Harare Mayor, Councillor Jacob Mafume, says businesses operating in partitioned shops, masquerading as shopping malls to avoid paying individual shop licences, will now be required to pay separate business licences.

Mayor Mafume clarified that true shopping malls, such as Sam Levy’s Village and Westgate Mall, are large commercial complexes with unified ownership structures and shared facilities, distinguishing them from businesses operating in partitioned spaces in the Central Business District. He said:

The issue of what they call malls, frankly speaking, does not fit the definition of what we understand as malls, either locally or internationally.

Someone just partitions their shop, names it after their grandmother, and suddenly claims it’s a mall.

When you subdivide your shop and put in multiple smaller shops within it, you have not necessarily created a mall.

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You have simply created several businesses that should be paying licences to the city as individual shops.

The idea of calling it a mall is simply an attempt to evade paying for each business. There is no common ownership; various tenants are operating separately, and they must be licensed accordingly.

In the old days, we used to have a one-size-fits-all licence. A supermarket and a small shop would pay the same fee.

But in the new budget, we have created clusters based on floor size. Each shop must now pay a fee that matches its actual business space.

Mafume said these unregulated malls on city planning and cleanliness, saying the mushrooming of partitioned shops has led to increased litter, pollution, and congestion in commercial areas.

More: The Herald