On September 2, President William Ruto announced that foreigners must stop petty trade, such as hawking and running small shops. The move aims to protect Kenyans from competition. Kenya wants job-creating investment, he said, not foreign hawkers.
The president’s announcement immediately drew comparisons with South Africa’s wide-scale xenophobic purges of African migrants.
However, Ruto did not order a general expulsion. Officials later clarified that documented traders with permits and licences can continue trading, and they gave a 90-day regularisation period to comply before stricter enforcement begins.
Trader complaints and a pending Local Content Bill, which reserves certain businesses for Kenyans, prompted the move.
The Ruto government’s actions, and the comparisons with xenophobic South Africa, highlight two contradictory factors. Kenya, like South Africa, cannot serve as Africa’s or its sub-region’s employment bureau and carry the cost of other governments’ failures.
Burundians queue at Nairobi Embassy to register after Ruto order
At the same time, excluding other Africans from local economies is no longer tenable. New developments, such as the African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA), have made that approach obsolete.
The Africa Centre for Strategic Studies, using UN data, put the number of Africans living in another African country (excluding refugees and asylum seekers) at 15 million in 2024, up from 12 million in 2015, a rise of roughly 25 per cent over the decade. Other reports put the current figure as high as 21 million.
That’s critical because, contrary to the popular perception that most Africans want to migrate to Europe, the Gulf, or North America, a majority of this movement happens within Africa itself, and intra-African migration has climbed by 44 per cent since 2010.
Several sources project 25 to 35 million intra-African migrants over the next decade. A booming youth population and climate-related displacement will drive this. Regional free-movement agreements such as the East African Community also make crossing borders easier.
African migrants in Kenya number more than a million today, so by the mid-2030s that figure could reach two million. At that point, the issue will loom too large for invocations of pan-Africanism to resolve, so Kenya needs policy and action now to head off that crisis.
Right now, though, despite its pull as the region’s leading economy, Kenya is not the top destination for African immigrants in the region. Uganda holds that position: it hosts 1.8 million refugees, the largest such population in Africa, alongside a smaller number of economic migrants: a distinction worth keeping in mind, since refugees and voluntary immigrants face very different circumstances.
Yet an intriguing sub-plot has emerged. Since about February, murmurs against Burundian immigrants in Kenya have grown into loud agitation. Ethiopian, South Sudanese, Ugandan, Somali, and Tanzanian immigrants make some sense because these countries share a border with Kenya.
Burundi, though, like DR Congo (and, even more notoriously, Nigeria), does not share a border with Kenya. These are more deliberate migrants: people who did not simply cross the nearest border in the middle of the night, cooking pans and mattresses in hand, fleeing a murderous militia or a vengeful army bent on rape and arson.
Burundians and Congolese also lack the advantage of speaking English; they speak French, and arrive in Kenya with only a smattering of Central African Kiswahili.
Regional stereotype does not rate Burundians and Congolese as smart as, or smarter than, Kenyans, who see themselves as the region’s leading innovators. So when people carrying so many supposed disadvantages, and even looked down on, outdo Kenyans in small trades and come to be seen as a threat, that raises a real question about whether Kenya is losing its edge.
The explanation, though, may be more structural. Congolese tailors rank among the continent’s best, so sensible Nairobians wanting a dress made for one of those “Africa-themed” galas head straight to them.
Burundians tend to succeed through humility and a willingness to do jobs at prices Kenyans will no longer accept. They work as gardeners or house help for Sh4,000 a month, or less, and braid hair for under Sh1,000. Many Kenyans feel these rates insult both them and their ancestors.
Kenyans who pay Sh4,000 a month for a gardener are not being mean; it is simply what thousands of people, battered by economic and technological headwinds and pushed out of the middle class, can afford.
How, then, do Burundians live on Sh4,000 a month? The same way earlier Eritrean, Ethiopian, and even Chinese immigrants managed it. They live communally in cheap shared accommodation, sleeping on the floor on a thin mattress, if they have one at all, under a threadbare blanket. Rent probably costs them Sh500.
Unlike Kenyans, they do not pay “black tax” at this stage of their lives; they have no siblings or aunts waiting to share their pennies. Given time, they save enough to break out and start a tightly run business, and undercut Kenyans with their thin margins.
The tragedy is that all this reflects a broken Africa, not some remarkable renewal or rise. And governments find themselves damned if they do nothing, and even more damned if they act.
The author is a journalist, writer and curator of the Wall of Great Africans. X@cobbo3
