While some activity in the informal sector could be legitimately described as illegal, such as foreign currency dealing, much of it involves ordinary people trying to make a meagre living by buying and selling vegetables or other goods at a slight mark up. Prior to OM, they could survive, and many of them had properly allocated bays and licences, but life has been very difficult for this sector in the last year. The hounding of informal traders is a constant phenomenon. They remain abandoned by the government and “on their own”.24 As mentioned in the previous section, “Operation Sunrise” is set to worsen this situation. OM: summary of 2005 impact on informal trading OM destroyed the livelihoods of an estimated 90,000 vendors, through the demolition of vending bays - many of them legal and built by local authorities for licensed vendors - through the seizure of goods and through arrests of tens of thousands of vendors. This figure is only for those arrested during the height of OM, and does not include the hundreds of daily arrests since then. An estimated additional 2,4 million Zimbabweans were adversely affected by OM, taking into account: self employed families who worked out of their back yard shelters, and who lost their livelihoods as carpenters, hairdressers, tuck shop owners etc when their businesses were destroyed; the knock-on jobs lost in rural areas for those who used to weave baskets or make curios for sale in the cities; loss of urban generated income sent back to rural areas to sustain extended family and the rural economy; loss of markets for those growing vegetables, fruit and flowers for sale by vendors. The need for regulation Once OM began to raise the anger and concern of the international community, rhetoric towards the informal sector changed from one focused on its criminality. The emphasis became on the need to regulate and order vending, to build proper vending sites and to vet and register vendors. In Bulawayo alone, there were promises of 41,000 vending bays to be built before the end of August 2005.25 Under the control of the government dominated IMCs, lengthy processes of vetting and approving would-be vendors were put in place. Government insisted that vendors should be moved out of town centres and into designated vending markets on the outskirts of city and town centres.26 24 A senior official in the Bulawayo City Council referred to vendors as “out there on their own”, with nobody able to effectively stand for them or protect them. 25 The Chronicle, 5 July 2005. 26 This is in keeping with government fears that thousands of vendors milling around in urban centres could enhance the likelihood of an uprising. 20