There is probably nothing left to say about the treatment of Somalis in Kenya that has not been said before. That is perhaps the most embarrassing part of this conversation.
It is 2026, and we are still having to explain to people that a Kenyan does not become less Kenyan because of their surname, religion, mother tongue or the part of the country they call home.
Reach into your pocket and pull out your national identity card. For most Kenyans, it is an ordinary document, something you need to access services, register a SIM card or travel.
For some of us, however, the document is a reminder that citizenship, which should settle the question of belonging, does not always settle it. You can be born here, educated here, pay taxes here, bury your relatives here and still find yourself explaining why you belong.
This suspicion did not emerge out of nowhere. It has a history, and the Kenyan state played a considerable role in creating it. In 1989, the government subjected Somalis to a screening exercise that forced people to establish their citizenship before officials. The exercise produced the infamous pink identification cards, a symbol of the extraordinary suspicion directed at a community whose members had lived in Kenya for generations.
People were made to queue and account for their origins as though their citizenship were a privilege awaiting administrative approval.
The consequences of such treatment settled into families, institutions and the way people understand their place in society.
The suspicion continued through successive security operations. After terrorist attacks, Somali identity, Muslim dress and ordinary expressions of religious devotion were frequently treated as grounds for scrutiny.
During Operation Usalama Watch in 2014, thousands of people were arrested, with many Somali residents subjected to detention, extortion and degrading treatment.
In The Origin of Others, Toni Morrison examines how societies manufacture the idea of the stranger. The outsider is not necessarily someone who is unfamiliar. Sometimes the outsider is the neighbour whose presence threatens the comfortable boundaries of one's own identity.
Kenya has practised this distinction for far too long. We have developed an informal hierarchy of citizenship in which some people are allowed to exist without explanation while others are repeatedly summoned to demonstrate their legitimacy.
And when institutions repeatedly communicate that a community cannot be trusted, people learn to organise their lives around that distrust. They rely on familiar networks, conduct business within their communities and turn to one another when public institutions fail them. What outsiders sometimes describe as isolation or an unwillingness to integrate may, in part, be the consequence of decades of exclusion. It is difficult to demand that people trust a society that has repeatedly treated them as outsiders.
This history also offers some context for the political alignment between sections of the Somali community and President William Ruto's administration. For a community that has experienced prolonged exclusion from national political life, visibility in government carries considerable significance. Having people from your community occupy influential positions can feel like evidence that the country is finally making room for you.
Representation, however, is not a personal gift from the president. It is a constitutional principle and a basic requirement of democratic government. Having a few prominent individuals in government does not automatically translate into security, equal opportunity, institutional accountability or improved living conditions for ordinary Somali Kenyans. Nor should access to government positions become a substitute for examining the government's record.
A community that has spent generations fighting to be recognised deserves more than symbolic inclusion. It deserves the same standards of accountability that should apply to every other Kenyan community.
But there is another uncomfortable conversation we must have. Historical discrimination does not give anyone a licence to practise ethnic superiority. Some Somalis, both in Kenya and in the diaspora, respond to online prejudice with insults and slurs against other communities. That response is counterproductive, and it deserves to be challenged.
The problem is that the same standards are rarely applied consistently. When an individual from another community expresses hatred online, the conversation generally concerns that individual. When the person has a Somali name, the discussion quickly expands to include millions of people. A single social media post becomes evidence in a trial against an entire ethnic group.
We cannot spend our days demanding a country founded on equality while reproducing the same prejudices in our own spaces.
But the greater responsibility rests with a state that has repeatedly failed to protect the equal citizenship of all its people. The government cannot selectively invoke national unity while allowing communities to be profiled, collectively punished or treated as permanent security threats.
I refuse to negotiate my humanity with a stranger on the internet, whether that stranger is Somali or belongs to any other Kenyan community. I will not produce a ledger of economic contributions, list the number of schools built by Somali businesspeople or explain how many generations my family has lived here to earn a place in a country that is already mine.
Somalis are not guests in Kenya. Their citizenship is not conditional on their political loyalties, their economic usefulness or the approval of other communities. They do not need to become more acceptable to deserve the rights they already possess.
We have spent too many years confusing national unity with the expectation that minorities should make themselves less visible, less vocal and less demanding to be accepted.
Perhaps the question we should be asking in 2026 is not why Somalis keep insisting that they belong. It is why, after all these years, a section of this country still believes it has the authority to decide whether they do.
