Cemetery puts life in order

The Sunday morning madness outside the Lhanguene cemetery in Maputo, Mozambique, is starting to calm, but Titos Ernesto's eyes are still hawklike as he takes in the car park.

One of his men is washing a car. Good. A woman walks by selling peanuts. That is fine — a complementary business, no competition.

The flower sellers are down to their last stalks and the phone card man weaves his way through the minibus taxis.

For the moment, Ernesto's slice of the informal economy — the unregulated and untaxed commercial activity that forms a huge percentage of the market — is in order.

But then two of the boys selling water start shoving each other. Ernesto swings towards them. “Knock it off!'' he shouts at them in Shangaan, the local language.

The boys shuffle off, looking for customers. “They need to behave,'' Ernesto says.

Lord of the guards

He should know. He was 9 years old when he started working, selling odds and ends to people who come daily to pay respect to their ancestors at this cemetery — the largest in the seaside capital.

By his early teens, he was washing and “guarding'' cars. Today, at age 25, he is known as chefe — “boss'' in Portuguese.

As chefe, he is in charge of the 70 or so car guards in this expansive car park, which he divides into zones and assigns territory to all the guards.

He is also the main liaison for the police department, which, in 2004, frustrated with crime, encouraged the car guards to organise.

“If anything goes wrong now, we are blamed,'' Ernesto says. Which means, of course, that they can't afford to let anything “go wrong''. Clad in faded “official'' vests, they watch for people stealing car mirrors.

They make sure that the young hooligans from the squatter camp a few blocks away aren't staking out any of their customers.

And they try to keep the peace among the hardened, impoverished youths who come to earn a few coins for bread.

Hence the scolding of the water boys, who clean jugs they find in the trash and offer to water flowers that Mozambicans plant on the graves of loved ones.

Economists and policy officials have tried for years to define and measure the informal sector.

Some say it is a sign of underdevelopment and will shrink as the economy improves.

Others believe that the “secondary economy'' — another name for it — is tied to the legal, commercial economy, and that aid donors should encourage informal traders with microfinance grants.

What is clear to everyone, though, is that the informal economy is huge. In sub-Saharan Africa, the informal sector makes up about 72 per cent of non-agricultural employment, according to the World Bank.

Most informal traders in urban areas have jobs such as Ernesto's — self-employed traders of some kind or another — and many congregate in places such as the Lhanguene cemetery parking lot.

In this city of about 1.5 million, there is a clear informal sector hierarchy. The vendors with stalls in some of the city's crowded markets are close to the top.

They have to pay for their spot and are supposed to buy a government licence. (They are considered “informal'' as they don't pay taxes and they don't have government protection like formally employed people do.)

Then come the informal stalls — people who set up stands outside their houses or along the kerb near the minibus taxi stops, selling fruits.

Sonia Alfeu, who is carrying dozens of small peanut packets in a handmade basket, as well as a baby tied to her back, is near the bottom of this pecking order. She does not have a stand or a regular customer base.

Every afternoon, after roasting about five pounds of peanuts (which cost her $3.20 wholesale) on an oven in her shack, Alfeu walks 20 minutes to this cemetery parking lot market.

She has sorted the nuts into little bags — she buys one big plastic sheet, then cuts it into about 150 smaller pieces — and sells the packets for a few cents each.

She has been doing this for a year, she says, ever since she became pregnant and was fired from her job as a housemaid.

“Sometimes the business is OK, but sometimes it's not so good,'' she says.

Even if she sells all the bags, she makes about $6 — a net of less than $2 after the cost of the nuts, plastic and oven. “I'd like to do something else, but don't have the money.''

With only a third-grade education — when her father died, she no longer had money for school fees — she says she has few prospects, but that one day, she would like to sell “in a proper place''.

Ernesto lives in a small cement house in one of Maputo's impoverished settlements, not far from the train tracks that shuttle official goods to and from the city's port. About a dozen relatives live with him.

He notices a man about to get into his car. Agostino Roberto Cumbane, one of the other guards, jogs across the pavement and the man pulls a few coins from his pocket before ducking into the car and driving away.

Ernesto's crew usually gets a few cents for watching someone's vehicle and a dollar or more for washing it. There are no set prices, they insist.

Community service

“It's whatever people feel,'' says Cumbane, who has been guarding cars since he was 13.

Jose Marquero, who at 22 years old is one of the older water sellers, agrees. Marquero used to be a builder but was laid off a year ago.

Now he walks five miles from his home to collect water from broken pipes around the cemetery, which he then uses to care for the plots of the ancestors of those families who were able to afford a grave in this cemetery.

As for price, he says, “it depends on the client. Some of them don't even have the capacity to pay. But we'll help them anyway. It's community service.''

Still, Ernesto says they can tell when someone is going to be a big spender or when a customer will try to leave without paying.

A tell-tale signal is when someone avoids eye contact, or refuses to talk back. “Not everybody is honest,'' he says. “But we are very patient with it because that's our job.''