Sakaja's Sh100m hawker relocation plan falls flat

Hawking in the Central Business District (CBD) has been a headache whose right prescription is yet to be found, decades later.

Several attempts, among them building closed and established open markets away from the CBD, have not cured the hawking problem.

Even when authorities manage to clear off the street hawkers, they troop back, and the numbers keep rising with the presence of new entrants. 

The situation is compounded by the fact that there seems to lack of effective by-laws on the hawking problem blamed for making the capital city untidy and insecure.

Over the years, the defiant hawkers who engaged in running battles with city askaris deployed to push them out of town.

The crackdown is understandable because virtually every street, road, lane, or pedestrian walkway is occupied by hawkers who display all sorts of wares, including clothes, shoes, phones, electronic gadgets, toys, and even foodstuffs.

From dawn to dusk, the small-scale traders troop in the CBD where they block streets, litter garbage and and disrupt legitimate businesses.

On his campaign trail in 2022, Governor Johnson Sakaja pledged to relocate the hawkers from Uptown. In his manifesto, he said his administration would not kick hawkers from their bases of operations but instead allocate them places to operate from.

However, his resolve appears to be running into headwinds. Sakaja has tried all efforts to solve the hawking problem, and none of them seem to have achieved the intended results.

Last year, his administration unveiled a plan to decongest the Central Business District (CBD) by moving hawkers to the backstreet lanes where they were expected to operate. 

In the plan, the county embarked on marking some spaces for hawkers on some lanes from Moi Avenue towards downtown, all the way to the bus station.

The exercise included putting up roofs on some lanes to cushion the traders during the rainy season at Sh100 million, which was approved during the 2023/24 Financial year.

Sakaja said that the county had doubled the amount to ensure backstreet lanes are clean, lined up with secure stalls complete with daycares to cater for breastfeeding mothers. 

While the plan was supposed to accommodate about 5,000 hawkers in the city centre, only a handful moved to the backstreet lanes.

Each stall with yellow and green stripes was restricted to a 3-by-3-foot space on designated clear pathways for pedestrian traffic. Creation of stalls in the backstreet was viewed as a short-term solution to twin hawking and congestion challenges in the city centre.

But one year down the line, the project seems to have collapsed after traders resisted moving, claiming the county government was moving them to dark alleys.

The abandoned project has turned into a nuisance. Stalls along Dubois Lane and Kenneth Matiba Road have been converted into places for answering nature calls. During the night and early morning hours, people walk into the stalls to either urinate or excrete - a scenario that, apart from posing health risks, is making the CBD untidy. 

The unfriendly environment is forcing some of the traders operating within to vacate, citing unhealthy working conditions.

They describe the project as a white elephant with only two out of 27 backstreet lanes still functional. 

"The project collapsed because the county did not involve the right people; they just came up with the plan without understanding the ground," observes Francis Gachanja, secretary general of the hawkers’ association within the city centre.

A spot check by The Nairobian established that some of the stalls have been vandalised as a result of neglect. 

Peter Njoroge, a trader, while expressing disappointment, says the project did not take off as expected because the office of the MCA and that of the governor have been reluctant to address the challenges that the traders are facing.

“Because it is the County Assembly that appropriates the money for such projects, sets aside and gives them to the office of the governor to implement the project and the MCA to oversight if what they passed has been implemented on the ground,” explains Njoroge.

He regrets the turn of events, accusing the county of a lack of commitment. The project faced another obstacle after matatu operators who utilised the marked lanes as termini refused to leave some of the spaces.

Apart from battling street families, the traders have engaged in numerous fights with matatu crews who accuse them of encroaching on their territory. 

Another trader, Silas Kimani, says that in some spaces on the backstreet lanes have been grabbed by some people who erect metallic gates on both ends of the lanes so as to block those using them as toilets.

“Dubois, Luthuli and Tavate lanes, for instance, have such barriers that tell you there is a mess because for someone to erect a gate on such lanes, it must go through the approval by City Hall,” says Kimani.

The man believes the project is simply being sabotaged not to succeed, and some of those behind the disruption sit within City Hall. 

