How to balance regulatory compliance and the Duty of Care during a time of great need: the Case of the Chitungwiza Soup Kitchen.

Chitungwiza Municipality has attracted a lot of criticism and anger peppered with insults after it issued a cease notice asking Samatha Muzoreki to stop feeding hundreds of people she serves per day at her soup kitchen in Chitungwiza. In theory, the cease notice is to enforce environmental and food safety regulations, which are designed to protect the public and ensure that food served to the public is safe and fit for human consumption. But in practice, the notice also dramatizes how Government’s regulatory power can be disruptive if not detrimental to people’s well-being, especially when such power is exercised from ivory towers with neither consultation nor regard to the best interests of the citizens from whom it is derived. The exercise of this regulatory power has real victims- women and children who are affected negatively and disproportionately.

While the risk of hundreds of people getting sick from food contamination or at worst contracting a disease is not only real, but probably the motivation for issuing the cease notice, it is unacceptable that regulatory power was exercised without regard to context and impacts on real people. At a time when most families have nothing to eat and when Government just extended the nationwide lockdown indefinitely without providing safety nets to the most vulnerable, the Chitungwiza Municipality could have struck a balance between protecting people through exercising regulatory authority and doing so through exercising the duty of care. Such a balance would require a different approach to ensuring compliance. Instead of shutting down the soup kitchen, the municipality could work help Samatha Muzoreki to help that facility become compliant. To that end, the environmental officer could inspect the place, then issue recommendations on how to become compliant within a set time frame. In fact, the council could even go further and help her with idle manpower to ensure that her facility is compliant. That way, the best interests of people and local Government are served.

This case also dramatizes the need for nuance, which is often lacking in our public policies. We often have bambazonke policies and laws that are not inclusive to the point that people opt out of the system, instead of trying to be compliant. Our monetary policies are like that: you wonder who they are really meant to benefit. And so are our policies on farmland; there is no distinction between a widow who wants to grow food for herself, a villager who wants to grow food for a family of five; and an enterprising small scale farmer who wants to grow food for her family and some excess for sale.

Back to the soup kitchen, it must and cannot be asked to meet the same standards that apply to the Meikles or Amanzi Restaurant. We must find a middle ground for regulations that allow Mai Fafi to serve her Sadza and Mufushwa or Mazondo in a safe space, instead of using disruptive regulatory power that forces her to go underground or play cat and mouse games with authorities. Ultimately, the burden of care during such a humanitarian situation falls, first and foremost, on the Government—not just citizens. As such, when citizens step up to help other citizens, they must be supported, instead of being shut down. Government must enable innovators, instead of just coming up to enforce laws that serve theoretical people to the detriment of real people.