On the 5th of October 2026, standing in Kubri Haboba market, the Caretaker Commissioner of Juba County, Hon. Kalisto Lado, told foreign nationals to leave small-scale trade to South Sudanese. He named chapati stalls, boda-boda riding and the sale of tomatoes, onions and charcoal as businesses that should be left to locals. A day later, he clarified that nobody was being expelled and that foreigners remain welcome to invest in wholesale trade, companies and factories.
I take that clarification in good faith. But the core of the directive stands, and the core is the problem. A public official has sorted the people in our markets by passport and told one group that the lowest rungs of the economy are closed to them. I share the Commissioner’s worry about our jobless youth, but I also belong to a people who were sheltered, schooled and treated by the very neighbours now being told to pack up their stalls. My argument is threefold: this measure is unlawful under treaties South Sudan has signed, ungrateful in the light of our history, and self-defeating as an economic policy. It will hurt most the very people it claims to protect.
South Sudan signed the Treaty for the Establishment of the East African Community in April 2016 and deposited its instruments of ratification in Arusha on the 5th of September that same year. Nobody forced us; we had asked to join for years. Article 104 of the Treaty commits Partner States to the free movement of persons, labour and services, and to the rights of establishment and residence for one another’s citizens. Article 8(1)(c) obliges each state to abstain from any measure likely to jeopardise the Community’s objectives, and Article 8(4) gives Community law precedence over similar national law. The Common Market Protocol turns these principles into specific rights. Article 3(2) requires Partner States to observe non-discrimination against nationals of other Partner States on grounds of nationality. Article 13 guarantees the right of establishment and defines it to include the right to take up and pursue economic activities as a self-employed person. A woman from Arua frying chapati in Gudele is a self-employed person pursuing an economic activity; the Protocol expressly protects her. Article 13(5) goes further still: Partner States must remove nationality-based restrictions on establishment and must not introduce new ones.
The Protocol does permit limits, but only on grounds of public policy, public security or public health (Article 13(8)). Shielding local traders from competition is none of these. The East African Court of Justice settled the wider principle in Mohochi v Attorney General of Uganda (2013). A Partner State keeps its sovereignty, the Court held, but must exercise it in compliance with the Treaty and the Protocol, and sovereignty is no defence for failing to comply. National provisions inconsistent with them were therefore declared inoperative as against citizens of Partner States.
That ruling answers the strongest objection to the matter in question. Our own Investment Promotion Act of 2009 lists micro-enterprises among its Priority Businesses for Nationals. However, the Act was written seven years before South Sudan joined the East African Community, and Article 8(4) and Mohochi tell us which prevails. The Act also reserves any change to the list of protected activities for the defunct Investment Authority’s board as it was known then, now Ministry of Investment and national ministers, by legislative instrument published in the Gazette. It gives no such power to a county official on a market inspection.
The Commissioner himself conceded that removing people from the country lies outside his mandate. So does rewriting the terms on which East Africans may earn a living here. South Sudan’s chargé d’affaires in Kampala has already told Ugandan journalists that the statement does not reflect the position of the Government of South Sudan. I applaud his prompt rejection of a careless and poorly judged pronouncement.
South Sudan also signed the African Union’s Protocol on Free Movement of Persons in Kigali on the 21st of March 2018. It is not yet in force, but a state that signs a treaty is obliged not to defeat its objective and purpose through policies that run against the spirit of that commitment. Article 43 of our own Transitional Constitution lists African economic integration and the promotion of African unity among the objectives of our foreign policy. The directive is at odds with every one of these instruments.
The law, however, is only part of the argument. The rest, rests on our shared humanity and our history. Sudan endured one of the longest conflicts on the African continent, from 1955 until the signing of the Comprehensive Peace Agreement in 2005, and in December 2013 an independent South Sudan plunged into civil war. Through all of it, our people survived because our East African neighbours opened their borders. At the start of our liberation struggle in 1983, Ethiopia gave the SPLM/SPLA its first home and sheltered our families at Itang, Pinyudo and Dimma camps. Kenya opened Kakuma Refugee Camp in 1992, hosted the talks at Machakos and Naivasha, and it was in Nairobi that the Comprehensive Peace Agreement was signed on the 9th of January 2005. Uganda, like Kenya, opened its doors, put our children in its classrooms and our sick in its hospitals, and treated us as brothers, as it still does to this day.
