Kenyans should not take a village perspective on things. I have seen predictions that by 2050 – in a mere 24 years – Nairobi will be one of the largest cities in Africa, with a population many times what it is today, mainly by sprawling into nearby towns and absorbing population from elsewhere, including other countries. And you know why I believe that?
Wale Akinyemi, a leadership and transformation trainer, was once explaining to an audience what he thought was Kenya’s superpower, why the country is exceptional and is likely to do well, its many problems not withstanding. And it is not the Silicon Savannah business or the geothermal steam or Mrima Hills in Kwale or the wildlife – it is our open, welcoming culture. Kenya has one of those unique ways that embraces people from all over and gives them an equal chance to do their thing. It is therefore a magnet for talent, capital, ambition and energy.
A pan-African and global perspective should be encouraged, not discouraged.
It is particularly limited to imagine that small traders do not contribute to the larger economy because, unlike the billionaire looters, they deal in only a few shillings. But they are many and when you compound their few shillings, it adds up to quite a bit. It is also a weak perspective not to realise that there is complexity even in small business dynamics; that when you introduce competition the path that opens up for existing operators is not just out, but also up. The really good hawkers stop pounding the street and start supplying the new entrants. Competition is not bad, competition improves business and helps to select the good ones for growth.
The informal trade sector is not a stadium with a fixed number of seats, where every Ugandan or Chinese hawker who sits down means a Kenyan has to stand. These markets survive on networks — suppliers, credit, sub-let stalls, favours owed and returned — that foreign and local traders alike depend on to keep the whole rickety structure standing. You cannot claim, in the same breath, that Kenya remains “open” to big foreign capital while ordering out the small foreign trader selling duvets in Gikomba. That is not economic nationalism. It is bullying the weak while bowing to the strong, and it does absolutely nothing to fix what is actually wrong with our micro-enterprise sector: no access to capital, inefficient licensing, and a government that finds it easier to name a villain than to look in the mirror.
If you have never lived and worked outside Kenya, especially in discriminative cultures, then you probably do not understand how cloyingly inhibiting xenophobia is both for locals and foreigners; a lot of energy and efficiencies are wasted in disadvantaging foreigners. And you can’t have a two-layer economy where xenophobia rules the small business level and perfect competition and equality at the large scale level.
President Ruto, in a campaign speech to traders at State House, Nairobi, on September 2, 2026, is reported to have said: “We have not built investor confidence for hawkers to come to Kenya. The confidence we have built is for investors, not traders and hawkers.” UDA has built business confidence?
“From next week, all [foreign] traders doing those small businesses should close them,” and warned that administrative actions would be taken to protect Kenyan merchants from “unfair competition”.
We have seen this script play out before, and it never ends well. South Africa has run it on and off for 20 years — Zimbabweans, Malawians, Nigerians beaten and sometimes killed in waves of xenophobic violence that leave Pretoria apologising to its neighbours every few years and never quite fixing the underlying rot. We used to look at that and feel superior, we the cosmopolitan hub of the region, the place where a Rwandese or a South Sudanese could come and trade and build something without fear. That reputation is not sentimental decoration; it is why Nairobi hosts the UN agencies and many other NGOs and companies. A speech that opens with “it cannot be that a person comes from China or elsewhere to be a hawker” does not help that reputation.
Notice, too, that nothing is being said about the Gulf money reshaping Nairobi’s skyline, not the Chinese contractors sitting on our biggest infrastructure tenders — the foreigners genuinely competing with Kenyan capital for land and margins. The Local Content Bill now being pushed through will not touch a railway contract, it will target a Ugandan woman selling clothes from a wheelbarrow. Tough on the powerless, silent on the powerful.
If the grievance among our traders is genuine — and I do not doubt that it is — the honest response was regulation, not expulsion: enforce the work permit laws we already have, close the real gaps in the Local Content Bill without criminalising people’s presence, and pair it with the capital access and licensing reform that would actually make a Kenyan hawker more competitive. None of that required the President drawing a line between “us” and “a person from China or elsewhere”.
Kenya has, so far, avoided South Africa’s fate. Let us stay away from that road.
