Something ugly has been unfolding on the streets of Nairobi, and it did not start by accident. When President William Ruto issued a directive on September 2 restricting foreigners from certain forms of small-scale trade, it did not just set off a bureaucratic process \u2014 it lit a fuse, and ordinary Kenyans, some of them looking for a reason, took it as permission to confront, intimidate and attack foreign traders, particularly Burundians, seizing their goods and threatening their livelihoods. The Law Society of Kenya has now stepped in with a blunt message: the government’s directive needs a fundamental rethink, and the violence on the ground must stop immediately.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
The LSK’s position is not a defence of lawbreaking \u2014 it is a defence of the rule of law itself, and that distinction matters enormously. The society acknowledges, without hesitation, that the Kenyan government has every right to regulate trade, enforce immigration rules and shield local businesses from unfair competition; nobody serious is disputing that. What LSK disputes, forcefully, is the manner in which this directive has been framed and enforced, arguing that it runs directly against Kenya’s own Constitution and the binding commitments the country freely accepted when it joined the East African Community, commitments that include the free movement of people, labour and services, the right of establishment, and a clear prohibition on discrimination among citizens of EAC Partner States.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
The LSK draws a sharp, unambiguous line that the government appears to have blurred: enforcement must be triggered by a specific, identifiable violation \u2014 trading without a licence, breaching immigration conditions, committing a documented offence \u2014 and not simply by the passport a person carries. “The action must be based on the particular violation, not simply on where the person comes from,” the society said, and that sentence should be read slowly, because it exposes exactly what has gone wrong here. When enforcement becomes nationality-based rather than conduct-based, it stops being law enforcement and starts being discrimination, and Kenya’s Constitution, with its guarantees of equality before the law, human dignity and fair administrative action, does not permit that \u2014 not for citizens, and not for anyone within Kenya’s borders.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
The street-level violence makes this even more urgent and more damning. Reports of Kenyans physically confronting foreign traders, confiscating goods and deciding on the spot who has the right to operate a business represent a collapse of the basic idea that enforcement belongs to authorised institutions, not to mobs acting on a perceived government nod. LSK is unequivocal: no government directive gives any private citizen the authority to assault another person or seize their property, and the government must now actively protect those at risk, investigate every reported attack and communicate clearly that vigilante enforcement is itself a crime.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
The government’s response has been a mixture of damage control and genuine diplomatic engagement \u2014 Foreign Affairs PS Korir Sing’oei visited the Burundian Embassy, apologised over harassment reports, convened a high-level meeting with Burundi’s Ambassador, UNHCR and IOM, and announced a Joint Task Team to handle emerging issues, while police charged one man, Kevin Odiwuor Otieno, with hate speech and ethnic contempt, and arrested four others for extorting foreign nationals in Nyamakima. These are steps, but they are reactive steps, and the LSK’s demand goes further: review the directive itself, give any trade restrictions a clear legal basis, and apply them fairly, individually and without discrimination. Kenya built its regional standing on the promise of East African integration. Right now, it is putting that promise to the test \u2014 and the test is not going well.<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Something ugly has been unfolding on the streets of Nairobi, and it did not start by accident. When President William Ruto issued a directive on September 2 restricting foreigners from certain forms of small-scale trade, it did not just set off a bureaucratic process \u2014 it lit a fuse, and ordinary Kenyans, some of them […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":4246,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_uag_custom_page_level_css":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[33,16],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4247","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-trending","category-world"],"blocksy_meta":{"styles_descriptor":{"styles":{"desktop":"","tablet":"","mobile":""},"google_fonts":[],"version":8}},"yoast_head":"\n