On the afternoon of Wednesday, September 2, President William Ruto stood before micro, small and medium enterprise (MSME) traders at State House, Nairobi, and drew a line that, within days, filled embassy corridors and increased demand for cross-border travel.
Small-scale trade, he said, was not a field in which foreigners and Kenyans should compete.
How Ruto’s directive became a scramble
From the following Monday, September 7, authorities were to act. The wording was blunt.
“From next week, all traders doing those small businesses should close them.”
He added that Kenya had not rebuilt investor confidence so that hawkers could come to Nairobi.
“It cannot be that a person comes from China or elsewhere to be a hawker or open a small shop.”
Trade Cabinet Secretary Lee Kinyanjui, then in Addis Ababa, was told to begin the crackdown on his return. Majority Leader Kimani Ichung’wah and Industry Principal Secretary Juma Mukhwana were instructed to hurry the Local Content Bill, 2025, through Parliament and close what Ruto called loopholes.
He did not publish a schedule of prohibited trades.
Kenya, he said, wanted capital that expands production and creates jobs. It did not want foreigners occupying the lowest rungs of the informal market, the same rungs on which millions of Kenyans survive.
That is what was said. What many foreign traders heard was an eviction order with a five-day deadline.
By Monday, the Burundian embassy in Nairobi was surrounded. Hundreds of citizens queued for emergency travel papers the mission had begun issuing at no cost. Some arrived with suitcases. Others carried mattresses. A few said they could not afford the journey and asked for more time.
Several people in the queue said neighbours had already threatened them after the President’s remarks circulated.
The United Nations refugee agency puts the number of Burundian refugees and asylum seekers in Kenya at about 16,000. How many of them, or of other Burundians who are not registered as refugees, live off street vending and small shops is not known.
What is known is that many in Nairobi sell used clothes, coffee and household goods, the exact trades Ruto had named as reserved for Kenyans.
Alexis Ntinanirwa, who heads the Association of Burundians living in Kenya, told the BBC Great Lakes service that he was unhappy with the decision and that the fallout would not stop at one community. Kenyans, he noted, also run small businesses in Burundi, Tanzania and Uganda.
Burundi’s Foreign Minister, Edouard Bizimana, went further. Kenyans in Burundi, he said, were living peacefully. If “hate speech against Burundi” continued, “things will certainly change.” Kenya, he added, was responsible for the lives of Burundians on its soil.
He convened an urgent meeting with East African Community representatives and asked Kenya’s ambassador to carry those concerns home.
The episode then took another turn. More than 600 Burundians trying to leave through the Isebania crossing into Tanzania were stranded when Tanzanian officers refused them entry due to incomplete papers.
An earlier Tanzanian crackdown on foreign informal traders had already shown how quickly one country’s enforcement becomes another country’s border problem.
Kenya changes tune from Monday shutdown to 90 days
Within a week, the official line had changed shape, if not its core demand. Government spokesperson Charles Owino said undocumented East Africans, “specifically Burundian citizens,” should present themselves to their missions for identity registration.
Those in the process would be treated as lawfully present while the paperwork moved. Foreign Affairs Principal Secretary Korir Sing’Oei visited the Burundian embassy, apologised for harassment some nationals had faced, and said security would be tightened in neighbourhoods where they live.
He also insisted the president had not banned documented traders. Anyone with the required permits and licences remained protected.
The State House then announced a 90-day window. Foreign nationals running businesses would have that period to regularise immigration status, work permits, business registration and licences. After it expired, the rules would be “enforced firmly and strictly.” During the window, agencies were told to apply the requirements fairly and without discrimination. No private person, the statement added, had authority to harass or interfere with foreign nationals or their shops.
On Thursday, September 10, Prime Cabinet Secretary Musalia Mudavadi briefed the diplomatic corps. Kenya, he said, had not imposed a blanket ban on foreign small-scale traders.
The aim was to keep participation consistent with the EAC (East African Community) Common Market Protocol and Kenyan law. The approach was “more regulatory rather than discriminatory.” Kenya remained open to small and large trade by foreigners who met immigration, permit, registration and licensing rules.
