Thomas Ondabu Obure during an interview at Nation Centre on February 27, 2024.
When he woke up on Tuesday morning, Thomas Ondabu Obure, 45, did what he had done countless times since relocating to South Africa from Kenya.
He prepared for work. Only this time, a text message confirmed that there was no work to go to.
A Burundian national who leased a motorbike to Mr Obure told him not to collect the two-wheeler that day.
Mr Obure has since 2023 been working as a rider in a delivery firm.
But the motorbike is owned by a Burundian national whom, he says, has always been affable.
Back home in Kenya, President William Ruto’s directive targeting foreign traders has been unfolding into queues in embassies of foreigners, mostly Burundians, full of uncertainty and hurried calculations of what happens next.
In South Africa, its consequences have travelled quietly into the life of Mr Obure who had little to do with the politics behind the proclamations, except that it came from his home country’s president.
“I was employed by a Burundian. I work as a delivery guy. He leased the bike to me and would pay him from the proceeds,” he told Nation.
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Burundians queue at the Embassy of Burundi Chancery in Nairobi on September 7, 2026 to regularise their documents.
This would earn him about Sh20,000 a week, from which he would service the very many needs competing for his attention both in Cape Town and Nairobi.
The motorbike owner, he said, had given it to a fellow Burundian who had flown in from Kenya following the crackdown on foreign traders, narrated Mr Obure. Now without the motorbike, he cannot do the deliveries.
“I was told there is no motorbike for me,” he narrated. That means he no longer has the critical tool of trade.
There was something unsettling about that sentence, especially the silence that followed it. But for a person living away from home, a job is always more than a payslip. It is rent. Food. Transport. A phone call home. School fees. A little money put aside for tomorrow.
Sometimes, it is the difference between feeling settled and feeling stranded.
“I’m now jobless. I haven’t paid my child’s college fees. And there are other financial needs as well,” he narrated.
Obure had tried his hands at anything and everything he could stumble on to fend for his family before 2014. He found his way to South Africa and came back in 2018 empty handed after his savings ‘vanished’.
Then in 2023, he went back again. That’s when he found favour with a group of Burundians, whom, he says, have always been affable to him.
They welcomed him when he had no one to lean to. They showed him where to go. They helped him when he did not have anyone. And, eventually, one of them leased a motorbike to Mr Obure for the delivery job. It is a kindness he has not forgotten.
Around 2014 when he was struggling to find a permanent job in Kenya when he moved to South Africa. He latched onto a friend’s idea to travel to South Africa, work and sustain his family, while saving enough capital to set up a business.
But after his tourist visa was rejected, Obure chose to sneak into South Africa and stayed there until 2018, when he returned shortly after.
The then 33-year-old Obure took to Cape Town with the verve of a fish to water. And within a few weeks, he had secured a sales job in a shop owned by another Kenyan. But the salary, he lamented, was barely enough to survive in Cape Town, let alone send money back home and start saving capital.
When it didn’t make economic sense to continue with the job, he quit the sales job and opted to become a cobbler, first setting up with just one stool in the middle of a street in Hermanus, within Cape Town.
He could now make more money, but he could not bank it due to complications with the documentation, since he was technically an illegal immigrant.
That’s when he joined Ekeza Sacco in Kenya, to which he would channel money through mobile money transfers. But soon after, Ekeza sacco would face legal hurdles and his savings and years of sweat all went under.
The sacco collapsed, triggered by what the Directorate of Criminal Investigations (DCI) officers insist was fraud by its founder televangelist and politician, David Kariuki Ngari, who is better known as Gakuyo.
Gakuyo was to be prosecuted in 2018 for allegedly defrauding over 50,000 sacco depositors of more than Sh1 billion. But he reached an agreement with the complainants to refund their money.
Life has always thrown curveballs at Mr Obure. When visa was standing on his way to South Africa, he smuggled himself there, fueled by the conviction that the coast would clear soon. That very conviction saw him maneuver the vagaries of life in South Africa as a newbie. His savings, years of sweat, and the dream of having a better life was scattered in the winds when Ekeza sacco turned out to be a scam. He would find his way back to South Africa, back to square one where it all began to redraw his life. Only that this time, he doesn’t know what to do, a teary Obure told Nation.
All that he has always worked for South Africa has always found a way of escaping his grip. Now caught between not knowing what to do next, with the option of flying back not viable, Obure stared blankly into the skies with teary eyes.
“I don’t know what to do,” he said, his voice only broken by silence.
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