Municipal authorities are to launch a new clean-up campaign in Harare to get beggars and street kids out of the Zimbabwean capital, an official has told state television.
The state-controlled Newsnet said scores of beggars and street children rounded up during a controversial 10-week urban clean-up campaign that ended in late July are ”back in full force”.
”As council, we are not going to allow that,” Sekesayi Makwavarara, chairperson of a government-appointed commission that is running the city told Newsnet in a report late on Monday.
”We are going to make sure that these street kids are taken out of the city.”
Makwavarara said there are plans to recruit 200 more municipal police officers to carry out the exercise.
”As we speak now, some of them are on training and you shall see them on the streets soon,” she said.
Newsnet reported that Harare is teeming with beggars, touts and vendors selling gas on the black market.
Zimbabwean authorities launched an operation in mid-May, razing shacks, homes, market stalls and small shops and detaining about 46 000 people as part of what it described as an urban renewal campaign.
But the opposition denounced the operation as a campaign of repression, while Western governments and the United Nations harshly condemned the blitz.
A UN report released last month said the demolitions had left 700 000 people homeless or without sources of income, or both, in cities and towns across the country while a further 2,4-million were affected in varying degrees. — Sapa-AFP