STREET HAWKING IN GHANA.  A SURVIVAL OF THE FITTEST

(THE CASE OF HAWKERS AT WEIJA TOLL BOOTH AND WINNEBA JUNCTION) 

Introduction

Except for the vehicles that wait in traffic to pay their tolls and those that stop at the Winneba junction either to pick new passengers or drop others, one would have thought that these areas were market places or battle grounds where individuals (both men and women) fought for their survival. Like all marketplaces, the toll booth area features all kinds of hawkers - young and old, women and men, girls and boys, as well as the educated and uneducated.  A close observation of the setting reveals a wide range of wares on sale, hawkers running after vehicles, quarrels among the hawkers, food vendors (chop bar operators) who sell to the hawkers, the trees along the banks of the Weija lagoon that served as resting places for the hawkers and others who dealt in building rocks, slates and flowers.

The Winneba junction offers another great avenue for hawking activities as vehicles from various destinations made their stop there. One look at the face of a hawker who had just sold an item to a passenger reveals a deep satisfaction and triumph over his/her comrade. Also to be seen are drivers’ mates fighting over passengers and station masters either driving these vehicles away or charging them to enter the station to pick up passengers and pay some amount of money.

Research Questions

The Weija toll booth area is not the only place where street hawkers are found in their numbers. What is different here however is the fact that the place is nearly remote from any main town unlike Kaneshie and Winneba junction. One other thing was the free way in which they went about their business as if there was nothing to worry about – the possibility of being knocked down by a vehicle and the activities of the city task force popularly called “aabayee”. Also worthy of note was how they (hawkers at the Weija toll booth and at Winneba junction) made ends meet considering the fact that many of the hawkers sell the same items and the petty quarrels they engage in when one hawker feels outsmarted by another.

1.       Why do so many hawkers prefer hawking on the streets to displaying their wares on tables or stalls at home or in the marketplace?

2.      What agreement do the hawkers have with the toll operators, the police station there and the city task force or the station masters in the case of the Winneba junction?

3.      How do the hawkers manage to get their wares sold considering the fact that they are all selling similar things if not the same things (e.g. ten hawkers selling “boodoo”, water or bread)

The Setting of the Weija Toll Booth and Winneba junction

My first visit to the toll booth on Thursday morning (which was a working day), I encountered most of the hawkers having their wares not on the pavement but on the ground and on benches under the trees while others, especially the hawkers of plantain chips and doughnuts were now packaging them into bits for sale. This notwithstanding, the pure water sellers, chewing gum and toffees sellers as well as the newspaper vendors were already making good use of the traffic by getting their goods sold to the passengers. What fascinated me even on my second visit was the gaiety as well as the vigor with which the hawkers went about their trade.  There was hardly any bread hawker to be found on the side of the road that led to Accra on an early Thursday morning. A few could however be seen on the other side of the rood which leads to Kasoa and the Central region. It is on this same stretch of road that you will normally find the beverage hawkers (those who sell packs of Malta Guinness, Guinness, Smirnoff, Guilder, Beer, Alvaro, Countre milk and so on).

I went to these places twice not only for assignment purposes but the fact that there was always so many hawkers at that point had always bothered my mind. I wanted to know why there were always more female than male hawkers (I knew this because I often pass through this area and I see them) as well as whether or not they make enough money to encourage them to keep coming there and the other reasons for their being there. The answers to these are found in the subsequent discussions

Gaining Access to the Sites

On the early Thursday morning that I visited the toll booth site, I alighted at the Tuba junction and walked to the area around the toll where the hawking was more serious even though the hawkers could be found along the road from the tuba junction where the traffic had built up. The side of the road leading to Accra was busier apparently because many people worked in the capital city. On the other side of the road leading to kasoa however, there was nearly no traffic and hawking activities there was not vibrant.  All I did that morning was to observe the on-goings in the environment. I observed the sexual divisions of the people selling there that early morning as well as the various age brackets they fell into. Among the items on sale that morning were sachet and mineral water, newspapers, chewables (toffees and gums), chips (plantain and flour chips),  call credit cards, koko king (porridge) vendors, doughnuts and other such petty things.

