Lucas Marang’a in his article A Running Bash supplies the eyewitness colour: roughly 30,000 runners, groups carrying music, a man in a suit and another in firefighter gear. Nairobi had dressed for every eventuality.
Congratulations to Standard Chartered for building a tradition people train for, recruit friends into and return to.
Long may the city keep this appointment.
While browsing for gym gear, I encountered tights. These deserve respect.
High waists, compression, ventilation panels and pockets that accommodate a phone. Anyone whose keys have slapped against their thigh while jogging will appreciate the progress. Then recently arrived what are called scrunch bum tights, with a gathered rear seam to contour and accentuate.
Why contour? Round is also a shape.
There are specifications here, people. “Something stretchy” will not settle the matter.
Run Beyond the sports store at Warwick Centre offers a KSh 3,000 gait assessment. Cameras examine how you move before you choose your shoes.
Nike at Sarit awaits the pure of heart and platinum credit card.
My guy Albert at Zoezi Shoes serves those whose budget favours slightly used sneakers. Big up!!
(Caveat Emptor) When buying used running shoes it is very possible that the shoes may have completed a marathon before you have.

Tumewaskiza (We have heard). Have You, Though?

Thirty thousand runners need shoes, socks, bras, watches and something to carry water. Quite a few tills ring before the medals arrive. Once home, however, even the best-equipped runner must negotiate the television budget. The children are home for two months. November, Christmas and January’s school fees are all queuing at the same wallet.

Those of us raised on one station remember waiting for programmes to begin. Today, someone announces there is nothing to watch while holding enough entertainment to occupy our entire childhood.

From 5 November, DStv’s six packages become four: Starter, KSh 750; Select, KSh 1,500; Sports, KSh 3,000; Ultimate, KSh 7,300 monthly. Sports includes every Premier League and Champions League match. Rugby, Formula 1, MotoGP, cricket, tennis and golf sit in Ultimate. I subscribed partly for rugby; when it left my package, I stopped paying. The price of reconciliation is clear. Household approval remains pending.

Premium’s KSh 11,700 becomes Ultimate’s KSh 7,300. That saves KSh 4,400 monthly, or KSh 52,800 annually. Meaningful money, especially now.

The comments beneath prominent Kenyan technology analyst Moses Kemibaro’s article “DSTV finally gets it” deserve attention. Commenter MM still considers KSh 3,000 expensive. He reports paying KSh 1,500 for 20 Mbps internet, against KSh 4,000 for 10 Mbps previously. Less money, twice the advertised speed, and the connection serves the whole house. FM says customers found alternatives and moved on.
FS raises the revenue question. Matching one KSh 7,300 subscription takes approximately 2.43 subscriptions at KSh 3,000, before costs. Of course, the old price earns nothing from someone who has left.
ES remembers years of concerns being noted; Moses replies that change followed years of losing customers. Individual experiences, yes, but worth hearing before assuming a discount brings everyone back. Some families have already worked out who watches what, on which screen, and what it costs.
Others are wondering how to put more money into the household altogether. There is always somebody ready to help with that.

Whatever way consumers look at it. They listened and acted. Kudos to the DSTV team.

Kutangulia si kufika. Godspeed.

Dr Amir Has Entered the Chat

Our hypothetical investor passes Dr Amir’s poster and shakes his head.
Miracle Oil. Lucky Ring. Mapenzi. Man Power. Nyota.
Who believes these things, he wonders, before returning to a WhatsApp group where somebody is explaining how a digital coin will rescue everyone from employment. The doctor has a wooden pole. The investment group has impressive charts, unfamiliar acronyms and a man joining from overseas. Even the promises arrive with better graphics.

BTC, ETH, USDT. Nobody wants to interrupt and look backward. Bitcoin’s creator used the name Satoshi Nakamoto; the identity remains unresolved. Binance, the exchange, has known founders, Changpeng Zhao and Yi He. Buying a coin and trusting somebody to hold it are different decisions. You can understand the first and still get a nasty surprise from the second.

On 29 October, money began leaving Binance the world’s largest cryptocurrency exchange. TRM Labs estimates attackers moved $6.36 billion across ten blockchains, most of it in twenty minutes, and attributes the attack to North Korea’s TraderTraitor unit. Binance itself has not named anyone.
But think about it twenty minutes.
Some of us take longer deciding whether to Uber or risk driving without valid insurance.
Binance initially pointed to a compromised engineer’s laptop and suspended withdrawals. It reported roughly $3 billion frozen with partners.
Imagine opening your app to discover that your money is there, according to the screen, but taking it out is temporarily unavailable. Its $1 billion SAFU emergency reserve amounted to about one-sixth of the reported theft. Binance said it would cover losses using its funds too: 90% replaced by 31 October, rising to 95% today as withdrawals resumed in phases.
Replaced does not mean recovered from the thieves.
An exchange being robbed does not turn cryptocurrency into witchcraft. Nor does everyone investing in it misunderstand the risks. But our ‘investor” should allow Dr Amir’s customers a little grace. He, too, has entrusted money to an assurance he cannot personally test.
Our investor’s enthusiasm simply raises a question: does he examine a polished presentation as closely as he examines a roadside poster?

Football sponsors have been examining that arrangement too.

Free Speech. Expensive Echo.

We complain that footballers say nothing in interviews. Credit to the players for that. Respect the opposition. One game at a time. Then Kylian Mbappé answers a question about his favourite meme, and you immediately understand why communications people hover nearby.
He recalled his face superimposed on somebody he thought was a Chinese dictator. The clip showed Mao Zedong’s image with Mbappé’s features.

