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In policies and in laws, please consider the defenceless, the poor

Friday February 17 2017

During the review of the Rwandan Penal Code, I co-ordinated a civil society coalition to ensure the rights of sex workers were safeguarded. This group was at the brink of being criminalised in Rwanda.

Sex workers, we told parliamentarians, were not going to abandon their occupation just because a new law says so. By criminalising them, the law was just rendering them more vulnerable to daily injustice, harassment by agents of order, clients and the rest of the community.

We showed lawmakers that such law was impracticable and discriminatory against the poor, because it would only be applied to the women standing by the road at night, but exempt the self-driving ones, sipping a glass of martini by the counter of five-star venues every evening.

Most importantly, we insisted to policy-makers that the main culprits of sex-work – namely the clients, the men — would hardly be punished, for the mere act of speaking to, or inviting a woman into one’s car did not qualify as “prostitution,” and that law enforcers would have to wait for the crime to be “consumed” as it were, to catch the alleged “culprits,” leading to witch-hunting and total chaos.

Rwandan policymakers are progressive. They did not go as far as legalising prostitution, but they removed jail terms for sex workers in the penal code, leaving only a number of area restrictions for troublemakers, and an obligation to pursue free anti-retroviral treatment, in case of seropositivity.

But this article isn’t about sex workers but hawkers; street vendors and anyone else in the informal sector. Every argument we used to defend sex workers, can apply it to street vendors.

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Initially, clients would refuse to pay then rough up these girls, who would have nowhere to report since they were considered walking crimes. Today, sex workers on the street do not live in fear and are actually protected by the police, a refreshing outcome for anyone who lived in Kimihurura and Remera before 2012.

See, in Kigali, we have hawkers and street vendors all over town who operate unbothered, except they represent the interests of big telephone, banks, water and electricity companies. As for hardworking single mothers trying to raise two, at times three children on their own, they are victims to daily bother from all sorts of city kings and kinglets.

You see, when faced with intractable, complex socio-economic questions, states tend to use the easiest tool at their disposal, which is legislation. However, people do not graduate from informal to formal sector by a stroke of pen on paper, nor the sight of ubiquitous men in uniform. Sex workers wouldn’t have abandoned sex work because parliament said it is bad.

People in precarity aren’t usually there by choice. Societal issues are only addressed by societal solutions.

To be fair, it isn’t that the city isn’t offering alternatives. A number of nice little marketplaces for former street vendors have just been built around Kigali. Not least, the Ubudehe and Sacco — poverty graduation schemes — have helped access to micro-loans and growth for many former street vendors. However if there is still demand for street vending, then there must be a non-coercive, convenient response. Law and fines are ridiculous. Street vending is an honourable job; it is not at all criminal.

Throughout history informal trading has raised families, sent children to school and ensured social stability. The young Tunisian who set himself on fire was a university graduate, yet a street vendor.

All in all socio-economic rights are subject to progressive realisation. The urge for city modernity too, must be subjected to progressive realisation; at the pace of its residents.

I was rooting for the Car-free Zone, because I hoped it’d be the place for colourful open markets and magic tricks, like in every city in the world, I was wrong. To those who lived in the areas mentioned above, the cat and mouse chase between agents of order and hawkers today, is the same that was experienced by sex workers then.

It must stop. I long for the day when the police will protect street vendors; the day that hawking will be decriminalised.

Rwandan lawmakers are progressive.

I will end with my favourite maxim: “The ethical tone of a society should be judged, not by how it treats its strongest, most privileged, most powerful members, but by how it treats its weakest, most vulnerable and most in need.”

Thierry Kevin Gatete is a researcher, blogger and human-rights lawyer in Rwanda