On the other side of the road however, were hawkers who were now packaging their stuff before they began the real hawking business. The food sellers (let’s call them chop bar operators because they sell fufu, banku, boiled yam and so on) had just settled and were cooking. The florists were also trimming and irrigating their flowers and flower beds while the building rock dealers whose rocks have already been set up sit under the trees in wait for customers.  The beverage hawkers were also in with their tables and beverages and were setting up (they are mostly to be found on the road that led to kasoa and the central region) whiles the bread hawkers have received their consignments from the various bakeries and were packaging them. In all, I counted about forty- five people that morning (fifteen males and about thirty females). What I didn’t know was whether they were all hawkers. The toll booth attendants were busily collecting the tolls from drivers without noticing the hawkers at all.

On the second visit which was on a Saturday and holiday, what I wanted to look out for or to know was whether the city task force did come there to sack the people off the street and whether the hawkers paid anything like income tax to the revenue collectors. I also wanted to know how many of the young hawkers were in school or have some level of education. Also important to me was the reason why those people were there in the first place and how they made sales with so many people selling similar things.  I was surprised to see the number of hawkers almost doubled the number I met there on Thursday morning. I approached one of the women who sold the assorted beverages and engaged her in a conversation. I first introduced myself and my mission in that area. She was very welcoming and offered me a lot of relevant information. This woman had been there for almost five years and was seated with her beverages on the pavement. According to her, she came there every day of the week except on Sundays.  She said sales had dropped that day (Saturday) because of the festivities and that on a very good day, she sold a lot of drinks especially the Malt. When asked why she would not establish a convenient shop, she replied by saying that, sales at the toll booth was much better than for her  to sit at one place. Besides, she had no money to establish a shop. Though she spoke to me, her eyes were fixed on the road for potential buyers. She will dash off like lightning to sell to a passenger in a vehicle and be back before I knew it. In the fifteen minutes that I stood beside her talking, she had sold about five mini packs of Malta Guinness. It left me wondering how ‘bad’ the market was according to the woman and how a good market looked like.

When I left the woman to search for another person to speak with, one of the male hawkers called out to me and started behaving funny (he said he had missed me in English even though I haven’t seen him before) and I wanted to ignore him but decided to engage him on a second thought because he was accommodating. I drew closer to him and we started conversing. I didn’t tell him about my mission from the beginning but his words and mannerisms gave me the opportunity to ask follow up questions. For instance, he asked me whether I wanted to join them and I said I hoped so but don’t know what to sell. Because he was speaking English language, I asked him whether he was a student and he said he had completed Senior High School and needed money to further, that was why he was selling bread at the toll booth. He also confirmed that more women and girls than men and boys were hawking in the area, because in his words “women and girls had more problems than men”.  As I spoke with him, other hawkers (his friends) also came around, apparently to listen to what we were discussing and in the process we formed an informal focus group. According to the boy, there was no one in charge of the place and that anyone could just come and sell whatever they wished without any hindrances. Like the woman I first spoke to, he said the revenue collectors used to come for income tax but not anymore. Also the city task forces come around only on weekdays to rid the hawkers off the pavements but not off the middle of the roads. According to him as well as others, one problem they have to grapple with was the frequency with which their monies were taken away by drivers and passengers leaving them with hardly any income after the daily sales

Most of the hawkers that I spoke with attested to the fact that some of the young hawkers are either in school or have completed one level and only came there on holidays and weekends to sell in order to survive and support themselves.

There were other hawkers who wore uniforms to identify and distinguish themselves from all others – Kantanka pastries (orange and white outfits with a hat) and the Adinkra pastries (green and white outfits with a hat). These two groups were a perfect example of ‘survival of the fittest’ as they sold the same pastries and each group does all it could to make their brand the preferred choice

Going closer to the area under the trees close to the lagoon, I realized that the ‘chop bar’ operators were busily pounding off their worries whiles other hawkers were there eating. When I asked why so many of them were seated under the trees with others fast asleep, I was told that, they were either tired or had finished selling their wares.

