Apondi Todd

Rachumbi Apondi Todd

[EMPRESS🇰🇪 @LensEmpress]

Crowds gather early as Gen BabuOwino leads Linda Mwananchi forces across the city. Only he matches the energy once seen under Baba. He stands as the Incoming 047 Governor today.
Jacaranda Bedroom
#LindaMwananchiNairobi.

[I am Chege @_James041]

History written in blood can never be erased by history written in ink.

[Mark_mwai @Mark_wa_mwai]

Chasing the burundian because he is poor and letting the somali rich fams in eastleigh who clearly can't speak simple swahili stay?let's focus on taking the government home first,leave good people alone...Africa needs to be united!!

[dennis ombachi OLY @ombachi13]

If you’re easily incited to hate on fellow Africans, you also can be easily turned against your own neighbors, communities and tribes.

Politics of division doesn’t start and end with tribalism.

[Dr. Michael Abiodun @MichaelAbiodun_]

This is the truth and Kenyans need to hear it raw.

A Burundian selling coffee on River Road is not why you are broke. A Congolese woman selling vitenges in Eastleigh is not why your rent is up 40%.

Your government taxed your bread, taxed your fuel, taxed your data, borrowed $1bn every 2 months and calls it development. Then points you to the foreigner so you forget to point at State House.

An African cannot be a foreigner in Africa. We said Pan-Africanism when Nkrumah said it. You don't become South Africa chasing Somalis in the name of jobs.

Chase Ruto. Leave that Burundian brother alone.

[WILLIE OEBA @WillieOeba]

Tukiongea ukweli Eastleigh na Donholm kuna very many illegal immigrants

Some ata kwa butchery & they can’t speak Swahili.

But selective justice inasema waburundi ndio shida.

[Silas Nyanchwani @nyanchwani]

A few months after leaving the University of Nairobi, I was homeless. What rescued me was not the Kenyan economy. It was a South Sudanese friend from college who took me to Juba to help start a newspaper while he ran a bakery. We rode a Kampala Express bus out of River Road, and I fell in love with Uganda on the way, a country where a man with no money can still have a good evening. That is not true of Nairobi, where the venue is the velvet rope.

The bakery worked. The newspaper did not. Within months I was back in Nairobi, homeless again. Again, a South Sudanese friend picked me up and took me to Northern Bahr el Ghazal, where he employed me for a year alongside many other Kenyans. I earned enough to come home, resume journalism, hijack a girl and start a family. One foreigner's favour to another paid for the next ten years of my life.

On Wednesday at State House, President William Ruto told small-scale traders that foreigners running small businesses should close them within the week. He promised legislation barring foreigners from certain trades. Kenya wants investors who create jobs, he said, not hawkers. The deadline falls today.

I am not neutral on this. I have a career, a marriage and the best decade of my working life because other African countries let a broke Kenyan walk in and work.
The man the president wants to shut down is me, twelve years ago, in somebody else's capital.

Four to five million Kenyans work outside Kenya, by the government's own estimate, more than half of them in other African countries. They are nurses, teachers, hairdressers and hawkers, running precisely the businesses a Ugandan president could close on a Wednesday if he spoke the way ours did. In the twelve months to May 2025, Kenyans abroad sent home Sh931.8 billion, according to a joint KNBS, Central Bank and FSD Kenya household survey. The Central Bank's own 2025 figure, measured differently, is USD 5.04 billion. Either number beats tea, coffee, horticulture and tourism combined.

That is his claim, not mine. He has praised the diaspora at State House for exactly the behaviour he criminalised on Wednesday when other Africans do it here.

The answer to his argument sits twenty minutes from his office. Somalis fleeing the collapse of Siad Barre's state after 1991 ended up in Garissa Lodge, where tenants turned their beds into stalls by day. That is hawking with a mattress. It now holds more than seventy malls and some 25,000 shops, and is estimated to generate between thirty and forty per cent of the tax the Kenya Revenue Authority collects in Nairobi. Governor Johnson Sakaja once told this president, in public, that Eastleigh's economy is larger than Rwanda's. Every part of it began as what he announced he would close on Monday. Foreigners. Small businesses. No permits. The state's contribution was to raid it and deny it building approvals.

We have also measured this properly, on Kenyans. The World Bank and UNHCR study of Kakuma found the camp raised the host region's economic output by 3.4 per cent and local employment by 2.9 per cent, and modelled that letting refugees work and move freely would lift Turkana income per head by around 6 per cent. Not refugee income. Turkana income, in one of the poorest counties in Africa. The World Bank returned this May with the corollary: when aid was cut, host livelihoods fell with refugee incomes, because Turkana and Garissa traders sell into the camp economy.

None of which means the anger is invented. Kenyan traders are being destroyed, and a man losing his corner does not want a lecture. But look at what is destroying him. Credit that costs more than his margin. Cess collected three times on one crate of tomatoes. Cartels controlling imports and market access. A tax net that catches the mama mboga and misses the importer. Close every foreign-owned kiosk in Nairobi on Monday and every one of those is still standing on Tuesday.