He found it funny. Some people paying him did not.

Chinese companies Dongpeng, Mengniu and Milkground ended their partnerships. French paper, Le Monde, citing trade publications, puts the Dongpeng and Mengniu agreements at approximately 50 million yuan, or €6.7 million. That is reported contract value; his actual personal loss remains undisclosed. Three departing brands, although Milkground belongs to Mengniu. Presumably, nobody in that group fancied explaining the joke at the next meeting.

Then China Media Group suspended Spanish league coverage. La Liga expressed regret. Other clubs had neither made the remark nor approved it, yet their access to viewers was affected. David Skilling’s Original Football analysis follows that widening exposure: the consequences travelled well beyond the man who spoke.

A historical Nielsen estimate, cited by Madrid, put its Chinese following at approximately 97 million people. That is a considerable audience to leave outside while everyone discusses what you meant. Sponsors can choose another player. Broadcasters can choose another competition. The supporters, meanwhile, wanted to watch football.

Before You Approve That Discount

On Monday, look at the names behind next year’s sales target. Have you budgeted for Nike Sarit customers or are you using a list of everybody wearing trainers?
And that subscriber who left: perhaps his cheaper internet now entertains the children and runs his business.
What exactly would he come back for?
Call a few former customers before commissioning another promotion. Ask where the money went. You may discover that the household solved its problem while you were still discussing the discount.

November Belongs to Us

Andrew Amonde and Patrice Agunda once wore Shujaa colours together. In the 2014 final, they opposed each other as players. Twelve years later, they met as coaches. Amonde’s KCB won 47–7, claiming their eleventh Impala Floodlit title.
Mwamba ladies also beat Quins Ladies 20–8.

2 teams 2 finals. Kudos Kenya Harlequin FC #Strong Sure Superior

A bruising evening for Agunda, a true Harlequin: fifteen playing seasons, five as
captain, and now preparing others to wear the shirt. Those of us watching leave with an opinion. He returns to work with the players.
His birthday is in November.
Happy birthday Patrice, our skipper our coach our stalwart.
Hopefully somebody has organised something requiring no post-match analysis.

Welcome to our birthday month. November babies, assemble. Scorpio rules.

In the words of recently departed Sir Patrick Stewart as Captain Jean Luc Pricard in Star Trek:
“It is possible to commit no mistakes and still lose. That is not a weakness. That is life.”

The older I get, the more people I can put beside those words. People who did what they could and still had to start again. I have a few afternoons I would gladly replay myself. Another birthday finds me grateful for friends who will listen, until somebody remembers something ridiculous and we abandon the serious conversation.

This November, make one of those calls. Ask your old friend when they are free. We have postponed enough good afternoons waiting for everybody’s diary to agree.
May we have good health, useful work and many more occasions to gather.
May the StanChart marathon keep giving Nairobi this annual appointment.

Sixty-seven articles. Time for a breather.

I’m taking November off from our weekly appointment. Our birthday month seems a reasonable time to catch my breath, read and collect stories without immediately counting the words or wondering whose toes I’m about to step on.

Thank you for reading, arguing, laughing and forwarding these pieces. If you joined us recently—or missed a few Sundays—the earlier stories are waiting. Have a wander. Send a favourite to somebody who would enjoy it.

Or somebody whose toes need attention.

We’ll meet again Insha’allah on Sunday, 6 December. Meanwhile, don’t save all the good (ngonya) gossip for yourselves.

Those of us who still Hash still need somebody to explain why the beer was twenty-one kilometres away. And in case you didnt know the words to the drinking song. Here we go.

Same Forest. Different Monkeys.
Mubarikiwe. Jah Bless.

A couple of weeks ago, our friend (Al-Haj) Malik invited us to his home in Mua Hills for a housewarming and the subsequent goat-eating.
We got lost. Nobody knew Malik.
After interrogating several residents, we abandoned the name and described the man.

“Aaaaah! Mnasema kwa Maluki!”

Apparently, our friend had heard Aliko Dangote was muslim and quickly baptised himself Malik. Unfortunately, he had not informed the people responsible for giving directions. We were looking for a coastal gentleman. The village knew Maluki.
My pal Kakash calls her people “Kambodians.” That’s what the uptown people call the Kamba. Others know them as Wa Nduli. That afternoon, whatever name you preferred, they had invited us to eat a goat. Finding the host had been our first negotiation.

Then somebody mentioned the resurfaced report about returning dowry after divorce. One man remembers his grandfather’s instructions. Another has a cousin whose marriage ended. Within minutes, everybody has qualifications in customary law.

Fortunately, we had Mutush: incoming Mhesh (MP) for a constituency yet to be named, aspiring Kamba elder and our authority for the afternoon. Among the Wa Nduli, he explained, a goat can arrive with a different assignment.
This one is called Mbui ya Ulee, the goat of separation. In the customary account, a woman or her family takes it to the husband’s homestead, accompanied by witnesses or elders, and leaves it tied there to signify the ending of the marriage.

Please establish the occasion before reaching for the grill.

We had spent the afternoon identifying a man by his description. Now we were identifying a goat by its intentions. But beneath the laughter sat something heavier. Families that gathered for ntheo, the goat ceremony sealing the marriage, and ngasya, the bridewealth negotiations, could meet again to undo it all.
This time, nobody would be singing at the gate.

Your In-Laws May Have Different Terms

Once the Kambas explain their goat, everybody wants to know what happens elsewhere. The fellow who has been quiet throughout lunch moves his chair closer. Somebody poured him something.
We are about to discover what the wedding spokesman left out.

