, which promoted the authenticity of the study's findings. A qualitative case study permits the exploration of a phenomenon in its setting using available sources of data (Yin, 1994: 85). Thus, this study's findings are credible because they are the outcome of the use of a combination of relevant sources.

The ISV phenomenon in Zimbabwe emerged following independence in 1980. Before 1980 the country's economy seemed to have been stable and vibrant, backed by extensive industrial, commercial, agricultural and mining activities all of which were largely formal enterprises (Mhone, 1993: 1). While by sub-Saharan Africa standards Zimbabwe at independence took over a fairly sophisticated and diversified economy, it increasingly suffered huge investment decline and low economic performance, high unemployment, price controls and a dearth of foreign currency (Tibaijuka, 2005: 16). Consequently, informal economic activities had begun to take root from around 1975 when the economy suffered from the effects of the liberation war, whilst some reforms and adjustment of discriminatory laws led to greater urbanization (Brett, 2005: 93). The existence of some laws that prohibited the uncontrolled movement of black Africans into urban areas (Dhemba, 1999: 12) partly explains why the urban informal economy in Zimbabwe (then southern Rhodesia) remained relatively low at not more than 10% in 1980 [Mazingi and Kamidza, (n.d.): 327].

The first decade of independence largely witnessed economic growth that averaged 5.5%. It was driven by “growing domestic demand, as workers' wages were increased due to government interventions, government's redistributive policies that saw a vast expansion of education and health facilities, and the opening up of external markets, among other factors” (Mlambo, 2017: 103). However, the new government and its associated socialist oriented policies and increased regulation of business affected formal business and generated unemployment (Carmody, 1998; Kamete, 2006; Ranger, 2007). Unemployment increased and was ~20% by the close of the first independence decade (Brown, 2011: 324). This development resulted in the introduction of the freedom to do business in some areas where it was previously prohibited. The establishment of some sites for doing such business started the expansion of the informal economy (McPherson, 1991: 1). In some way, these were the early signs that the Zimbabwean government can tolerate informality.

The government's embracing of the Economic Structural Adjustment Programme (ESAP) by the close of 1990 in an effort to revamp economic investment and growth through a number of liberal measures including the removal of price and exchange rate controls, privatization of public enterprises and trade liberalization worsened the situation in the second decade of independence (Mlambo, 2017: 104). A combination of factors culminated in ESAP being unproductive and harmful to the Zimbabwean economy it was meant to improve. These ranged from the poor package of ESAP, the severe drought of 1992 and poor implementation of the programme by government (Mlambo, 2017: 104). The resultant slow growth of manufacturing partly due to ESAP actually exacerbated the shrinking of formal employment and the earnest initiation of the informal economy (Brett, 2005: 92). Zimbabwe's informal economy was projected at 59.4% of gross domestic product (GDP) in the 1999–2000 fiscal year while by November 2000 the informal sector was estimated to be supporting 1.7 million people (Mlambo, 2017: 107). Accordingly, Mlambo (2017: 107) notes that “as the economy rapidly contracted, the formal employment sector collapsed and more and more Zimbabweans resorted to the informal sector for survival.” Consequently, ESAP added to the precariousness of livelihoods through social services commercialization, government and private business retrenchments, economic liberalization, increased unemployment, decreased real wages and rising food and fuel costs (Dhemba, 1999: 5). The decline in consumer demand came as a result of the rise in prices that was triggered by the removal of price controls.

Besides ESAP, economic decline took an acute turn in the late 1990s following unwise and unsustainable policy choices which included but were not limited to: the country's involvement in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) war in 1998 and the unbudgeted pension payouts to the liberation struggle war veterans in 1997. The two decisions presumably exhausted the hitherto declining national coffers and led to unparalleled inflation and reduced economic performance. For example, the payouts to war veterans gobbled 9.7 per cent of the government's budget (Richardson, 2006: 3). According to Mlambo (2017: 106), the payouts to war veterans prompted a 74% drop in the value of the Zimbabwean dollar against the United States of America dollar in just over four trading hours on Friday 14 November 1997, now popularly known as Black Friday. Similarly, the decision to intervene in the war in the DRC was unplanned overspending and it led to severe budgetary constraints (Alao, 2012: 155). The combination of the economic debility and the increasing inflation and cost of living levels triggered the December 1997 food riots and strikes. The government responded with cruel measures to quash the strife and, debatably, contributed to the emergence of the MDC-T opposition political party in 1999 (Mlambo, 2017: 106).