“Those behind the vandalism are people within City Hall; that is purely sabotage, and some of the materials are lying at Central Police Station, “adds Kimani.

The stalling of the project has thrown the county government back to the drawing board over the hawk problem blamed for general lawlessness within the CBD. For decades, hawking has been a hot potato for successive regimes that have failed to find a lasting solution.

The first Governor, Evans Kidero, tried in vain to eject the hawkers. A frustrated Dr Kidero at one point attributed the hawking headache to powerful cartels within City Hall, who allegedly incite the small-scale traders to remain in the city centre. 

His successor, Miki Sonko, faced the same challenge that persists to date. And now in his mid-term, Sakaja has been equally blowing hot and cold over the issue. 

In his first attempt after the elections, City Hall conducted a crackdown targeting traders in the CBD, where the population keeps swelling despite the establishment of new additional markets in residential areas.

“There will be no hawking on the road. Nairobi will be a city of order and dignity. There will be no hawking on roads, and that is not negotiable,” vowed Sakaja. The crackdown, however, lasted for only two days following stiff resistance.

Since then, traders have been swarming the CBD, blocking roads and pavements, inconveniencing pedestrians, contributing to garbage problems, and obstructing licensed business entrances.

With options narrowing, Sakaja hopes proposals to construct 20 new markets in conjunction with the national government will ease the problem.

Ironically, even as his administration is grappling with the hawkers' problem, some complete markets remain unoccupied due to fighting among local leaders and traders over who deserves to be allocated space. 

Some of the completed markets include Mwariro, Westlands, Karandini, Gikomba, and Kangundo Road, which remain unoccupied three years later after completion. 

Sidebar One: Why Atwoli asked Sakaja to eject hawkers from CBD

During the 2025 Labour Day Celebrations, Cotu Secretary General Francis Atwoli complained about the filth in the capital city, choked under heaps of garbage amid the hawking menace. 

According to the COTU boss, Nairobi had lost its allure due to twin problems of hawking and haphazard disposal of waste. He urged President William Ruto to intervene and restore sanity. 

“I want to appeal to you (President) that this city belongs to all of us and it must reflect other cities of the world,” said Atwoli, decrying that Nairobi was lagging behind African cities like Kigali, Abuja, and Accra.

“We cannot remain in a filthy city, a city of riders, hawkers, matatus. When somebody arrives at the JKIA, Mombasa Road is full of hawkers depicting the picture of poverty of Kenya,” he noted. 

Pointing out: “This must come to an end, and we are appealing to the national government to team up with the county government and make sure that we have a city.”

The veteran unionist proposed re-painting of buildings and repair of walkways as one way of sprucing up the capital city. 

He challenged Sakaja to ensure the city restored its lost glory. A section of city MPs recently put the governor under pressure over the matter.  

According to the lawmakers, their working relationship with Sakaja was poor, and as a result, it had become extremely difficult to implement development projects aimed at giving the capital city a facelift.

In a bid to decongest the city, the county government has ordered small-scale traders to operate from backstreet lanes from Monday to Saturday between 4 pm and 10 pm.

Sidebar Two: Unsuccessful push by MCAs for hawkers to be registered 

In November 2024, Nairobi MCAs passed a motion directing the Nairobi County government to relocate street traders to designated backstreets and regulated pop-up markets.

The motion, moved by Umoja 1 MCA Mark Mugambi, was supposed to guide the county administration to allocate designated market zones and register hawkers.

Mugambi argued that unregulated street vending has become a major hurdle to city mobility, lamenting that enforcement officers regularly exploit traders by collecting bribes and harassing them.

"As a capital city, for a long time, we have failed to ensure that the vendors are regulated. We want to ensure that they operate within a regulated environment and that there can be mobility within our city," he said.

Mugambi's motion was anchored on the Nairobi City County Pop-Up Markets and Street Vending Act of 2019, a law created to regulate hawkers but has yet to be fully implemented.

Under the Act, all street vendors must secure a license from the county government. The law also calls for a database of vendors, tracking their locations, contact information, and types of goods sold.