Among the Taita, the dowry ceremony is Wupe. One man interviewed by The Star recalled being asked for fifteen cows and forty goats.
He wanted to pay everything and begin married life debt-free.
His elders advised instalments.
Imagine your own delegation telling you to maintain a fuliza limit with your Out-laws. Marriage had come with a relationship manager.

Then the Muslim account changes the conversation. At the Nikkah, the marriage contract, Mahr is due to the bride herself.
Hold on.
We have spent the afternoon discussing what families received. Here, the wife has an entitlement of her own. Before debating its return, establish whose property it is. Clever.

Divorce cannot be settled over nyama choma by declaring that everything goes back. There are children, years and sacrifices. Someone once arrived in that home carrying hopes that would never fit inside a refund calculation.

Every delegation once helped choose somebody. On Monday, another will assemble around an interview table. This time, the history arrives as a CV.

Even the Photograph Looks Employed

When did you last read your own CV? I sometimes look at mine and say, wueh. Is this me? The fellow sounds extremely useful. Everything suggests a man whose Mondays have always gone according to plan. You would hardly suspect what he survived between those bullet points.

Across the table sits someone with a less cooperative history. A redundancy. A business that folded. Work outside their profession because school fees refused to wait for the correct vacancy. We ask this person to explain themselves. Meantime the smooth CV has reached the salary discussion.

Regina Hartley, an HR executive at UPS, calls them the Silver Spoon and the Scrapper.
(I call them Ninjas)
Give the Scrapper/Ninja a hearing, she argues. The struggle may contain evidence the paperwork obscures. Anyone endlessly “optimising” a LinkedIn profile knows the feeling: you improve yourself all evening; the applicant tracking system rejects you before breakfast.
Elon Musk’s test is “evidence of exceptional ability.” He asks about difficult problems and probes how candidates solved them. The person who did the work usually remembers the awkward details.
Nvidia’s Jensen Huang offered Stanford students a more alarming blessing:
“I wish upon you ample doses of pain and suffering.”
After acquiring that student debt, you might have expected congratulations. His point concerned the resilience adversity can develop.
Managers, this was not an instruction to make your staff miserable.

In sales, take one result and stay with it. “Thirty per cent new business? From what base? What changed? What went wrong? What did you personally do?” Then listen. I regularly interview people whose profession is persuasion.
Many of them some sell themselves beautifully. Look under the hood.

Examine the triumph as carefully as the setback.

Como, meanwhile, had a history requiring a second interview.

Manchester United supporters, inspect the cooking arrangements. Somebody has put your club in a sufuria and connected a cylinder labelled “Fabri Gas.”
Football WhatsApp groups have no mercy.
On Wednesday, Cesc Fàbregas’s Como beat United 4–1 in the Champions League. Before supporters finished explaining the defending, somebody supplied the gas.

Cesc Fàbregas, the former Arsenal, Barcelona and Chelsea midfielder, now coaches Como. Those who remember the teenager threading passes through Premier League defences may need a moment. The boy has grown up. Your grievances have grandchildren.
But how did Como reach this kitchen?

In 2017, after bankruptcy and a failed attempt to secure its place higher up, the club restarted in Serie D, Italy’s fourth tier. SENT Entertainment took ownership in April 2019. Como won Serie D that year, Serie C in 2021 and promotion to Serie A in 2024. Five years. Three promotions.
The Hartono brothers supplied financial backing. Former Chelsea captain Dennis Wise became influential behind the scenes. Fàbregas arrived as a player and shareholder; Thierry Henry also became a shareholder. They backed the choices with investment in players, facilities, youth development and the organisation.

That part rarely makes the meme. You can hire a wonderful person and leave them fighting the broken arrangements that exhausted their predecessor. Six months later, another farewell email. Everyone wishes them well. Nobody fixes the job.

Como built around its choices, season after season. United have witnessed the progress first hand.

The Ladies Came With Receipts

At Kasarani, Kenya won the inaugural World Boxing African Championships. Algeria followed; Uganda finished third. Here is Citizen Digital’s medal comparison for the leading countries: Kenya topped the standings, Algeria finished second and Uganda’s Bombers came third with thirteen medals.

Our Ugandan neighbours collected more medals than Algeria. Unfortunately, the table counts gold before enthusiasm. We shall discuss this at the border.

Grace Atieno, Rosemarion Otieno, Juliet Opondo and Friza Asiko supplied four of Kenya’s five golds. Eighty per cent. Before the chairman congratulates “our boys,” somebody correct the speech.
Rosemarion took Best Female Boxer; Kelvin Maina supplied the fifth gold and Best Male Boxer honours.
Anyone proposing a friendly spar with their partners should establish whether “one round” means what they think it means.
We recognise foreign footballers from the backs of their heads. Its about time we learn to calebrate our Kenyan champions. LOUDLY!
Their next bouts deserve attention before the medals arrive.

Japan Has Interfered With the Furnace

Meanwhile, that graphic says Japan has classified teaching children about hell as psychological abuse. Several Sunday-school teachers and grandmas would require legal representation. We barely understood addition and subtraction but were already receiving detailed briefings about everlasting fire. The actual December 2022 guidance concerns coercive religious practices, including terrifying children into compliance.
Japan has not abolished hell.
But imagine your child bringing that screenshot to breakfast.
Getting ready for church now requires a vetting committee.

Back in Mua Hills, we needed a description to find Maluki. Al-Haj Malik’s impressive new name had got us lost.
On Monday, hear the person behind one broken CV. Ask what they did when things fell apart. If you choose them, help them succeed. We put considerable effort into welcoming people.
The harder work begins after the visitors leave.

