Nairobi County arrests hawkers in push to restore sanity

Hawkers go about their business in the city. The county has embarked on an operation to clear the streets of hawkers. [Photo: File, Standard]

The city county will today start a swoop on street families in an operation that has also seen around 2,000 hawkers arrested.

The Director of Operations at the City Inspectorate Department Peter Mbaya said yesterday that over the past two weeks an operation had begun to first tame hawkers, then street children and finally the matatu industry.

“We have a work plan to bring order into Nairobi… We first started with controlling hawkers, tomorrow we want to remove street families and then streamline the matatu sector,” said Mr Mbaya.

He said street families would be moved temporarily to Joseph Kang’ethe Centre in Kibera and the Kayole Rehabilitation Centre. Mbaya admitted flushing hawkers from the city was proving a headache and they were now focused instead on reducing them to a “sizeable” number through massive arrests.

“The best way to control them is to take them to court where they face numerous fines,” he said.

Financial burden

He said the charges ranged from Sh1 to Sh10,000 with the hawkers being slapped with numerous charges in order for the fines to cripple them financially, adding that 2000 hawkers had been arrested so far on the ongoing operation.

Mbaya estimated that there were 15,000 hawkers operating in the Central Business District. He dismissed claims that running battles between hawkers and police would resurface in the CBD saying the city was “already in talks” with the hawkers for them to clear town.

On Wednesday, county officers impounded a huge amount of their wares as they ran away from arrest. He, however, declined to comment on whether the county was committed to relocating them to another area.

Governor Mike Sonko had last week devised a plan to relocate hawkers from the CBD to Mwariro Market in Kariokor. Locals have, however, been hostile to the idea. Last month, Sonko also ordered hawkers to operate in the CBD starting from 2pm – a plan that has failed.

Matatu threat

Mbaya further said he had opened talks with players in the matatu sector so that they could control themselves. He said matatus had threatened to stage demonstrations, but the county was willing to bring in ‘breakdown vehicles’ to remove any matatus blocking city roads.

He added the county had started to build terminals outside the CBD to serve as holding areas for matatus, citing an example of the one at the Globe Cinema Roundabout serving as a holding place for matatus plying the Githurai route. In September, Governor Sonko suspended a ban on matatus accessing the CBD.

He instead directed that as a temporary measure to stem the traffic menace, matatus would not double-park, obstruct, make unnecessary U-turns, cause noise pollution and block business premises.

Mbaya added that in his drive to bring order into the city, close to 1,000 arrests daily were taking place and 250 in the central business district.