Month: February 2023

Over a thousand Kenyan traders protested in the capital Nairobi on Tuesday against Chinese traders.

The demo comes in the wake of controversy elicited by the coming of China Square retail outlet of general merchandise whose prices are on average 45 percent lower than those prevailing in locally owned enterprises, local media reports.

China is Africa’s top trading partner and more than 1 million Chinese are estimated to reside on the continent.

Kenya’s relationship with China was in focus during last year’s presidential election, won by William Ruto. Ruto promised to publish government contracts with China agreed upon under his predecessor and to deport Chinese nationals working illegally.

Dressed in dust coats used in their retail outlets, the traders marched to the office of the deputy president and to parliament to submit a petition against the Chinese retailers.

“The Chinese cannot be importers, retailers, wholesalers, and hawkers,” read one placard held aloft during the protest. Some chanted “Chinese must go!”

Trade Minister Moses Kuria has offered to take over China Square’s lease from its Chinese owner and hand it to local traders, but Korir Sing’oei, the principal secretary at Kenya’s ministry of foreign affairs, stressed on Twitter that all investors are welcome, irrespective of their nationality.

Wu Peng, the top African official at China’s ministry of foreign affairs welcomed Sing’oei’s assurance on Twitter.

China Square’s owner Lei Cheng has reportedly told a local newspaper that he was inspired to open the shop after finding the prices at a Nairobi supermarket to be exorbitant, Reuters reported.

Ruto followed through in November on his campaign promise to publish documents related to $3 billion in loans for a controversial Chinese railway built under his predecessor.

The National Human Rights Commission (CNDH) of Chad estimates that 128 people died in the bloody October crackdown on opposition protests against the extension of the transitional government, in a report sent to Africanewsguru tv on Thursday.

On October 20, 2022, opposition demonstrations against the continuation in power for two more years of the transitional president, General Mahamat Idriss Déby Itno, had been repressed in blood in N’Djamena, the capital, and in other cities of the country.

The authorities had initially announced that around fifty people had died, mainly young people shot dead in the capital by the forces of order, before re-evaluating this figure at 73 deaths. However, NGOs had denounced the underestimated figures.

“The official figures are different from those obtained after the investigations of the National Human Rights Commission”, says the CNDH, which specifies that its work “mainly concerned the towns most affected by the repression, notably those of N’Djamena, Moundou, Doba, Koumra and Sarh”.

According to the investigators, 943 people were arrested, 435 detained, and 12 disappeared. The CNDH “attributes the main responsibility for all these human rights violations to agents invested with state authority, namely the FDS (security forces), who clearly failed in their tasks in the chain of events,” the report notes.

On “Black Thursday”, 621 people, according to the government, were arrested and then taken to Koro Toro, a high-security prison in the middle of the desert 600 km north of N’Djamena. They were then tried in a mass trial, without lawyers or independent media, after a month and a half in detention.

“Four lifeless bodies arrived in Koro-Toro, having died en route, and eight died as a result of ill-treatment” in this prison, the CNDH said.

The CNDH, created in 2019, has the mission of protecting and promoting human rights and transmitting opinions to the government, the president of the Republic and the National Assembly.