Which custom surprised you? Bring your elders’ version to the comments. Share this with someone choosing a colleague, building a team or marrying into unfamiliar territory.

Subscribe for next Sunday. And if a goat arrives before then, call Mutush.

Same Forest. Different Monkeys.
Mubarikiwe. Jah Bless.

This week’s recessional hymn is led by Kasau Katombi. Pewa Pewa.
Go with song.

Five, Four Hundred, Ten

Five. Then four hundred. Now, reportedly, fewer than ten. That is the arithmetic of Microsoft in Nairobi, and before I give you this week’s version, let me introduce you to the five.
Many years ago, in the last century, I used to swing by a quiet, swanky office on 3rd Ngong Avenue to see my pal Msitu then an early MS staffer.
Microsoft had a handful of people there, not more than five.
They say pesa haipendi kelele, and that office was the proof.
You whispered even to say hi. The lady at reception looked at me the way we now look at a rider we suspect took three drumsticks from our KFC 20-piecer.
The reception had real wood panelling that would make gypsum envious.
They were very posh, and they were very few.

This week, a Fintech Association of Kenya newsletter brought me back to Microsoft. Reports suggest fewer than ten could remain from roughly four hundred employees at its Nairobi Africa Development Centre. Microsoft has not confirmed those totals and says it will continue operating in Kenya. The old sales office and today’s engineering centre are different operations, but consider the journey: Kenyans who once sold the technology ended up helping build it.

Then comes the meeting about your job.

School fees are due. The mortgage has not heard about restructuring. Your relatives still introduce you as “our daughter at Microsoft,” and you are wondering when to tell them. Allow people to grieve that before arriving with a motivational quote. But look at what these engineers carry with them.
You return the laptop. You do not return what you learnt.
They built for users across the world, and those users are still there. So are other businesses needing those skills.

The office may shrink. The market need not.

Our diaspora readers know a lot about finding the next opening. Behind the dollars arriving home are unfamiliar winters and shifts worked while Kenya sleeps. Kenyans abroad sent home US$5.04 billion in 2025; CBK’s revised projection for 2026 was US$5.1 billion.
Some of these engineers may find opportunities abroad and add to that pot. Others could serve global clients from Nairobi.
I have always said that one of Kenya’s biggest exports is our people.
A salary paid abroad still finishes a house in Kitengela and educates a child in Nakuru.
Our diaspora friends may know somebody recruiting. Somebody helped you find your feet once. You remember what that meant.
At the receiving end, though, there is another problem. Have you looked carefully at your thousand bob lately?

One Thousand Bob. Explain Yourself.
There was a time you could send someone a thousand bob and sit back feeling you had made a difference. These days you send it and immediately explain yourself.
“Bro, niko down. Kula kidogo kwanza. I’ll sort you out properly on Friday.”
Even your generosity now comes with an instalment plan.
A graphic doing the rounds put today’s thousand shillings at KSh 344 in January 2010 money. Updating to September brings it to about KSh 342. Put the other way, what KSh 1,000 bought then would require roughly KSh 2,900 now, using the overall consumer price index.
The note still says one thousand. You still send it with the seriousness of one thousand. Then it reaches the shops and starts behaving like three hundred and forty-two.
You have sent your mum the same amount for years, faithfully. In your mind, you have maintained your support. At her end, she has been deciding what to leave out. Then she asks for more, and you mutter that everything has become money with these people.
Which people? The woman buying cooking oil?
Now carry that thousand bob into Monday’s meeting. Sales are up. Did you sell more, or charge more because your suppliers charged you more? A bigger revenue number can do a convincing impression of progress.
Count the money. Then ask what it can still buy.
And before telling a young employee that you survived on less in 2010, price the life you expect them to maintain today. Their rent is not being collected in nostalgia.

JAJUOK PARTNERS WITH NIKE
Meanwhile, where some of my closest friends come from, night running is not a sport.
Mention Jojuogi (pl. singular JahJuok) and the Luo and Luhya contingents begin exchanging looks. Those from elsewhere move closer.
Naked? At night? Doing what, exactly?
In the fireside tales, a runner roams after dark, sometimes smeared in ash, banging on tin roofs, throwing sand at houses and sprinting away when chased.
The thrill is your fright. The urge, people say, runs in families.
Before my friends start explaining their relatives, let us proceed.
The village had its answers. One reported trap was an open doorway covered with a sheet. The runner arrives to kick the door, meets thin air and tumbles inside. Other tales end with livestock changing hands before dawn so that a name stays unshouted at sunrise.
Then there is the “Kanyaga Meko” tale in the research: the lady of the house stepping on the cooking stones to restrain the restless husband. Other versions bring bedroom sanctions into it. Our friends from western Kenya, which versions did you hear? Settle the details in the comments.
Some households apparently had their own athletics committee.

Now Nike has organised night running.
Properly.
Registration, coaches, race numbers, photographers.

The London leg of its After Dark Tour was scheduled for Saturday, October 17: a women’s 10K from Silverworks Island, through the Royal Docks, including London City Airport’s runway. Sold out, according to the event page.
Sold out. People wanted to run at night so badly that some could not get a place.
Back home, nobody asks whether you registered. They ask whether you locked the kitchen door.
Imagine the village proposal. Organised night running. Silence. Participants will wear numbers for identification. Now the cattle dip chairman is interested. There will also be photographs. Several comfortable people begin asking about data protection and royalties. In the stories we grew up hearing, being identified was the punishment. Nike has made it the souvenir.