In the 2000s, political polarization and disagreements and the fast track land reform programme (FTLRP) in the early years of the twenty-first century that was targeted at redressing the then entrenched skewed colonial land ownership patterns also generated some economic negative effects in the country that were more severe than those of ESAP (Ranger, 2007; Raftopoulos, 2009). The FTLRP of 2000 negatively affected commercial agricultural production, which was arguably the backbone of the country's economy and had subsequent negative effects on industries. The Western countries' retributive response to Zimbabwe's FTLRP with economic sanctions and the accompanying charges of violations of the principle of the sanctity of property rights exacerbated the country's already economic decline (de Jager and Musuva, 2016: 22). Moreover, large volumes of farm workers on commercial farms lost employment (Southern African Migration Project, 2006: 131). Over 300,000 farm workers were left jobless and in most of the cases the new farmers did not absorb them. This development forced the jobless farm workers to either join the growing numbers in the informal economy in towns or engage in gold panning [Mazingi and Kamidza, (n.d.): 349].

The negative economic developments contributed to the rapid increase of the informal economy, such that in 2002 it was projected that not <50% of the national workforce was working in the informal sector (Kamete, 2004). Moreover, the unemployment rate was at 80% in 2004, and the deteriorating economic situation resulted in several company closures. About 800 manufacturing companies ceased operations countrywide since 2002, whereas 25 were stressed and eight faced shutting down in 2004 (Mpofu, 2011: 6; Tibaijuka, 2005: 17). The urban informal economy employed not <76% of the urban workforce in 2004 (Gumbo and Geyer, 2011: 55). About three to four million Zimbabweans were earning their living via the informal sector while ~1.3 million people were formally employed in June 2005 (Mpofu, 2011: 6; Tibaijuka, 2005: 17). A combination of the aforementioned government policies and international responses that saw the significant contraction of formal employment initiated and sustained the informal economy, particularly ISV, in Zimbabwe.

There is no evidence of the decrease of poverty in the country since ESAP. According to Mpofu (2011: 1), urban poverty in Zimbabwe as of 1990/91 was estimated to be 12% but by 1995 it had risen to 39%. Zimbabwe's poverty rate in 2008 was conservatively projected at 70%, whereas unemployment was estimated at 80% (Mlambo, 2017: 106). The record inflation which increased extensively from the late 1990s until it became hyperinflation in 2007 and reached 79.6 billion per cent in mid-November 2008 was the country's greatest challenge (Hove, 2017a: 46). The inflation in Zimbabwe was the product of a combination of years of money printing to fund public costs and quasi-fiscal spending by the central bank (Mlambo, 2017: 107). By January 2009, 10 out of a total of 13 million citizens of Zimbabwe, over 75% of the people, were in despairing poverty (Mpofu, 2011: 1). Roughly 78% of Zimbabweans were unconditionally poor and 55% of the people (nearly 6.6 million) lived under the poverty datum line in April 2010. Over 65% of Zimbabweans were estimated to be living below the poverty datum line in December 2009 (Mpofu, 2011: 1). Mlambo (2017: 107) notes that the creation of the government of national unity in 2009 (until its end in 2013) temporarily assisted in arresting “the free falling Zimbabwean economy.” Nevertheless, the economic state of affairs in the country after 2010 largely continued to be unbearable for the unemployed. Although the economy stabilized following the dollarization of the economy after the failure of the Zimbabwean currency in 2009, formal job development and formation was very inadequate (Mpofu, 2011: 19).

