Dennis Conrad

Refugee/human rights advocate: Humanitarian: Success often comes to those who dare to act. It seldom goes to the timid who are ever afraid of the consequences.

[Dennis Conrad @dlikule]

RT @NCIC_Kenya: The #NCIC CEO @DanielGiti today hosted a delegation from Communities for Africa Network–Kenya for a courtesy call, led by C…

[Rapcha The Sayantist @IAMRAPCHA]

The story of a president who built a stadium but filled two cemeteries

The number of people killed by this regime can fill two cemeteries

Na bado kuna watu wanatumbia "forget about the deaths, hamuoni stadium"

Clowns 🤡 WANTAM ☝🏽

[John-Allan Namu @johnallannamu]

The RSF is welcome in Kenya, but not the Burundian street vendor. A militia that has killed and discriminated on the basis of ones ethnicity and race has the diplomatic red carpet rolled out for its leaders. Yet the scapegoat for a struggling economy is the Burundian street vendor.

[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.

[Dennis Conrad @dlikule]

@samuelwasilwa5 Same 🤣🤣

[Okiya Omtatah Okoiti @OkiyaOmtatah]

Leadership is about vision, integrity, and the will to serve.
Ordinary Kenyans, not wealth or privilege, are the backbone of any true movement for change.
We will prove that a people-powered campaign can inspire hope and deliver a better future for all.

[Gitobu Imanyara @GitobuImanyara]

On this Mashujaa Day I celebrate these fallen shujaas.

[Fabrizio Romano @FabrizioRomano]

🔴⚪️ David Raya, insane goalkeeper.

One more fantastic (double) save after what he did in Premier League against Aston Villa.

[The People’s President @bonifacemwangi]

National Intelligence Service which is headed by Noordin Haji who served six years in the Office of the Director of Public Prosecutions (ODPP) and left the prosecutor’s office without securing a single conviction of any big crooks, has a budget of 46.8 billion shillings. In comparison, two important institutions with bigger payrolls and more responsibilities, have smaller budgets; Prisons with Ksh 32.7 billion, and the Judiciary at Ksh 24.7 billion. Why so much money going to one secretive institution? It’s Noordin’s secret police, running the death squads that have been abducting citizens, and running secret jails across the country. It’s also his budget that is being used to bribe politicians and buy loyalty, and pay online bloggers to malign our reputations.
#FreeBobNjagi #FreeKitengela3

[Gitobu Imanyara @GitobuImanyara]

Raila Odinga's ODM party has, by accepting to join Ruto's collapsing regime, betrayed everything that the Gen Z revolution stands for.
ODM Deputy Party leaders Hassan Ali Joho, Wycliffe Oparanya and
ODM National Chairman
John Mbadi together with their National Assembly Minority Leader Opiyo Wandayi (ODM) think they can slow down or subvert Kenyans' determination to forge ahead and realise the vision and mission of our Constitution. They will fail most miserably. They are traitors.

[Amnesty International @amnesty]

Peaceful protest is a human right.
Peaceful protest is a human right.
Peaceful protest is a human right.
Peaceful protest is a human right.

We must #ProtectTheProtest.

[Gabriel Dolan @GabrielDolan1]

#RutoMustGo Ruto doesn't get it. Establishing an illegal unit to audit the budget while @lawsocietykenya declines. Public want radical changes not the usual time wasting tactics. They know his games and will not be fooled

[waikwa @waikwawanyoike]

Every person should never underestimate the small things they do - can do - for constitutionalism & the rule of law.

They all add up to something.

... and on a lucky day, the sum of the parts shows.

[Shortstuff @weak_spell]

Jameni si muache hata we achieve police reforms before you bow down to the government 😩People were killed, abducted and tortured and no one has been held accountable for this yet. If you think you're going to win in negotiations with the govt I got news for y'all💀

[igiriwM@ 🇰🇪 @Mwirigi]

He thinks that if he squeezes GoK and service provision gets bad he'll blame Gen Z

Excuse me, nani ndio President? Uliomba kazi, ukapewa.

We will still blame Ruto if things stop working! 🤣🤣🤣

[waikwa @waikwawanyoike]

If your President only "reflects" and "concedes" after so many people have died and many more injured...

And after significant tantrums and chest-thumping.

You have no President!

[FERDINAND OMONDI @FerdyOmondi]

Gabriel Oguda has now been held longer than 24 hours.
Incommunicado.
Produce him in court or set him free.
A government that respects the rule of law doesn't operate like a rogue militia.
#FreeOguda.

[Dennis Conrad @dlikule]

#FreeOguda

[Dennis Conrad @dlikule]

#RejectFinanceBill2024

[Lindah Oguttu aka Mtu ya mjengo @lindahoguttu]

President @WilliamsRuto said he will talk to Gen Z's. Interior CS @KindikiKithure said they are free to protest and gave guidelines. So who is abducting Kenyans in the dead of the night? @NPSOfficial_KE is mute on the abductions. This is not it guys.
#RejectFinancebill2024

[Lindah Oguttu aka Mtu ya mjengo @lindahoguttu]

President @WilliamsRuto said he will talk to Gen Z's. Interior CS @KindikiKithure said they are free to protest and gave guidelines. So who is abducting Kenyans in the dead of the night? @NPSOfficial_KE is mute on the abductions. This is not it guys.
#RejectFinancebill2024