A man attempts to extinguish flames after fire broke out at Gikomba market in Nairobi on May 18, 2025.
Walk long enough with a stone in your shoe and you stop feeling it. The pain becomes rhythm. You learn to limp without appearing injured.
This is how Kenya walks on Gikomba.
But here is the truth that leadership refuses to reflect: 80 per cent of this nation is walking on Gikomba’s soles. When we talk about Gikomba, we are not talking about a “messy open-air market” or a “riparian encroachment.” We are talking about the National Wardrobe.
According to the Kenya National Bureau of Statistics (KNBS), over 91.5 per cent of Kenyan households buy second-hand clothes. The shoes on the feet of the schoolchild in Turkana, the blazer on the job-seeker in Kisumu, and the boots on the farmer in Othaya, or bought by a junior executive in a Nairobi upmarket second hand stall, almost certainly passed through the mud of Gikomba.
Gikomba is the leather between the nation’s foot and the hard ground of a Sh28 billion annual import trade. To strike it is to leave a nation of 55 million people walking barefoot on their own economy.
The holes in Gikomba are not accidental; they are structured absence.
On March 30, 2026, the hole was shaped like a yellow excavator arriving at 4am. It was the “riparian clearance” mandated after the 2026 floods—a tragedy used as a convenient shovel. President William Ruto defends the demolition as a “commitment to modernise” the market despite an existing court order from the Environment and Land Court issued just weeks prior to halt the exercise.
But the most dangerous hole is the one dug in the 1970s. The promise of a “modern trading hub” is now 50 years old.
Traders salvage items from burning debris after fire broke out at Gikomba market in Nairobi on May 18, 2025.
In Kenya, “six months to completion” is not a timeline; it is a political incantation used to drown the sound of demolisher diesel engines at dawn.
Sh5 billion stalls
Why is the state so obsessed with “modernising” a place it consistently fails to protect from fire? The answer lies in the Shadow Landlords. As trader Judith Omondi reveals: “The landlords were against us... they wanted to be registered so that when the Sh5 billion stalls are built, they return as our masters.” This is the “Bottom-up Transformation Agenda turned upside down. The “Bottom” — the two million livelihoods — is cleared away. This allows the “Up” — the title-deed holders and politically connected contractors — to harvest the rent of a “modernised” facility.
Artiste impression of Gikomba Market.
The political reaction is a broken mirror on the National Wardrobe. Rigathi Gachagua calls the demolition “beastly” and “inhuman.” Kalonzo Musyoka calls it a “cowardly raid.”
They are right, but they are also reflecting their own pasts. Gachagua served as Deputy President during the 2023 fire that killed 16. The opposition leaders governed through the fires of 2015, 2018, and 2021.
The mirror breaks because it cannot hold both images: the man who holds the power and the man who now holds the microphone.
There is a moment in every shoe’s life when the hole becomes total. When the foot touches the ground directly.
Kenya is reaching that moment. Not because the traders will stop rebuilding—they cannot stop—but because their “resilience” has become the state’s excuse for cruelty. The state digs the hole because it knows the people will fill it with their own bodies, their own savings, their blood and sweat and their own makeshift timber.
Traders and residents scavenge through debris to salvage valuables after fire broke out at Gikomba market in Nairobi on May 18, 2025.
The question is no longer when Gikomba will be “modern.” The question is how much longer the 80 percent of Kenyans who rely on this market can walk on a sole that is being systematically hollowed out by the very men who promised to repair it.
In Gikomba, they know. They have measured the hole in meters, shillings, and decades. They are just waiting for the rest of the nation to feel the ground give way.
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