Nike says last year’s tour attracted more than 50,000 women, one in three a first-time racer. Consider the woman postponing her first run. Too dark after work. Nobody to go with. Worried about being last. Create a gathering where beginners belong, and you can see why places go.
Sometimes you only need make the invite funkier.
Still, that Kenyan application form: previous night-running experience?
Answer carefully. It may affect your starting position.

A Hundred and Twenty Kilos of Waiting

And while Nike finds a runway for its runners, some Kenyan rugby players would settle for a fixture.
Congratulations to KRU on securing Nairobi’s HSBC SVNS 2 hosting for January 23–24, 2027, at Talanta Sports Stadium. Visiting teams, supporters, business and a home crowd deserve applause, alongside Shujaa and the Lionesses’ Safari Sevens successes.
Then Irish Olympian Harry McNulty observed, via SportyFM Kenya: “There’s more rugby sevens being played in Kenya than there is in Ireland.”
We popped our collars and said nani kama sisi.
Until we checked the fifteens rankings. Ireland third. Kenya thirty-sixth.
Now the collar is tight.
E.F. Aligura on Facebook recently counted 454 days without official Simbas rugby, dating from the July 19, 2025, Algeria match. Today, 456 days have elapsed since that game.
Think of the fellow waiting. Six foot five, a hundred and twenty kilos. Or the stocky man built like a village wrestler, gifted at moving another unwilling human backwards. There is intelligence in that work. Years learning where to put a shoulder.
You cannot send them all to Sevens.
They train, play for clubs, hope for selection. Another birthday arrives while the national jersey waits in a cupboard.
A rugby career has an expiry date.
International appearances can matter overseas. Sevens participation must meet the destination’s endorsement rules; SVNS 2 is no automatic work permit. Scotland’s XVs rules provide an example: for countries ranked twenty-fifth or below, one route requires three ranking Tests in twenty-four months and ten career internationals.
How does our hooker, prop or 2nd row build recent caps without fixtures?
KRU, please use your relationships for reciprocal tours and affordable Tests. Arrange development games too, distinguishing which award caps.
Give players minutes, footage and introductions to recruiters.

Four hundred engineers facing uncertainty. A mother stretching the same 1k from her son. A player getting older while waiting to represent his country.
“Kula kidogo kwanza” can get someone through Friday. What happens on Monday?Somewhere in your address book is a person who could help someone earn again. A former colleague recruiting. A customer needing software. A rugby contact who could arrange a match.
Before forwarding another motivational quote, try that number.

I remember when Microsoft had five people in that quiet office. Look how much Kenyan ability we have seen since. Surely we can find more work for it.

And if you see us running after dark, ask whether Nike is involved before joining.
And if the whole world is truly in debt…..who do we owe?
I’ll leave you with the wise words of Yama on X

Same Forest. Different Monkeys.
Mubarikiwe. Jah Bless.
Go with song in the words of Ochieng’ Wuod Ojola

How many times have you defended or accused someone, only to discover you were reading the wrong script?

Jeffrey Archer made a career out of that uncomfortable moment. You had identified the villain, trusted the respectable gentleman who accused him and prepared your verdict. Then he turned the page. Suddenly, your respectable gentleman needed a lawyer.
Archer died on 5 October, aged 86, a day before his final novel, Adam & Eve, was due out. Even his departure came with a twist. He was one of my favourite authors, and A Twist in the Tale helped inspire Same Forest. Different Monkeys. I liked the way he let people reveal themselves while we congratulated ourselves on understanding them.

Take the British edition of First Among Equals.

Four men want the highest political office. Charles Seymour, an earl’s younger son and Oxford graduate, has pedigree, connections and ambition. His elder brother gets the inheritance. Charles must find another way to become important. When Simon Kerslake threatens that ambition, Seymour works to undermine him. Apparently, a good upbringing does not prevent bad behaviour. It can provide better cutlery.

Kerslake is a solicitor’s son, persistent enough to survive setbacks that would send others home. But money troubles and threatened bankruptcy keep interrupting his climb.Raymond Gould brings humble origins and a formidable economic intellect to Labour politics. He can explain the figures while his colleagues are still looking for the relevant page. Brains can open a door. They cannot guarantee that the people inside will like you.Andrew Fraser, son of a Conservative, joins Labour, then leaves for the breakaway Social Democratic Party (SDP) and becomes its leader. Principle, ambition and political survival share a vehicle, though nobody agrees who is driving.

Four men. One prize. Same Forest Different Monkeys.

I shall leave the Kenyan casting to you. When your favourite changes parties, do you inspect his reasons, or move your chair and continue applauding? Archer knew how readily we mistake knowing somebody’s story for knowing the person.

At a Kenyan family gathering, that confidence starts early.
“His father’s ears.” “That forehead is from our side.”
The baby is three weeks old and the relatives have distributed his anatomy like an estate. No laboratory, no appeal, and the loudest auntie chairs the proceedings.

Resemblance, our favourite unpaid witness, deserves cross-examination.

