There is no doubt that street hawking can be an eyesore.
Dozens of able bodied young men and women selling water, soft drinks, chewing gum and a myriad of other things in traffic and by the roadside, take away from the aesthetic value of the city by contributing to the problem of waste and interfering with the free flow of traffic by encroaching onto the road in busy areas.
In a few cases, they also pose a security risk to motorists when robbers pose as hawkers.
However, the phenomenon of street hawking, much like okada and keke, are a symptom of the wider dysfunction that is present all over Lagos, a city of 20 million that has only in the last several years begun to come to grips with the reality of the spiraling urban migration that puts pressure on all areas of society.
Young people come into the city in droves with little by way of skills, and much faster than there are jobs to accommodate them. So they often resort to hawking or riding a keke or an okada to get by.
Just like keke and okada riders take advantage of an inadequate transport system to get people from one point to another, hawkers also play a big part in the distribution of fast moving consumer goods to customers, on top of a need for day-to-day survival.
These realities make the recent announcement of a ban on street trading by the Ambode administration – a law passed in 2003 – a problematic one. Any attempt to reduce the number of hawkers has to address the causes of hawking in order to be effective, or else, it will merely become another cash cow for officials tasked with its enforcement.
Some of those who engage in hawking do so due to a lack of alternatives; either to get a job, learn a trade, or to formalize their current hawking business. It is hard to imagine that a majority of hawkers like the idea of chasing after vehicles on bridges or at traffic lights, in the rain and in the sunshine, in order to earn meagre profits.
The state government must do the hard work of providing alternatives, and informing them of these alternatives and how they can take advantage. The Lagos State Employment Trust Fund presents one of the avenues by which this can happen. Young people can develop skills to enable them move away from a life of hawking.
For those who prefer to just trade, easing the passage from informal to formal trade is critical. There is no barrier to entry to hawking, and in order to get them off the streets, the conditions should be similar.
Many of the shops available for rent are far out of the reach of these hawkers. The new Tejuosho market is a case in point. Despite being commissioned in August 2014, the vast majority of the stalls remain unoccupied as a result of high rental costs.
The makers of the products that sell quickly in traffic also depend on these hawkers for much of their distribution, and a ban will probably affect sales. Creating a space for hawkers at major bus stops – or even selling them inside danfos and BRTs – could be a solution.
The bottom-line is that merely decreeing the end of street trading will not solve the underlying issues that drive it, and Nigeria’s experience with banning things should provide more than enough cautionary tales. The Ambode administration to resist the temptation to put the cart before the horse.