Partner-state citizens living in the country should obey Kenyan law in the same way Kenyans abroad are expected to obey the law where they work. Anyone who threatened foreign traders would face the full effect of the law.
That sequence – a public order to close, a rush for the exit, an apology, then a compliance deadline – explains why the 90-day period exists. The original timetable was politically explosive and diplomatically expensive.
It also collided with the fact that Kenya does not have a clean register of who is trading informally, on what papers, and from which country. A Monday shutdown would never be administrable without chaos.
A registration window bought some time and let Nairobi tell Kampala, Bujumbura, Dodoma and Kigali that this was enforcement, not expulsion.
Uganda moved quickly on its own side. The High Commission in Nairobi, together with the National Identification and Registration Authority (NIRA), began pushing citizens to obtain national IDs so they could then seek Kenyan permits.
NIRA said about 5,000 Ugandans used those identification services in Nairobi, a figure officials described as low against the population that should be reached.
“If you need to get a licence to operate, please do. Why are you hiding underground?” NSSF managing director Patrick Ayota asked.
Who is actually in Kenya’s informal market?
There is no official census of foreign hawkers and small retailers in Kenya. That absence is part of the story.
President Ruto’s meeting followed complaints from Kenyan MSME traders, including protests that had also touched on tax and import-duty grievances. The government says some foreigners are using tourist status to work or run businesses in Kenya illegally.
The trade ministry later said the order was aimed at foreigners operating without work permits. That is a narrower target than The State House language suggested, and it is the version the government now prefers.
What the data do show is the scale of the sector Kenyans are fighting over. According to the Kenya National Bureau of Statistics, MSMEs employ more than 14.9 million people, account for roughly 30% – 34% of GDP, and make up more than 90% of private enterprises. Informal work is where most new jobs appear.
In that world, a stall that undercuts on price is not an abstract labour-market problem. It is a neighbour who still has customers when yours have walked on.
Foreign small traders sit inside that same economy. They buy from the same wholesalers and hire, in some cases, Kenyan assistants. They also occupy niches such as second-hand clothes, certain food lines, particular household goods that Kenyan vendors say have become harder to hold. The government treats that as displacement. Critics treat it as ordinary market competition dressed up as a nationality problem.
Refugees complicate the picture further. Kenya hosts around 870,000 refugees and asylum seekers. About 120,000 live in Nairobi and other towns. World Bank figures cited after the directive suggest roughly 37% of urban refugees may be working, while only about 1% hold a work permit.
The Refugees Act, 2021, gives recognised refugees a right to engage in employment, enterprise and trade. The Shirika plan, a landmark initiative launched by President Ruto in March 2025, is supposed to move camps toward self-reliance. A crackdown that does not distinguish a recognised refugee with a legal right to trade from an undocumented hawker on an expired visitor pass will hit both. Aid cuts have already pushed more refugee households toward work or nothing.
Between documented and undocumented foreign traders, the undocumented group is almost certainly larger in the informal tier.
What the Kenyan law asks of a foreign trader
Kenyan immigration law is not silent. A foreign national who wants to work, trade or run a business needs authorisation. An eTA or visa-free entry is permission to arrive, but not to sell. County business licences and company or business-name registration sit on top of that.
The permit that matches independent trade is Class G: specific trade, business or consultancy. Applicants must show company documents, tax compliance and, crucially, proof of capital of at least $100,000 US dollars. Processing costs $154, while issuance is $1,900 a year.
EAC citizens are charged nothing for those fees, but they are not excused from the capital test or from registration. A later Class R route was introduced for EAC nationals as a simplified, fee-free permit. It still requires an application. It is not a street-corner waiver.
That is why the 90-day programme may regularise some people and fail others. A Ugandan shopkeeper who can produce an ID, incorporate a business and show capital can, in principle, come into the system.
A Burundian refugee selling second-hand clothes from a tarp, or a young man who entered on a visitor pass and never left, cannot conjure $100,000 because a presidential deadline has been extended.
The Local Content Bill is not quite the same instrument
Ruto tied the crackdown to the Local Content Bill, 2025, sponsored by Laikipia Woman Representative Jane Kagiri.
He told traders the bill would, by law, name businesses foreigners should not do in Kenya.