I speak from experience. Not once in Uganda have I been stopped and asked where I am from or what I am doing there. I am South Sudanese by birth, but I consider myself Ugandan by choice. To put it in my modest Luganda: “Ndi Musajja wa Kabaka” (I am the Kabaka’s man). I feel this way because our Ugandan brothers and sisters are the most loving people in East Africa; the true spirit of Ubuntu is headquartered in Uganda. I have had the privilege of knowing many of them closely, among them my dear friends Collins Mugisha, Jameel Kawuma, Benjamin Musoke, Hussein Nuwaga (aka Dr. Feel Good), Linda Nagudi, Abu Kanamala, Yahaya Yusuf, Ronald Kalemera, Patience Owomugisha and the one and only Hon. Balaam B. Ateenyi. They, and many more, have shown me the true meaning of brotherhood. I see them as nothing less than my own family.
This history is not over. UNHCR’s latest figures show 1,044,679 South Sudanese refugees in Uganda, 483,936 in Ethiopia and 213,122 in Kenya. More than 1.7 million of our citizens live today on the hospitality of the three countries whose traders we are now asking to shut down the means of their livelihood. Uganda, for instance, allows refugees to work, farm and trade. Many more South Sudanese families live by choice in Kampala, Nairobi, Kigali, Addis Ababa and other towns and cities across the region, renting homes, paying school fees and running businesses of their own. If Kampala applied to South Sudanese the rule that the Juba County Commissioner is now contemplating for Ugandans, the suffering would be ours. No tradition among our communities permits a guest who was fed in famine to bar his host from the table at harvest. Let that sink in.
There is also a practical reason to want these traders among us, and it is the one least discussed. Half a century of war did not destroy roads, hospitals and schools, or prevent them from being built. It broke the chain by which commercial skill passes from one generation to the next. A child raised in a displacement camp does not grow up watching a parent keep stock, extend credit, bargain with a supplier or price for a thin margin. Those habits are learned by apprenticeship, and apprenticeship needs masters. Economists have a name for this. Kenneth Arrow called it “learning by doing“: productivity rises through practice, and the knowledge spills over to those working nearby. The Ugandan woman selling chapati at dawn, the Kenyan mechanic, the Ethiopian or Eritrean shopkeeper who restocks before the shelf is empty: each runs an open classroom. South Sudanese employees, neighbours and competitors learn there what no donor workshop in a hotel conference room can teach. Every stall, kiosk and garage they run, big or small, is a lesson in how business is done. Close the stall and you close the school. The evidence from elsewhere points the same way. A World Bank study of South Africa found that between 1996 and 2011 each immigrant worker generated about two jobs for South Africans. One reason was that a quarter of working immigrants were self-employed, against 16 per cent of locals.
Migrant traders also carry our supply chains. UN trade data show that in 2025 South Sudan imported about US$524 million worth of goods from Uganda, led by flour, sugar, cooking oil and vegetables, and sold roughly US$22 million in return. Many of the people who move that food from the border to Konyo Konyo market are the very people now being told to stop. Remove them before South Sudanese traders have the capital and networks to replace them, and the first result will be higher prices for the poorest households in Juba.
We do not need to guess where this road leads. South Africa started from the same sentence: small trade belongs to citizens. In 2008 that idea ended with at least 62 people dead and tens of thousands of non-citizens driven from their homes. Seven more were killed in 2015, and at least twelve in 2019. Today a movement called Operation Dudula marches on migrant-owned shops and insists it is merely upholding the law. What is considered political statements give rise to movements whose members feel they have nothing to lose, and we have all seen how that has played out in South Africa in recent years.
The diplomatic bill arrived in 2019. Nigeria recalled its High Commissioner, withdrew from the World Economic Forum on Africa in Cape Town and began flying its citizens home. MTN and Shoprite, two of South Africa’s best-known companies, closed outlets across Nigeria after reprisal attacks. South Africa, a country the whole continent had sacrificed to free from apartheid, became a place where Africans fear to trade. South African unemployment did not fall; the whole agenda backfired. Officials there also began by saying, as Commissioner Lado has said, that there was no hatred in it. But when public officials declare that a class of people has no right to do the work it is doing, the street hears permission. That implied permission, combined with frustration, leads to violence.