Like in many post-colonial African countries, Zimbabwe's formal job creation continues to be very limited and high rates of unemployment have continued compelling many people to be on the streets trying to sell something to earn a living. Additionally, in 2013 a Micro, Small and Medium Enterprise survey found that there were 5.7 million Zimbabweans employed in the informal economy with 2.8 million as business titleholders and 2.9 million as employees (Mujeyi, 2015: 7). This suggests that the informal economy has turned to be the major employer, accounting for nearly 90% of men and women of working age in the country (Mujeyi, 2015: 7). The unemployment rates in the country further soared because of retrenchments that were experienced in the job market during the last half of 2015 after a land mark Supreme Court ruling that allowed employers to dismiss employee contracts on three months' notice [Zimbabwe Coalition on Debt and Development, (n.d.): 13]. Within a month after the Supreme Court ruling 25,000 formal jobs were lost (Labour Market Profile Zimbabwe, 2015: 4). This further aggravated the number of street vendors in the country's urban centers and accounted for the exponential increase in ISV activities.

The foregoing broader macro-economic outline informs this article's analysis considering that it played a significant role in both initiating and sustaining informal trading practices in Harare and elsewhere in the country. To this end, in an environment marked by desperation as in the case of Zimbabwe, with at least not <80% of the population relying on informal trading, having firm policies on trading sites is not likely to perform any miracles in stopping its continuation. Therefore, the effects of the politicization of ISV in Harare on human security are discussed in the light of the economic problems that Zimbabwe has experienced over the past 21 years.

The ZANU-PF government vacillates in its position on, and practices toward, urban informality since the late 1990s. The several concessions to informal workers and housing in the 1990s after ESAP led to the demise of so many formal sector jobs and a related surge in informality were shun in the 2000s following the emergence of the MDC-T as a formidable opposition political party. Here the giving of concessions to urban informality emerged inadequate for ZANU-PF to win urban constituencies which increasingly swung to the opposition. As shown in Figure 2, ZANU-PF has not won more than 6 seats in Harare since 2000. This informed the government's strategy to clampdown on urban informality through, among other interventions, Operation Murambatsvina (OM, Restore Order), which, as we shall see below, was a nationwide militarized clean-up campaign using violent methods to end several urban informal activities, including ISV. Consequently, I put forward that ZANU-PF's actions in dealing with urban informality and ISV in particular, are largely cynical, even Machiavellian (that is, largely interested in retaining power), in its desperate efforts to strengthen its position and extending its rule. So when the ruling party appears to be either on the urban informal sector's side or against it talking of the need to maintain urban orderliness, it is not sincere but seeking to use the sector in a devious way to simply undermine any opposition movements. This is because the party largely draws on pragmatism choosing to uphold or disregard the need for the urban poor to survive through ISV when it sees it fit. Certainly, the ambivalence in ZANU-PF's responses to urban informality since the 1990s is testament to this viewpoint.

As part of solutions, I suggest a voluntarist school of thought-inspired intervention. The Zimbabwean government and HCC should stop continuing to seek to employ more punitive measures such as a clampdown on the ISV activities but rather build a conducive environment for players in the informal sector as a precursor to formalize their business undertakings. This is because informality may be signifying a starting point for developing entrepreneurs that have the potential to create formal employment which can in turn promote human security. There is no doubt that this formalization will result in the creation of more tax-payers and thus help increase government revenue.

There is also a need to identify, mobilize and develop the potential of ISV for the advancement of human security. A legalist-inspired perspective would suggest that the obstructions to the formalization of the informal sector such as solely viewing it as presenting unnecessary competition to formal businesses are actually impeding these enterprises from growing and recognizing their potential which include creating formal jobs and related positive effects on human security. Moreover, the miscarriage of potentially competitive micro and small enterprises to develop due to unrelenting threats to outlaw and crackdown on them is also hindering them to develop and effectively compete with bigger formal enterprises with far-reaching implications for the competitiveness of the broader economy and promotion of human security. This means that the onus is on the Zimbabwean state to decide when and how to make and unmake informality, which according to Roy (2011), is characterized by gray zones and constant transgressions between the formal and the informal sphere where there are no fixed or stable boundaries.