We also insist couples grow alike through marriage. The 2018 PLOS ONE paper, Revisiting facial resemblance in couples, found perceived resemblance beyond hair and accessories, with judgments about personality influencing what observers saw. The 2020 Scientific Reports study examined 517 couples and found facial similarity at the outset, without greater similarity decades later. Two different studies, neither a paternity test. Neither study establishes what happens among Kenyan couples.
The family committee may keep its tea. It should surrender its facial recognition certificate.
The graphs below (if you can make sense of them) show how facial similarities account for successful couples. (the survey somehow moved from Europe to Asia without consulting Africa)

Talking about people who look like each other.
Picture a recruitment interview. A young woman, smartly dressed, mentions your old school and the famous dining-hall matron. You were asking about a customer problem. Suddenly, you are remembering school lunch. By the end of the interview, you have discovered three mutual friends and agreed that young people no longer want to work. The candidate has not yet explained how she will fix your sales problem, but you like her. “She’ll fit in well here.” Sawa boss. Another mini-you.
Soon you have a team of clones, dressing, walking and talking like you and bringing the same worldview to every task and every mistake.
Who will bring what the team is missing? Professionally its called “Similarity attraction bias”, wearing the respectable clothes of culture fit.
Your sales problem remains unsolved.

Meanwhile, ‘Made in China’ used to settle an argument before you even opened the box. Cheap. Probably fake. How long will it last?
You checked the price and negotiated with your expectations. If the thing survived until Christmas, sawa.
Now look again. China was moving beyond the job we had assigned it. We kept the joke; they kept building.

Stanford’s research summary reports that domestic value added, the portion of export value created within China, rose from 66% to 76% between 2007 and 2020. Then BYD’s first Brazilian-built vehicle rolled off the line at Camaçari in July 2025. Initially, it was semi-knocked-down assembly, with localisation still developing.
Made in Brazil. Built by China.
Our old insult now needs a geography lesson. The transformation is unfinished and carries costs: imported inputs remain, and the Brazilian project has faced allegations about contractors’ treatment of workers.
Admiring capability does not require ignoring how it was built.

What did we build for our football?
We are very good at demanding finished excellence while refusing to finance the years before it. Which brings us to Benni McCarthy and our expectations of AFCON 2027. Reports of his press conference say Kenya lacks the squad and resources to challenge Morocco, Egypt, Senegal and Côte d’Ivoire for the title. Paying him millions would not change that overnight. You can hear the indignation: “Then why did we hire you?” Perhaps we expected eleven internationals in his suitcase.

Awala, the Kaya kingdom heir apparent, has supplied names worth reading aloud: Linton Maina, Tyler Onyango, Clement Mutahi Bischoff, Zak Vyner, Silko Amari Otieno Thomas and Eliot Matazo. Somewhere, somebody is saying, “ Kazungu wehu” Tyler ni mtoto wa nanii, Linton ni wa murima. These are family connections stretching across football’s map. Brooklyn Mwadime Kazungu, the MK Dons forward, has already received a Kenya Under-23 call-up. A name on the team sheet brings the conversation home.

But ancestry is not a signed commitment. Eligibility, willingness, paperwork, fitness and combinations matter. Recruit the diaspora. Also ask why somebody else must keep financing the talent we hope to collect. Benni owes us selection, preparation and improvement. His salary does not buy the years of player development we failed to fund.

Sales managers know this arrangement. New appointment, impressive introduction, ambitious target. Same product problems, neglected team and empty budget. Three months later, management asks why experience has failed to perform miracles.
Kuwa serious.
You cannot hire somebody to harvest what you refused to plant.

Carl Tundo’s Safari Rally work offers a constructive response. Ahead of the 2026 event, he credited SportPesa with covering a funding shortfall and acknowledged KCB, Kenya Airways and Safaricom. “I want private capital playing a bigger role in owning and running sport commercially, with proper accounts and enforceable rights.” Sponsorship buys exposure; management operates the business; ownership carries control and financial risk.
Institutional integrity is the spine of Sports development.
China built suppliers around production. Sport must build development around performance. Private money cannot cure every football failure, but somebody must finance the unphotogenic years. The trophy presentation is a terrible place to start looking for investors. By then, everyone wants the photograph.

MZEE NI WEWE
Eliud Kipchoge provided a welcome interruption to the obituaries being written about his career. Melbourne, 2:09:10: a course record by two seconds, his seventeenth marathon victory and first since Berlin 2023, aged 41. Three years without winning is a long silence when the world expects a victory every time you lace your shoes. Some of us recognise the silence from unanswered applications and phones that used to ring. Today, he answered on the road.
Briefly, New Zealand beat Australia 50–19 in the Bledisloe encounter. At Safari Sevens, Shujaa and the Lionesses emerged victorious again.

Ghana, meanwhile, has given the bus preacher something new to pray about. Its restriction concerns preaching and hawking in moving public or commercial vehicles, with reported penalties including fines or up to eight months’ imprisonment. Reports on 9 October said implementation was suspended. Stationary vehicles are outside this particular prohibition.

Imagine our mathree. Fare paid, knees folded, conductor squeezing in one more passenger. A man stands:
“Praise the Lord!” Riiiissswaaa!!
You were hoping to reach town. The sermon gathers momentum; a pothole supplies the resurrection. Then comes the collection.
Apparently, your fare covered transport but excluded salvation.
Jeffrey Archer would appreciate the twist.
Preach while parked, stop when moving.
Nairobi traffic could accommodate both Testaments.
Just as the collection reaches you, the matatu is stopped by traffic cops and an officer walks in. The preacher drops his “collection pouch” on your lap as he tries to exit the vehicle,
A twist in the tale.

Lets try something next week. Examine one familiar verdict you have stopped questioning. Your preferred candidate, your supplier, your assumptions about someone’s ability. What evidence would make you change your mind?

Same Forest. Different Monkeys.
Mubarikiwe. Jah Bless.

P.S. WHO’s 8 October update confirms Kenya’s imported Bundibugyo Ebola case following travel from the DRC through Uganda. The patient died; contact tracing followed. Follow official health updates. A grieving family and a public health response deserve better than forwarded funding conspiracies.

