Someone at the SA Human Rights Commission hearing into allegations of racism by the Forum of Black Journalists last week briefly lamented the plight of hawkers.

Someone at the SA Human Rights Commission hearing into allegations of racism by the Forum of Black Journalists last week briefly lamented the plight of hawkers.

Yesterday, hardly a week later, this paper reported about a metro police raid at Orange Farm, south of Johannesburg, where vendors' stalls were destroyed.

The harassment of hawkers, which amounts to criminalising poverty, is a serious national problem, one that cries out for the urgent attention of the human rights body.

This sad saga of jobless people being hounded daily for trying to make an honest living has no place in our rights-based democracy.

The government should, surely, by now have come up with more creative solutions than to callously deny poor people a livelihood.