How Burundians became the face of Ruto's foreign trader crackdown

As late as Friday night, the Burundian Embassy compound along Denis Pritt Road in Nairobi has sheltered hundreds of nationals caught in the uncertainty of Kenya's decision to crack down on foreign-owned small businesses.

Bedding, luggage and personal belongings lie piled within and outside the Chancery, telling the desperate situation of the majority of the Burundians who have sought refuge at the embassy where they have been sleeping there for days now.

The conditions, according to governance expert Stella Agara, amount to an indignity, with inadequate sanitation, blocked toilets and people forced to live beside accumulated waste while begging for food.

What was initially framed by the Government as an effort to reclaim small businesses and jobs for Kenyans has therefore acquired a very different human face — that of Burundian migrants scrambling for safety.

Yet there is an important question at the centre of the unfolding crisis: How did Burundians become the primary targets of public anger when President William Ruto did not specifically single them out in his directive against foreign traders?

Ruto's remarks were broadly directed at foreigners operating small businesses and hawking goods in Kenya, with the Government insisting that Kenyans should be given priority in economic opportunities.

The debate has, however, increasingly come to revolve around Burundians, many of whom operate small enterprises such as food kiosks, salons, barber shops and roadside vending businesses.

For some Burundians, the President's remarks were interpreted by locals as an order to forcefully drive them out, putting them in a precarious state.

Hakizimana Aman, 31, who sold groundnuts in Ruiru, told The Saturday Standard that he could no longer risk remaining in Kenya despite having valid documents.

“I cannot continue staying, even if I have documents,” he said. “I was thrown out of my house with everything, including my passport.”

Many who spoke to this publication since the tension arose lamented having been robbed, and viciously attacked in the rented houses, including in the dead of night.

Aman said he had slept at the embassy since Sunday and was surviving on occasional assistance.

“We are only asking for documents and help to get home,” he said.

Meshack, a Burundian who has lived in Nairobi for about four months while working as a boda boda rider, said several of his compatriots had been harassed and their businesses targeted, prompting them to seek refuge at the embassy.

The irony is that Burundians were not singled out and/or targeted for the economic concerns that informed the President's directive.

Governance expert Stella Agara believes the  Burundians' unexpected position at the centre of the storm may partly have been created by the way the public debate evolved.

She says Gen Z activists, while highlighting the need to protect jobs and businesses for Kenyans, also drew attention to services commonly offered by Burundians — including uji, coffee, mandazi and barbering.

“That is why they were highlighting uji, coffee, mandazis and the haircut that they normally get from them in the barber shops,” she says.

But, Agara argues, this may have unintentionally narrowed the debate to Burundians and made them more visible targets.

“There is a possibility that this may have trivialised the subject and now narrowed it down to the Burundians,” she says.

The ambiguity of the presidential directive, she adds, may have compounded the problem.

“If he had said the police should go for them, people would not be sending them away,” Agara says. “But because he said, ‘deal with them’, now everybody feels like they have a right to chase the Burundians away.”

This is where a political pronouncement collides with the reality of enforcement.

Agara says individuals who may have had personal disputes with foreign traders could interpret the directive as permission to settle old scores.

“People who have a small vendetta with individuals who have started small businesses and are succeeding around their vicinity decided that they are going to take it out on them through the President's directive,” she says.

The unfolding events have also exposed what analysts describe as a failure of Government institutions to properly manage immigration and foreign labour in the first place.

If some foreigners are working without the appropriate permits, overstaying visas or engaging in activities outside the terms of their entry into Kenya, Agara argues, the responsibility lies with the State to detect and address those violations.

“They did not fly and land like mosquitoes,” she says of the foreigners in Kenya. “They travelled into this nation through known boundaries, known borders.”

The question, therefore, is why immigration authorities allowed people who entered Kenya under particular conditions to remain long enough to establish businesses and livelihoods.

“If they know when this Burundian came in, if they know this person came in on holiday, and their holiday was supposed to last 10 days, but they decided to stay the entire 90 days that they are allowed to stay, why didn't they then follow up with this individual and organise for them to leave before they settled down and became residents of this nation?” Agara asks.

Prof Peter Kagwanja, a governance and political analyst, argues that the numbers alone raise questions about why the Burundian community has become the centre of a national conversation.

“Roadside pronouncement cannot be a virtue, it's a vice,” he says, noting that the number of Burundian nationals in Kenya is relatively small compared with other foreign communities.

“Burundian nationals are about 16,000. We have more Ethiopians than Burundians. You cannot talk about such a hidden number and make it a national issue. Unless there is a hidden agenda.”

Kenya hosts sizeable communities from Somalia, Tanzania, Uganda, Ethiopia and the Democratic Republic of Congo, among others. Kagwanja's argument is that a crackdown based on nationality risks reducing a complicated question of immigration, employment and business regulation into a simplistic contest between Kenyans and foreigners.

“We have more than a million Somalis... We have Tanzanians as well. We have Congolese... It is not everything that is foreign that is negative,” he says.

Even before the ink dried on Ruto's directive, experts had similarly warned that a sweeping crackdown without proper fact-finding could produce consequences beyond its intended target.

“Without a very targeted approach, it could lead to unintended consequences of profiling and business disruption,” observed Ken Gichinga, Chief Economist at Mentoria Economics.

Sometime in June, Dagoretti North MP Beatrice Elachi raised concerns about foreign workers taking up jobs in sectors such as construction and security, arguing that some employers prefer foreigners because they accept lower wages.

“I can see some people have taken up many jobs in the construction industry. I am about to disrupt that situation and tell them, ‘You cannot come to Kenya and take jobs at KSh400 a day when Kenyans are paid KSh700 and above. That cannot continue,’” she said.

Elachi has maintained that Kenya welcomes foreigners who comply with the law, but not practices that undermine Kenyan workers.

The challenge, therefore, is how to enforce that principle without turning legitimate economic grievances into xenophobia.

Agara believes the President was attempting to address a wider problem involving foreign traders from countries such as China, Somalia and Ethiopia, but failed to communicate the policy through the institutions responsible for implementing it.

She argues that Chinese traders, in particular, occupy a much more consequential position in Kenya's trading ecosystem, from importation and wholesale distribution to retail and hawking.

“If he had the audacity, this is something that between the Ministry of Foreign Affairs can be addressed with China,” she says.

Kagwanja similarly believes Kenya would be having a fundamentally different conversation if the President had taken the issue through Cabinet, developed a clear policy paper and subjected it to public debate.

“We would be having a totally different conversation if President Ruto went to his Cabinet and came up with a paper on how to respond to all those who are within our borders who are not Kenyan citizens, irrespective of whether they are Europeans,” he says.

Such a framework, he argues, would provide predictability for foreigners while protecting the interests of Kenyan workers and businesses.

It would also prevent one nationality from becoming the unintended face of a policy that was supposed to address a much broader economic question.

“The purpose of governance is not to be dramatic about things,” Kagwanja says.