Off the streets by today: Lusaka's vendors face the council's deadline — and a market system that must now absorb them

The notice gave them a date, and the date is today. The Lusaka City Council's directive that all street vendors vacate undesignated trading areas and return to allocated spaces in markets takes effect on Tuesday, 29 September — the latest and firmest step in Mayor Chitambala Mwewa's campaign to clear the capital's pavements, bus stops and road reserves of informal trading.

The notice, issued by Town Clerk Oliver Muuka, rests on the Markets and Bus Stations Act No. 7 of 2007 and Statutory Instrument No. 12 of 2018, which empower the council to regulate trading and manage public markets and bus stations. Its teeth are administrative as much as physical: vendors who fail to comply risk losing their allocated trading spaces, which the council says will be re-allocated to prospective traders on its waiting lists. Street vending in undesignated areas, the council has warned, "will no longer be tolerated" after the deadline.

The directive lands on an economy that runs through those pavements. Lusaka's street trade — groceries, phone accessories, second-hand clothes, cooked food — is the first rung of the city's commerce and the last safety net for thousands of households, and every previous clearance campaign has discovered the same physics: vendors move, enforcement thins, and the trade seeps back. The council's answer this time is the re-allocation threat, aimed at the vendors' one fixed asset — a market stall. Whether it works depends on two things the notice does not say: whether the designated markets have the space, footfall and sanitation to absorb the returning traders, and whether enforcement survives the first week of complaints, exemptions and political pressure.

The timing is also a small study in municipal confidence. The council has chosen to enforce in the same week the fuel-tax cushion expires and a month before the budget cycle begins — a moment when the cost of living is about to be renegotiated at the pump. Clearing streets is a legibility project: it makes a city easier to govern, tax and move through. It is also, always, a livelihood story. Today Lusaka finds out which of those two the directive is remembered as.

Sources: Diamond TV, "LCC gives street vendors September 29 deadline" (23 Sep 2026); LCC public notice, Town Clerk Oliver Muuka (Sep 2026); Peza News (24 Sep 2026).