The draft, as analysed by lawyers, is broader and, in some ways, different. It is aimed mainly at foreign companies in services and infrastructure. It would require at least 80% of the workforce to be Kenyan, including at management level, and at least 60% local sourcing of specified goods and services where standards are met.
The Cabinet Secretary could extend coverage by regulation. It is a local-content statute for firms, not a street-trading code. Nothing in the published analysis reads like a schedule that says “hawking is reserved.”
That gap matters.
The EAC problem Kenya cannot talk past
Kenya is a partner state of the EAC. The Common Market Protocol provides for free movement of workers and a right of establishment for self-employed persons, with a rule against discrimination on grounds of nationality, subject to the Community’s own instruments and to national law.
Partner states have always kept the right to regulate entry, public order and the conditions of work. They have not always agreed where regulation ends, and a ban begins.
The East Africa Law Society warned that measures aimed at foreign small traders and hawkers could damage confidence in the Common Market.
Mudavadi’s later language – compliance with the protocol, no blanket ban – was an answer to that warning as much as to the queues in Nairobi. The legal argument Kenya now makes is that it is enforcing documentation, not nationality.
The political argument it made on September 2 was that some jobs are for Kenyans. Those two sentences can live in the same press release.
They do not live as easily in a market stall when the person being asked for papers is Burundian, and the person asking is not. Reciprocity is not a theory. Kenyans trade and work in Uganda, Tanzania, Rwanda and Burundi. Tanzania ran its own campaign against foreign informal traders last year.
Bizimana’s warning was the unvarnished version of a thought many diplomats will not put on paper: if Nairobi treats East Africans as guests who have overstayed a privilege, Bujumbura and others can treat Kenyans the same way. Ntinanirwa said as much. So did civil society groups that called the episode economic scapegoating.
Competition, contribution and the fear around both
The government’s case is straightforward. Youth unemployment is high. Small trade requires little capital. If foreigners occupy that space, Kenyan traders lose the first rung.
Foreign investment is welcome when it builds factories, not when it stands in the same queue for customers as a hawker from Eastlands.
The other side is also straightforward, and it does not require sentiment. Foreign small traders are already inside supply chains. They rent. They pay for goods. They keep certain lines of merchandise moving. Pull them out quickly, and two things can happen at once: a Kenyan vendor may gain a pitch, and a buyer may face a thinner market or a higher price.
Harassment is the part the government now says it will not tolerate. Reports after September 2 included threats in residential areas, fear of xenophobia, and people leaving even after the 90-day window was announced.
Nyamughisha Rwanganira, a Burundian businessman operating on the outskirts of Nairobi in Embakasi, said he shut down his shop shortly after the declaration.
“I rent a shop and employ four Kenyans. I make barbecue meat skewers, which they then sell around the area. That period was particularly difficult, as I closed the shop out of fear of xenophobia. I earned nothing during that time, and my employees were affected too.
Some of my countrymen returned home.”
Sing’Oei’s apology and the warning against vigilante enforcement were admissions that the first message had slipped the state’s hands.
A joint task team involving Kenya, Burundi, UNHCR and IOM was set up to handle regularisation and any returns of Burundian nationals.
When the 90 days run out
The window opened in the second week of September. Firm enforcement is what the government has promised at the other end.
What “firm” means will decide whether this remains a documentation drive or becomes the closure order traders first thought they heard.
If agencies use the period to issue identity papers, distinguish refugees from other migrants, and put EAC nationals onto Class R or an equivalent that informal traders can actually obtain, the crisis may settle into the dull work of permits.
If the only legal landing place is a Class G investment test built for people with $100,000, then December will look like September with better letterhead. People like Rwanganira will leave, go underground, or stand in another queue at another embassy. Kenya can protect local businesses with already available tools including licences, tax compliance, immigration status, the Refugees Act, and county by-laws.
President Ruto said Kenya had not built investor confidence for hawkers. The weeks since September 2 have shown a different kind of confidence problem: whether East Africans, who already live here, can trust an order given in one register and walked back in another, and whether Kenyans trading across the same borders should expect the courtesy Nairobi is now asking of its neighbours.
