Tawanda Musarurwa CHECKPOINT DESK A YOUNG woman died and six people were injured on April 6, 2024 when a balcony gave way on a building at the corner of Chinhoyi…
Tawanda Musarurwa
CHECKPOINT DESK
A YOUNG woman died and six people were injured on April 6, 2024 when a balcony gave way on a building at the corner of Chinhoyi and Bank streets in Harare’s central business district (CBD), following heavy rains.
The building had structural problems, engineers who assessed it afterwards found.
It had also, like a growing number of properties across the CBD, been subdivided into small trading units.
Markets are usually good at solving mismatches between supply and demand.
In Harare’s CBD, however, that adjustment is taking a risky form. Large corporate floors are being carved into smaller retail units to meet growing demand from informal and small-scale traders.
The trouble is that the institutions meant to police that rebuilding admit, in their own words, that they are not quite keeping up.
For decades Harare’s CBD ran on large formal tenants, namely banks, head offices, department stores occupying whole floors.
That model is breaking down. The Harare Master Plan (2025 to 2045) found that approximately 60 percent of CBD office space has sat empty for the past five years, a vacancy rate serious enough that planners now call it structural rather than cyclical.
Another 10 000 square metres of office space is expected to come off the market by the end of 2026, as suburban head offices under construction finally open and pull tenants out of town.
Into that vacuum has poured a different kind of tenant. The Master Plan blames a decade-long shortage of small retail units on the rapid informalisation of the economy, which it puts, citing World Economics estimates, at 64,7 percent of the economy in 2024.
Some landlords facing empty floors have responded by chopping large units into smaller ones.
According to data from the Harare Master Plan, CBD retail rents rose from roughly US$9 to US$25 per square metre between 2014 and 2024, a rise of 160 percent, even as weak demand and rising vacancies kept pressure on the office market, where rents climbed from around US$0,80 per square metre in 2019 to US$7 in 2023 before slipping back to US$6 in 2024.
The buildings being subdivided were not all built for this. The scale of the problem is measurable.
A 2024 survey of CBD stock found about seven in 10 buildings in acceptable condition, meaning nearly a third are not.
And just last week, the Harare City Council (HCC) classified 465 properties across the capital as dilapidated, unsightly or otherwise non-compliant with building regulations, and issued 465 statutory notices and Abatement Orders to their owners under an ongoing enforcement drive.
The City insists subdivisions should not take place without its blessing.
Property owners converting a building into a multi-tenanted retail facility must first secure development approval, according to HCC spokesperson Mr Stanley Gama, a process that runs through registered architects, structural assessments and revised fire and electrical designs before the City Architect signs off.
Occupation, he said, “should not occur until all statutory inspections have been satisfactorily completed.”
Where it does occur regardless, the consequences are meant to be real.
“Any building occupied after unauthorised alterations is liable to enforcement action under the Urban Councils Act and applicable building control legislation,” he said.
While the council has raised concerns about unapproved subdivisions and the proliferation of small trading spaces, some traders say the arrangement has made it possible for them to enter the formal CBD business environment at a cost they can afford.
“I’m not against these subdivisions because without them I would never have been able to set up a business in the CBD,” said mobile phone and accessories trader Ms Charmaine Hukwa* (not her real name).
An imperfect measure of the risk
NSSA’s national injury statistics illustrate the scale of the country’s workplace-safety problem, but they offer little visibility into the workers increasingly occupying subdivided CBD premises.
According to the Zimbabwe National Statistics Agency (ZimStat)’s 2025 Second Quarter Labour Force Survey, of the 3 186 598 people employed in Zimbabwe, only 1 140 886 (35,8 percent) were in formal employment, while 1 863 695 (58,5 percent) were informally employed.
That makes the absence of routine OSH oversight in the informal sector more consequential – and the available injury data, compiled by NSSA over fifteen years, an imperfect measure of the risk facing traders in these buildings.
The safety gap
Asked directly whether NSSA has the legal power to inspect and enforce safety standards inside these subdivided mini-malls once they are occupied, the Authority’s answer was blunt.
Its mandate, says NSSA general manager Dr Charles Shava, “is currently limited to the construction phase, where such works are undertaken by formally registered operators.”
Once the building is finished and informal traders move in, “the Occupational Safety and Health (OSH) division does not have a specific legal mandate to enforce OSH provisions within the informal sector operations housed in these premises,” he said.
Under the Factories and Works Act, the Pneumoconiosis Act and the NSSA Act, said Dr Shava, “the Authority does not have jurisdictional powers to regulate or enforce OSH standards in informal sector operations.”
In other words, the very buildings absorbing Zimbabwe’s informalisation boom sit in a legal gap between HCC’s planning powers and NSSA’s mandate, which remains anchored in legislation built around the formal factory setting.
A proposed OSH Bill, which is before Parliament, would close that gap by extending coverage to all workplaces, but until it passes, informal traders occupying subdivided floors remain largely outside routine inspection.
Dr Shava does not pretend coordination between agencies is working well either.
“Coordination among the various regulatory authorities responsible for building and workplace safety, particularly in relation to informal sector operations, remains inadequate and requires a more concerted and structured approach,” he says.
NSSA’s own diagnosis of the mini-mall boom is equally direct: “There are concerns regarding overcrowding and lack of OSH regulation of the malls as well as other informal sector operations,” added Dr Shava.
Among the fixes NSSA wants are joint building-plan approvals between local authorities and factory inspectors for any partitioning of existing malls, resident caretakers stationed in each building, and – tellingly – “outlawing floor blocking that closes out emergency escape routes in high-rise buildings,” a reference to precisely the kind of obstruction that turns a structural fault into a fatality.
Mr Gama frames HCC’s position as a balancing act between facilitating trade and protecting public safety, achieved through consistent enforcement, joint inspections with the Fire Brigade and other agencies, and preventing overcrowding beyond approved limits.
“Ultimately, the City’s objective is not to discourage commercial redevelopment, but to ensure that redevelopment occurs within the framework of Zimbabwean planning and building legislation so that public safety, property investment and sustainable urban growth are protected,” said Mr Gama.
But, that is the official version. The Master Plan’s own numbers suggest a messier reality: roughly a third of CBD buildings in poor condition, an economy that is 64,7 percent informal, and a national safety regulator that says plainly it has no jurisdiction once traders move in.
Harare’s CBD is solving one problem by creating another.
Empty office space is being converted into smaller commercial units because that is where demand has moved.
But the regulatory system governing the resulting workplaces has not moved with it.