Just as I was about to leave the scene, I spotted a group of young boys selling fresh tilapia they had caught from the Weija lagoon. I had a good laugh when one of the boys was shouting “fresh tilapia promotion”. I asked him why he has added promotion to his slogan and he replied by saying that he was giving out the tilapia on promotional prices by giving seven pieces of the fish for ten cedis (10.00) instead of the usual five pieces as Easter present to his customers. Also, it was getting late and he needed to get back to work at the lagoon. 

The situation was not very different from what happens at the Winneba junction.  What caught my attention here was one could not tell where the hawkers appeared from ones a vehicle stops at the junction. They swarm around one vehicle, especially; the bigger busses like bees and I  could not but wonder whether each one of them is able to sell their wares. The most common items on sale here unlike the toll booth area were “boodoo”, fried yam and steamed bush meat on sticks. Of course there was water in abundance. Here too, most of the other hawkers of fruits and the like sat behind their wares till they were called by a passenger to serve them.

I also realized from the times that I have been there and from interviews I had with some of the hawkers of “boodoo” that the number of hawkers could fluctuate from one season to the next, one day to the next, and even during a single day. This was because some vendors only sold in the morning, afternoon or evening; and others sold only during certain seasons.

One thing however was true among the two places – the fittest hawker survives in the midst of all these by getting his/her goods sold

Structuralist perspective of street hawking: a necessity-driven activity

Street hawking falls within the category of economic activities generally referred to as the informal sector (Jimu, 2003). Being one of the highly visible informal sector activities, street hawking is basically unregulated trading that takes place in public spaces such as streets, sidewalks, bridges, pavements etc (Jimu, 2005).

 Bhowmik, (2000), described a hawker to be a person who in the name of commerce occupies space on the street, pavements or other public/private spaces or, they may be mobile in the sense that they move from place to place by carrying their wares on push carts or in baskets on their heads.

With this recognition of the widespread persistence and even growth of street hawking, a structuralist perspective has come to the fore which depicts this endeavour as a survival practice conducted out of economic necessity as a last resort in the absence of alternative means of livelihood (Williams & Gurtoo, 2012). In many developing countries like Ghana, women tend to predominate in areas of trade which are less lucrative. With the low level of education of these hawkers as and the lack of employment even for highly educated people, it is not surprising to find so many youths as well as middle aged women engage in this kind of trade (skinner, 2008).

Gender perspectives

Why so many women than men at these places? This brings to mind the boy I interviewed at the toll booth, he said “the females are many because they have more problems”. What were these problems and why do they think the solutions to them lie on the street? Considering the first woman I spoke with, despite everything she told me, she was also a mother and had a family to support. The young girls, especially, the teenage mothers had babies to cater for and looking at their levels of education and financial standing, they have no other option but to carry wares on their heads and sell (a common phenomenon among Ghanaian women). But where are the men involved in all these? It shows the level of marginality and oppression women are still going through as well as the result of the social structure that has not given consideration to people like these.

Another factor that leads to the issue of the fight of survival is urbanization, migration and economic development trends which suggest that there has been a rapid increase in the number of street traders operating on the streets of African cities (ILO, 2002).

One thing I noticed about the hawkers was the fact that most of them were not from the greater Accra region. They or their parents (in the case of the young one) are migrants who had come to the cities in search of unavailable employment. Faced with the harsh realities of city life, they have no option but to join the band of street hawkers to make ends meet. 

These hawkers are depicted as unwilling and unfortunate pawns in an exploitative global economic system. For such marginalized populations, street hawking ‘is the only means for survival’.  From the structuralist perspective, this necessity-driven endeavour is highly insecure and unstable, composed of long hours, poor conditions, and no legal or social protection, (ILO, 2002; Kapoor, 2007).

REFERNECES

Skinner, C. (2008). Street Trade in Africa: A Review. School of Development Studies

Mittullah, W. (1991) Hawking as a Survival Strategy for the Urban Poor in Nairobi: The Case of Women. Environment and Urbanization, Vol.3, No.2.

Williams C. & Gurtoo A. (2012). Evaluating competing theories of street entrepreneurship: Some lessons from a study of street vendors in Bangalore, India. Springer science+ business media