Monday, December 21, 2020 - The Nairobi County Assembly is finalising a bill that will end the perennial fight between city askaris and hawkers. For the past 20 years, hawkers in Nairobi have been engaging in running battles with city askaris. Now, the assembly has introduced The Nairobi City County Popup Markets and Street Vendors Bill,…
Nairobi Governor Hon Ann Kananu has signed into law a bill that will see hawkers given at least two days to sell their products in the Central Business District.
NEW DELHI: Senior government functionaries on Thursday took exception to former vice-president Hamid Ansari’s assertions in his recently-released autobiography that NDA felt entitled to get bills passed in Rajya Sabha even amid din, saying that the former chairman of the Upper House raised no objection when 13 bills were passed in similar circumstances between 2007 and 2014 under UPA.
“It is case of selective outrage and belated discovery of procedure,” said a senior government source. In his autobiography, ‘By Many A Happy Accident’, Ansari has written that “NDA felt that its majority in Lok Sabha gave it the ‘moral’ right to prevail over procedural impediments in Rajya Sabha”.
THE STANDARD By
Josphat Thiong’o |
December 29th 2020 at 08:35:15 GMT +0300
Hawker Evana Morry at Nairobi’s Marikiti Market in March. [File, Standard]
Hawkers and other small-scale traders will have to be licensed to ply their trade in Nairobi if a new Bill is adopted by the City County Assembly.
The Nairobi City County Pop-up Markets and Street Vendors Bill 2019 has proposed a raft of measures aimed at regulating how hawkers and small-scale traders conduct their business.
The Bill by nominated MCA Kabiro Mbugua, which has already gone through the Second Reading and public participation, is intent on establishing a department to deal with the operation of hawkers and small-scale traders.
Will proposed law end Nairobi hawker menace?
Monday December 21 2020
By COLLINS OMULO
Summary
The hawkers’ menace in Nairobi is an age-old problem that has defied various interventions meant to restore sanity in the city streets.
Attempts to relocate the hawkers to permanent markets including Muthurwa, Mwariro and Kirindini have proved largely unsuccessful.
Even where some move to new locations after being asked to do so, there are always new traders showing up to take up the spaces they vacate on the streets, making it hard to convince anyone to shift to the intended market areas.
Nairobi, once popular as the ‘Green City in the Sun’, has sadly lost this description with the invasion of hawkers slowly turning its streets into a nightmare for residents.