The continuing flight of Burundian citizens from their country, and their transformation, in the towns and cities of various Eas African countries into hawkers, day labourers, and long-term refugees is not a natural or voluntary migration in search of opportunity.
It is a displacement driven by conditions inside Burundi that the East African Community can no longer treat as a purely internal matter, given its direct consequences for the security, social cohesion, and economic burden of neighbouring states.
Today, some 253,000 Burundian refugees remain in exile across the Great Lakes region and beyond, and tens of thousands more move informally across East African borders each year, unable to return and unable to formalise their status where they land.
Behind this figure lies not one crisis but three, each of which falls squarely within the East African Community’s founding mandate to safeguard peace, security, and good governance among its Partner States.
Firstly, credible international and regional monitors continue to document a pattern of grave human rights violations inside Burundi.
The United Nations-mandated inquiry and independent experts have recorded enforced disappearances, arbitrary arrests and prolonged detention without trial, torture, extrajudicial killings, and sexual violence, with state agents or their proxies implicated in a large share of these cases.
Burundi’s own National Independent Human Rights Commission has itself acknowledged persistent abductions and disappearances, even as it calls on the government to act.
Citizens who are perceived to be linked to the political opposition including refugees who attempt to return home report continued harassment by local officials and by the ruling party’s youth league, the Imbonerakure.
This repression sits alongside a state increasingly unable to meet the basic needs of its population.
Compulsory, coercively enforced financial contributions imposed on ordinary citizens and businesses since 2024, chronic shortages of fuel and foreign exchange, and the collapse of public services have driven households into destitution. It is this combination political terror and economic collapse together that pushes Burundians across borders not as migrants seeking a better life, but as people fleeing for their lives and livelihoods.
Many arrive in EAC Partner States with nothing, and survive only through informal trade and hawking, without protection, documentation, or a durable solution.
Secondly, the Arusha Agreement of 2000 remains the foundational compact that ended Burundi’s civil war and established the power-sharing architecture on which the country’s stability was built.
It was negotiated under regional guarantee, with East African and international facilitation, precisely because the East Africa region understood that Burundi’s internal peace was a regional public good.
Its steady erosion including the removal of constitutional term-limit safeguards, the marginalisation of the ethnic and political powersharing quotas Arusha guaranteed, and the closing of space for genuine multiparty competition, most visibly in the 2025 legislative, senatorial, and local elections in which the ruling party secured 96.5% of the vote amid the sidelining of opposition candidates represents a direct departure from the letter and spirit of an accord that East African governments helped to guarantee.
The EAC and its Partner States are not bystanders to Arusha. Several sitting and former Heads of State within this Community were signatories or guarantors to that Agreement. Its unravelling is therefore a matter of regional responsibility, not only Burundian domestic politics, and its restoration should be treated as a shared obligation rather than a matter left to Gitega alone.
Finally, beyond individual rights violations, credible reporting from Burundian civil society organisations, including Ligue Iteka and ACAT-Burundi, and from independent researchers, points to a resurgence of ethnic framing in Burundian public life, alongside the systematic exclusion of political dissent. Access to public office, security-sector positions, and economic opportunity is increasingly reported to track loyalty to the ruling party rather than the inclusive, ethnically balanced representation that Arusha was designed to guarantee.
Rhetoric associated with informal or paramilitary structures aligned with the ruling party has, on multiple occasions, taken on an ethnic as well as political character. Political dissent and ethnic identity are, in effect, converging as grounds for exclusion, intimidation, or worse and it is precisely this convergence that has historically preceded Burundi’s gravest crises.
Each of these three drivers, alone, would be cause for concern. Together, they explain why Burundians continue to leave in numbers that regional humanitarian and economic systemsare struggling to absorb: a strain made sharper by the near-simultaneous pressure torepatriate refugees from Tanzanian camps on a timeline that credible observers, includingUN experts, have warned may not meet the standard of safe, voluntary, and dignified return.
Burundians who cross into Kenya, Rwanda, Uganda, Tanzania, and the DRC as informaltraders and hawkers are not seeking to displace host communities; they are surviving in theonly way available to people denied both safety and a functioning state at home.
In order to fully address this growing crisis, the East Africa Community Summit must now;
(i) Reconstitute a serious, time-bound EAC-facilitated dialogue on the restoration of Arusha’spower-sharing guarantees, drawing on the credibility of the Agreement’s original regionalguarantors
(ii) Call publicly and consistently for an end to enforced disappearances, arbitrary detention,and reprisals against returnees and perceived opponents, and support independent, credible investigation of reported cases
(iii) Ensure that any repatriation of Burundian refugees from Partner States is genuinelyvoluntary, safe, and dignified, with independent monitoring of conditions for returnees inside Burundi
(iv) Extend appropriate protection, documentation, and livelihood pathways to Burundian nationals already present informally in Partner States, pending a durable political resolution
(v) Mandate the EAC Secretariat, in coordination with the African Union and the International Conference on the Great Lakes Region, to report regularly to the Summit on progress against each of these commitments.
The East African Community was built on the conviction that the peace and dignity of one Partner State’s people is inseparable from the peace and stability of the whole region.
The steady exodus of Burundian citizens is not a distant humanitarian statistic; it is a daily, visible reminder that this founding conviction requires renewed and urgent attention from this Summit.
Burundi’s crisis must be placed, explicitly and without further delay, on the agenda of the Community’s highest decision-making organs.
Article by Boniface Mwalii, a 2025 alumnus of the International Crisis Management programme at George Washington University and a member of the International Relations Society ofKenya (IRSK).
Disclaimer! Views expressed in this article do not represent the position of Kenya Broadcasting Corporation.