Additionally, the continued failure to forcibly remove the street vendors in Harare is testament to the complex factors that have initiated and sustained their presence on the streets. The primary factors include desperation, extensive unemployment and the dire need to survive that characterize the country while the politicization of the urban informal economy becomes a secondary factor. To this end, it will be inadequate to merely call for the respective political players to stop interfering in the running of the city for the furtherance of their selfish agendas. This is because the state has a role to play in helping the urban poor to survive in the face of severe unemployment as currently the case in Zimbabwe. Accordingly, a dualist school of thought-informed perspective suggests that ISV is a safety-net for many poor urban residents in Harare and Zimbabwe in general. The Zimbabwean government and the HCC need to rethink their conventional strategies of seeking to completely outlaw ISV and related human security consequences. In lieu, they should look for ways to both allow and regulate it with a long term goal to formalize some of the activities and creating formal employment important to promote human security. This is because for the good of urban governance and human security, the Zimbabwean state really needs to negotiate with the urban poor. It must shun its current position of seeking to outlaw ISV, the urban poor and unemployed people's only avenue of survival without giving them an alternative. Failure to do so will simply perpetuate and bolster “the injustice of enforcing urban ‘order' when the symptoms of poverty thereby tackled have been forced upon the urban poor, and not chosen by them” (Potts, 2006: 273).

Importantly, efforts targeting integrating the informal economy into the formal economy need to diverge from current ones that have failed mainly because they represent “a sinister stripping away of the lifeblood of informality” mostly ignoring “that which makes informality a livelihood haven for the majority of urbanites” (Kamete, 2018: 167). Put another way, urban informality, especially ISV, is promoting the human security of many in Harare - both those involved in it and those who rely on it for cheaper provisions. Therefore, formalization can partially address the human insecurity problems emanating from government clamp-down and repression of the informal sector given the current poor state of the Zimbabwean economy. This means that formal employment is not the only solution to urban informality. Considering that informality is nothing else but a mode of the production of space (Roy, 2009, 2011), street vending, which is an integral part of African urban societies fulfilling different needs in the local economy (Skinner and Watson, 2020) should be carefully handled to promote human security. For instance, 70% of poor households in 11 cities in Southern Africa rely on street vendors or informal outlets for their food (Skinner and Watson, 2020: 127). Globally, the informal sector employs around 2 billion people (61.2%) [International Labour Organisation, 2018: 13]. It is the employer of 69.6% and 18.3% in developing and developed countries, respectively (International Labour Organisation, 2018: 15). Also noteworthy is that informal employment's share varies across different regions of the world: from employing 85.8% in Africa and 68.2% in Asia and Pacific to employing 40.0% in the Americas, and 25.1% in Europe and Central Asia (International Labour Organisation, 2018: 13–14). Accordingly, ISV in Harare, akin to other regions of the world where the informal sector is the main employer, needs careful handling failure of which no meaningful solution can be in sight without providing alternatives for people to survive.

The article has discussed the link between ISV and politics in Zimbabwe and the related consequences on human security. It adds to the literature discussing the informal economy but had elided focusing on the effects of the politicization of ISV on human security. It exposes how political parties in Zimbabwe have sought to abuse ISV to achieve political gains regardless of the urban governance and human security consequences. Focusing on the positions of ZANU-PF and MDC-T, the article shows that the politicization of ISV has contributed to human insecurity and the lack of effective solutions, but it is far from being the major cause of its emergence and proliferation in the first place. The Zimbabwean broader macro-economic context typified by economic decline, shortage of formal jobs culminating in loss of livelihoods and desperation was central to the initiation and sustaining of ISV in Harare as elsewhere in the country. As a result, the basis for effective solutions to address the ISV development in Zimbabwe and related human security concerns partly lies in the generation of formal employment. Attempts solely targeting outlawing ISV without consideration of generating formal jobs are subject to be futile. This is because dependence on the informal sector by the urban poor is not voluntary, but unquestionably essential for their survival and human security. People in Zimbabwe mainly join ISV in the face of a lack of formal jobs or when the formal jobs available do not pay adequately to meet basic costs of urban living. It is doubtless that formal employment is not the only solution given the fact that street vending is an integral part of African and other developing countries' urban societies serving different needs in the local economy.

The original contributions presented in the study are included in the article/supplementary material, further inquiries can be directed to the corresponding author.

Ethical review and approval was not required for the study on human participants in accordance with the local legislation and institutional requirements. Written informed consent for participation was not required for this study in accordance with the national legislation and the institutional requirements.

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