Let celebrate this welcome twist. Go with song.

Abud Omar stood shirtless at Nyayo, arguing with the kit manager.

He had just given his national jersey to a supporter after Kenya’s 1–1 draw against Eritrea. The captain went to thank the fans; the kit manager came to retrieve the shirt.
The kit manager’s approach had the urgency of a defender chasing a winger through a gap. Only this time, the prize was the shirt. Teammates stepped in to separate them.
A national shirt carries weight long before anyone puts a price on it.

You train for it. Wait for selection. Phone home when your name appears. Pull it over your head knowing that, for ninety minutes, you are wearing the country. Then you give it to someone who shouted himself hoarse for you.

Imagine that supporter getting home. The shirt comes out. People gather. Add the players’ signatures and it becomes something to frame, show your children, leave to somebody.

Or sell.

After that match, a fan advertised a jersey bearing ten players’ signatures and Benni McCarthy’s for KSh300,000. An asking price, mind you. We have not seen the buyer’s M-Pesa message. Nor is it established that this was Omar’s shirt.

FKF vice president McDonald Mariga explained: “It is because we only had one jersey.” The shirts were needed for the next away game. He promised: “From next year, we will solve it.”
What happens when the next call-up is a different size? Does the new winger inherit the departing defender’s shirt and safety pins?
Are we selecting the best eleven—or the eleven who fit?
Questions, not confirmed arrangements. But “we need it next game” deserves more than a washing instruction.
I remember the 20th century rugby routine: represent Kenya, return the shirt, shorts and stockings washed, then collect your allowance. But that was the stone age.
Never worn a national jersey? Imagine leaving your job. You surrender the laptop, phone and car keys.
Then HR points at your chest.
“The branded polo shirt also.”
Even the one you wore through three company retreats?
Getting the shirt is one thing. Being ready for what it demands is another.

That is where Gilbert Enoka, the rugby mental skills coach, comes in. He spent 23 years helping New Zealand’s All Blacks handle the pressure, including their 2011 and 2015 Rugby World Cup victories.

He has also worked with New Zealand’s Black Caps cricket team and Silver Ferns netball team. Now he is back with the All Blacks as Leadership and Mental Performance Coach under Dave Rennie, preparing for the 2027 Rugby World Cup.
These professionals already know how to play. The problem comes when seventy thousand spectators, a scoreboard and your own thoughts start offering instructions simultaneously.
You can practise a kick a thousand times. Taking it with your country’s hopes attached requires another kind of preparation. So does recovering after you miss. Mental readiness helps an athlete stay attentive, make decisions and remain useful when the afternoon stops following the training-ground script.

Enoka uses an old saying: wishbone, backbone, funny bone.

The wishbone gives you something to chase. Selection. A national shirt. A World Cup. For some of us, getting through school fees without the bank manager becoming a family friend.
The backbone carries the work—and the uncomfortable admissions.
The funny bone lets you laugh when your five-year plan discovers it did not consult life.
Ambition without action becomes a WhatsApp status.
Determination without perspective can make you unbearable at home.
After the All Blacks’ 2007 World Cup exit, Enoka acknowledged shortcomings in his preparation. He sought help. Imagine the boss saying at Monday’s meeting.

“We missed the target. Here is what I got wrong.”

No lengthy introduction about market conditions. No junior team leader suddenly owning the entire failure. You can almost hear the chairs stop squeaking.
But keep that funny bone ready.

Manchester City fans thought they were watching an expensively assembled orchestra. Then a certain re-tired rugby player circulated Milli Vanilli wearing City shirts. Remember their song, Girl You Know It’s True?

Let us check who was paying for the music. Milli Vanilli gave us the hair, dancing and faces on the sleeve. Other people supplied the recorded vocals. Their Grammy was revoked in 1990. Now Rob and Fab wear City shirts, courtesy of fellow “creators” with the funniest of memes delivered courtesy of paid AI imaging.

Citeh fans, remain seated. Your players really played. Agüero really scored. The players were real. They were amazing finds. The awkward question concerns the money.

Robinho: £32.5 million. Agüero: £38 million. Kevin De Bruyne: a reported £55 million. Roughly £125.5 million before wages. You watched the unveiling. Bought the shirt. Explained to your United-supporting neighbour what a properly managed club looked like.

Then the accountants entered the chat.

On September 29, the independent commission found City guilty on 114 of 115 charges. City denies wrongdoing and has appealed. City was cleared of one failure-to-cooperate allegation. The financial charges all stood.

Even a class monitor would struggle with that report card.

The commission found that sponsors paid only part of the recorded fees, with the owner’s company, Abu Dhabi United Group, providing the balance. Alongside arrangements reducing recorded costs, the schemes distorted City’s financial position by more than £900 million across nine seasons. So, my good friends Obewa Jones, Arrex and the sky-blue faithful, while you admired De Bruyne’s passing range, the commission examined the money’s route to Manchester.

City’s reported defence says the additional sponsorship money came from the Abu Dhabi government, rather than the owner’s company. The commission rejected that explanation; City is challenging its findings.
Same destination. Fierce argument about whose pocket.
You knew who supplied the passes. Did you know who supplied the pounds?
Before rival fans reallocate medals on WhatsApp, punishment remains undecided. The £900 million is an accounting distortion, not a fine. Relegation has not been announced. Etihad told the US government in 2015 that it funded the sponsorship itself. City’s reported defence now points to Abu Dhabi government money.

Somebody needs to reconcile the background vocals.

