The clean-up now has a court ledger. The Lusaka City Council says 45 street vendors apprehended between 4 and 7 October in a joint operation with the Zambia Police have appeared before the Fast Track Court and been fined for breaching street-vending regulations. Three other traders — people who hold stands in City Market but chose to sell from the street regardless — will appear before the same court today, Monday 12 October, council assistant public relations officer Nyambe Bulumba said in a statement issued on Saturday, per News Diggers.
The fines extend a pattern. A week ago, 25 vendors who resisted the anti-vending operation appeared before the Fast Track Court and were fined accordingly, the council said — the first court batch of an exercise that has also seen buses impounded in the central business district. Operation Clear Path, now the signature policy of Mayor Chitambala Mwewa's young tenure, aims to return pavements and roads to pedestrians and traffic; its critics' question — where the traders are supposed to go — remains formally unanswered, though the City Market three make the council's point for it: some of the street has a roof and chooses not to use it.
The council has framed the operation as a public-health measure as much as an order one, pointing to the city's cholera history whenever the vendors return to the pavements. The mismatch behind the cat-and-mouse is structural, and older than the operation: the Zambia Institute of Architects has estimated Lusaka's street-vending population in the hundreds of thousands against roughly eleven thousand designated market spaces. Until that arithmetic changes, the Fast Track Court is where the policy will keep its accounts.
Sources: News Diggers, “LCC nabs 45 street vendors” (11 Oct 2026); Lusaka City Council, “25 street vendors fined by Lusaka Fast Track Court” (6 Oct 2026).