The giveaway is Eastleigh's own last trade war. It was Somali shopkeepers shutting their malls in protest at Kenyan hawkers outside, who paid no rent and no licence and undercut them. The real fight in our informal economy is between people carrying overheads and people avoiding them. It has nothing to do with passports. Nationality is simply the version a politician can win without spending money. Fixing credit is slow and makes enemies with lawyers. A crackdown on foreigners is free and makes enemies only of people who cannot vote, ten months before an election.

It also contradicts his own policy. In March 2025 this administration launched the Shirika Plan at this same State House: the end of encampment, identity documents, tax numbers, bank accounts, business permits, and the right to live anywhere in Kenya without a movement pass. Eighteen months later the same president has ordered the people it was designed to bring into the economy to shut their shops. You cannot integrate people on Tuesday and evict them on Wednesday.

He cannot hide behind the public either. Stanford researchers put the question to more than 3,300 Kenyans. Sixty-seven per cent supported refugee work permits and financial inclusion, 69 per cent access to government services, 57 per cent freedom of movement. In July, when a Kenyan man was filmed accusing a Burundian trader of stealing his opportunity, the dominant public reaction was embarrassment. Not that the government cares about public opinion.

I did not arrive at this position cleanly. Those traders bothered me for most of a decade, and what I felt was not an economic judgement. Reporting changed it. The reason so many of them hawk on the streets all over is that we made every legal route impassable. A refugee has the right to work on paper and needs a Class M permit in practice, obtained through a process so slow and costly that law and reality have stopped speaking to each other. That question is before the High Court. Judgment is expected on Tuesday, the day after the president's deadline expires. We forced people into the informal economy and now propose to punish them for being in it.

So make the Class M permit fast and cheap, and informal trading becomes taxed trading. Implement Shirika on its own timetable. Enforce licensing against everyone equally, which is compliance, not nationality. Fix the credit, the cess and the cartels. And in the East African Community, whose free movement protocol we signed, behave as though we meant it.

None of this is charity. We have spent twenty years arguing that Kenyans should be welcome everywhere, and collecting nearly a trillion shillings a year on that argument. We do not get to make it in Doha and Atlanta and then unmake it on River Road because an election is coming.

Somebody's brother in Juba decided that a broke Kenyan with nowhere to sleep was worth a job. Everything I own descends from that decision. On Monday, this country proposes to make the opposite decision, thousands of times over, against people who are exactly who I was.

Eastleigh settled this argument thirty years ago. That we are still having it tells you it was never about economics.

[MÙSAKÙRÙ @musakuru45]

I'm just curious, how does a Burundi guy hawking coffee and mandazi make a kenyan jobless?

[Don Bull @mainandegwa232]

The hate for Burundians is a distraction from the real enemy hurting your economic power....

[Hanifa @Honeyfarsafi]

Goodness 💔💔💔 does Ruto even know what’s he done with his remarks

[African @ali_naka]

Thank you Kenya

[John Mutongoi @johnmtongoi]

Activists have threatened to mobilize Kenyans and Africans across the continent to protest against President William Ruto on Thursday if the government proceeds with its crackdown on foreign small‑scale traders, which has already triggered xenophobic attacks on East African nationals in the country.

[N.D. Egwa🇰🇪 🇵🇸 @Lionsayshello]

I fucking hate Ruto and his satanic tongue

[A concerned Kenyan🇰🇪 @Brian_Collins25]

WAAAAH!!😳😳
Burundian traders to President Ruto: Expect more single mothers in Kenya, we're leaving our wives and kids for you to take care of. We're not paying rent. They conclude by saying that kenyan Gen-Zs are lazy, they can't even sell tea and mandazi.

[Rein @Asamoh_]

Karen county club has adjusted the admission requirements to include a certificate of circumcision. All advocates who want admission must prove they were circumcised by the river side without anesthesia.

[George T. Diano @georgediano]

Anyone who feels threatened by people selling mandazi should seriously examine himself. That's really low of us. The only foreigners we should be talking about are the Chinese & Nigerians.

[KoffeTungu🇰🇪 @Spear_80]

@rebelde_ke I keep repeating, a Burundian or Congolese left his failed country, came to a functional one and saw an opportunity that a lazy ass youth couldn't see and took it, why is he being victimized for his effort?
Kasongo is becoming a danger to the region too with his reckless talk.

[Mzee Kasri @JoyceSabali]

After they are done with the Burundians and sijui Congolese, they will come for you mjaluo who lives in Naivasha , you Kikuyu who lives somewhere in Nandi County, you Taita in Western.
#RutoMustGo

[Aziz Mire @aziz_mire]

Context matters. A Tanzanian Maasai married to a Kenyan and running a kiosk, or a Burundian/Congolese refugee selling coffee, is not the same as a Chinese manufacturer opening retail shops.

Let’s protect Kenyan traders without turning East Africans into 'foreigners.'