Kenya’s Ruto Orders Crackdown on Foreign Traders

Medium Enterprise traders at State House, Nairobi, on September 2, 2026 to order foreign nationals engaged in hawking and small scale trading to close their businesses from September 7. He said Kenya’s efforts to attract investment were never meant to open the door for hawkers to arrive from abroad and compete with locals.

He referenced complaints of foreigners selling items such as duvets and other merchandise directly to consumers and undercutting Kenyan traders in the informal sector. Ruto also pushed for the acceleration of the Local Content Bill 2025, currently before Parliament, which would legally bar foreigners from certain trading activities. He has also tasked Majority Leader Kimani Ichung’wah and Trade Cabinet Secretary Lee Kinyanjui with fast tracking it, while administrative measures begin ahead of the law being passed.

Though much of the public anger driving this has focused on Chinese traders in markets such as Gikomba, Nyamakima, and Kamukunji, the language of the directive and the Bill is broad enough to catch other foreign nationals too, including Tanzanians, Ugandans, and other Africans who operate small shops and hawk goods in Nairobi and other parts of the country.

This is not unprecedented. Nairobi MP Charles Njagua was arrested in 2019 and again in 2025 for threatening Tanzanian and Ugandan traders over the same grievance, prompting formal diplomatic protests from Dar es Salaam. The statement follows years of simmering resentment among Kenyan traders, who have also taken the government to court over the growing presence of Chinese owned companies allegedly undercutting local prices, and comes against a backdrop of persistently high youth unemployment and a sense that ordinary hustlers have been squeezed out of their own markets.

History suggests immigrants and foreign traders are often among the first to suffer when governments come under pressure over their own failures. South Africa offers the most recent example. Waves of attacks on foreign owned shops, some following remarks by a Zulu monarch linking migrants to crime, left Kenyan traders among those counting heavy losses from looting and destroyed premises. Economic frustration builds and political leaders struggle to fix the underlying causes, so a visible, relatively powerless minority becomes the target. Kenya has its own history of this, from mob attacks on Somali traders in Eastleigh after security incidents to the repeated targeting of Tanzanian and Ugandan hawkers in Nairobi’s markets.

Ruto’s own position adds weight to this reading. A TIFA survey conducted in May 2026 found only 29% of Kenyans expressed trust in him, compared with 68% who had little or no trust, giving him a net rating of minus 39%, with taxation policy scoring an even worse minus 67%.

Nearly four years after promising a bottom up economic transformation for boda boda riders and small traders, many Kenyans feel the opposite has happened because heavy new taxes, removed subsidies, and a debt burden forced painful fiscal choices. Ruto himself insists inflation has eased and the Shilling has strengthened, and points to Kenya avoiding default when several peer countries did not, but these claims do not correlate with the popular opinion that everyday life has become harder.

Announcing a crackdown on foreign hawkers is a low cost way to appear responsive to ordinary traders without addressing the deeper structural problems of debt servicing, taxation, and stagnant real incomes. It gives Kenyans a visible enemy and a swift remedy, while the government continues wrestling with Eurobond repayments and IMF conditions in the background. If enforcement becomes heavy handed or spills into vigilante action, as has happened before with Somali and Tanzanian traders, Kenya risks sliding towards the kind of xenophobic violence that has repeatedly occurred in South Africa.