By Foibe N Paavo
SWAKOPMUND, 19 April – As everything is getting more expensive, the local markets seem to face more challenges on a daily basis. I visited hawkers near Woermann Brock in Mondesa and they had much to complain about.
“We’re not employed and we rely on things that are coming from South Africa. Three-quarters of things we use are imported. For example, a packet of tomatoes is N$80 and I need to come and sell it at my mark-up price. Also, some of the things that are very expensive now to us we can manage, but we cannot afford to feed our families,” one hawker said.
“Generally our difficulties are increasing on a daily basis, especially after Covid. Everything went high and people are no more employed. There’s no money. Some companies have been closing up in Swakopmund, and people have been retrenched too much,” said another.
“Now also on the market, we are suffering because our regular customers are no longer supporting us on a daily basis since most of them lost their job,” she said.
Another hawker stated: “Sometimes you can sit here from 07h00 until 20h00 but you’ll only manage to sell N$30 or N$40, sometimes even N$20. Sometimes you’ll buy tomatoes but they’ll just get rotten waiting for customers to come to pick them up. And as a result, tomorrow you’ll not even have anything to go and order your stock.”
“We’re really struggling. We can manage to buy three-quarter packets to make a living from them but it’s really very difficult since the profit is very little,” said one frustrated seller.
“We’re are standing and crying to say small businesses are not well looked after … nobody looks at us to help us, even with small loans from the Ministry of Trade, for example, to help us manage our little businesses,” another remarked.
“Some of us are single mothers, we’re the breadwinners in the house and some of us are living with orphans. But we can’t just sleep. We need to come up and try to hustle,” said one woman, “We also face daily challenges such as thieves grabbing our combos, sweets etc because people are hungry!”
Hawkers implored the government to come up with small loans for small businesses and business people or small projects for people to try and increase their businesses.
“We can’t loan money from the banks because we don’t have enough funds or payslips. We want to produce our own gardens so that we don’t have to wait for suppliers. We could try such initiatives but now our hands are tied because we don’t have land to plant our crops,” another added.
“If we had such initiatives, then maybe we would be able to come up with our own projects or urge a group of people to come up with our own vegetables.”
Many of the people at the marketplace get sick because it is extremely cold during winter and extremely hot during summer and the wind disrupts their daily sales. They beg the government to provide them with a proper structure.
“We need officials to come up here and see our suffering!” – Namibia Daily News