Kenya is the fresher lesson. On the 2nd of September 2026, President William Ruto ordered foreign hawkers and small shopkeepers to close, with enforcement from the 7th of September: five days’ notice to pack up and leave. Although the enforcement period was later revised, the damage had been done. No law had yet been passed; the Local Content Bill was still before Parliament. Within days, hundreds of Burundians were queuing at their embassy in Nairobi for papers to go home, some reporting threats from neighbours. Here was an East African leader deploying one of the oldest tricks in the book: if you fail, blame someone else. Immigrants were the low-hanging fruit for political capital.
The East Africa Law Society answered with a nine-point statement citing Articles 6, 7, 8, 76 and 104 of the Treaty and Articles 3, 7, 10 and 13 of the Protocol. It warned that Kenyans trading elsewhere in the region could expect similar treatment. Only a year earlier, Nairobi had invoked the same Protocol to protest when Tanzania barred foreigners from a list of small businesses. A month after enforcement began in Nairobi, Juba County has taken the same dangerous route, and Kenyans are among those affected.
This is how integration unravels. No state leaves the Community outright; that makes for bad optics. Instead, each chips away at its founding principle by copying the worst habits of the others. Dar es Salaam had a head start in this race to the bottom, then came Nairobi, and now Juba. Was the common market designed for trucks and capital, and never for people? As a private citizen, I worry that today’s leaders seem to have learned nothing from the continent’s greatest, the likes of Kwame Nkrumah and Patrice Lumumba, who understood that Africa’s strength and progress lay in our ability to unite, not as lip service but in substance. East Africa has run this experiment before. In 1972 Uganda expelled its Asian traders in the name of giving commerce back to citizens. The shops changed hands, the shelves emptied, and Uganda spent the next generation inviting the expelled to return.
The founders of the Organisation of African Unity met in Addis Ababa in 1963 convinced that the borders drawn in Berlin were the continent’s deepest wound. Kwame Nkrumah warned them that Africa must unite or remain weak. Six decades later, the African Union’s Agenda 2063 still promises an integrated continent built on the ideals of Pan-Africanism, and counts the free movement of people among its flagship projects. South Sudan claims a place in that tradition. Our liberation was argued to the region in Pan-African terms, and the region answered in kind. A nation born of African solidarity cannot make its first economic doctrine the sorting of Africans by passport at the market gate.
Africans rightly protest when Europe, the Gulf or America treat African migrants as a problem to be contained. That protest loses its force when the same treatment is meted out in Juba, Nairobi or Johannesburg. The African Continental Free Trade Area promises a single market of more than one billion people. South Sudan has signed it but has yet to ratify it. We cannot ask for that market while fencing off a chapati and tomato stall. The world takes its cue on how to treat Africans from how Africans treat one another. Each time we turn on each other, we hand our critics their argument and weaken our own hand in every negotiation that follows. A chain is only as strong as its weakest link.
None of this makes the Commissioner’s concern false. South Sudanese youth and women are locked out of commerce, and they deserve leaders who address that lack of opportunity. The honest diagnosis is that they lack capital, training, market space and protection from arbitrary fees. A Ugandan with a frying pan is not what stands in their way. A government serious about the future of our young men and women should look beyond the convenient label of economic immigrant and focus instead on a few practical steps:
- license and tax every trader on the same terms, citizen or not, and publish the fees
- reserve stalls in new county markets for South Sudanese women and youth, with start-up credit attached;
- ask larger foreign-owned shops to take on South Sudanese apprentices, so that the classroom becomes policy;
- clear road reserves and enforce sanitation rules without reference to anyone’s nationality;
- bring any proposed limit on foreign participation to the National Legislature and the EAC, where it can be tested against our treaty obligations.
I call on the Caretaker Governor of Central Equatoria State and the national ministries responsible for trade and East African Community affairs to set this directive aside, and to say so publicly. Our brothers and sisters from Uganda, Kenya, Ethiopia and across the region stood with us when we had nothing to offer them. We need them still, and we owe them better than this. The dream of one East African people will be kept or broken in places like Kubri Haboba market or at the steps of the State House in Nairobi.
The writer, Garang D’Chut Deng, can be reach on aphricanhero@gmail.com
The views expressed in ‘opinion’ articles published by Radio Tamazuj are solely those of the writer. The veracity of any claims made is the responsibility of the author, not Radio Tamazuj.
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