The Premier League has released a redacted decision, with further material still confidential.
Here in Kenya, we are also asking for paperwork—for the $16 billion Dangote refinery.
Different project. Familiar request: show us the agreement. Ekuru Aukot has requested the agreement and ownership details; President Ruto told critics to use proper channels.
Citizens and supporters can applaud an announcement while still asking to see what sits behind it. That is reasonable scrutiny.
Please pass the documents with the ribbon-cutting photographs.

Then came the news from Tennessee. Christa Gail Pike received two doses of a lethal-injection drug on September 30. She continued breathing. Witnesses reported snoring. AP reported that an ambulance eventually took her to hospital.

How do you sleep through your own execution?

But “slept through it” sounds peaceful. Her attorneys said she was unconscious and on a ventilator, receiving medical care after the state’s attempt to kill her.
Pike was 18 when she killed 19-year-old Colleen Slemmer in 1995. She was convicted of murder after a sustained assault. Colleen’s life and her family’s loss must not become background to a startling headline.
Governor Bill Lee halted the remaining executions for the year and ordered an independent investigation. The prison commissioner announced his resignation. Tennessee’s Department of Correction said it followed its established protocol.
That is where the backbone must return: examine the method, hear the warnings, account for the outcome.
Enoka’s three bones help us through difficult moments. They also remind us to know when the funny bone must fall silent.

“Then there is Luka Modrić, still doing his homework after all those trophies.”

Luka Modrić.

Coach Slaven Bilić remembers him joining Croatia’s Under-21 side in 2004 alongside boys two years older. Standing at 5 ft 8in and 66 kilos. Slightly built, but already willing to take responsibility.At a meal, Bilić’s son asked whether Real Madrid could win the league. Modrić listed Madrid’s remaining opponents, then Barcelona’s, in order. He knew where the title could be decided.
Some of us cannot name our next three customers without asking the sales administrator. Modrić knew the opposition’s homework too.
Thirteen seasons at Madrid brought 28 trophies, including six European Cups, plus the 2018 Ballon d’Or.
The useful part is the attention that survived the success. The medals accumulated; he kept studying the game.
Same forest. Different coaches. Still standing.
Salute. Another GOAT.
The wishbone got him dreaming. The backbone kept him preparing. The funny bone belongs to those who retired mentally after their first management appraisal.

For Monday: which bone are you relying on—and which have you neglected?

Have you made the difficult call, checked the figures, prepared for the next opponent? Or become so serious that nobody at home remembers the last time you laughed?
Back to Omar’s shirt.

A player wears it with pride. A supporter receives it with delight. The kit manager needs it for the next match. The shortage turns their meeting into an argument.

We can dream of great tournaments and demand brave performances. Somebody must order enough shirts—in the right sizes.
Let the next player worry about earning his place. Surely he should not also have to fit the previous fellow’s laundry.

Same Forest. Different Monkeys.
Mubarikiwe. Jah Bless.

For a week when the explanations deserve as much attention as the performance.
Milli Vanilli — Blame It on the Rain.

Rose Naliaka became Kenya’s first female professional golfer, then started an academy to teach girls who might otherwise never have had the chance to play. She visited schools to find them.
One of those schools was Jamhuri Primary.
Rose selected a group of girls there. Serah Khanyereri wanted to go too, but she was left out. She was under five feet tall, and Rose worried that she was not mature enough to board the matatus to practice. Serah has clarified that point: Rose did not think she was too short to play golf. The concern was the journey to training.It was a reasonable concern.
It still left one little girl watching the others get picked.
Serah found out where they practised and went to the range. She borrowed a club from one of the selected girls and began hitting balls.
She kept turning up. After two weeks, Rose let her join.
In 2019, Serah travelled to the United States to study and play golf. The community college she first attended, in New Jersey, had no women’s golf team.She searched for another college and found St. Thomas University as it was starting its first women’s programme. She joined the team. Serah earned a Bachelor of Arts in Sport and Fitness Administration/Management and went on to study Sports Business at master’s level. St. Thomas named her a graduate assistant in its golf programme. She also coached children, worked as a golf course ranger and did data entry while pursuing her own game.

In May this year, she won the Mile High Women’s Open in Denver, her first professional victory. This month she entered LPGA pre-qualifying. Her three rounds totalled 226; she finished tied for 61st and did not advance.
But this is just one tournament.
There are many more to come. More training, travel and money. She needs our help. Read to the end to see how.

THE SWOOSH AND THE SHOPKEEPER

Nike spent years among the hundred corporate giants in America’s S&P 100. On 21 September, it was removed. The index is a shortlist drawn from the larger S&P 500; losing a place does not stop Nike trading or selling shoes. But it does tell us that the Swoosh no longer ranks among that particular group of heavyweights.
How does a brand with that much reach find itself there?
There is no single explanation for Nike’s troubles. But its push to sell more directly to customers, while pulling back from some wholesale relationships, raises a familiar sales question.

Why give a retailer part of the margin when you could sell the product yourself?
Because the retailer does more than take a slice. It buys and holds stock. It puts shoes where customers can see and try them. Its staff help someone find a fit. It learns what people in that neighbourhood ask for. If you reduce that relationship, your own operation has to take on the work.
Nike’s fiscal third-quarter results give the question some bite: wholesale revenue rose while Nike Direct revenue fell. Those figures do not prove the earlier distribution shift caused Nike’s wider decline. They do show why margin alone cannot settle the choice of route to market.

Nike is also facing challengers where it once looked untouchable. This month, Kylian Mbappé left Nike for Swiss brand On as it entered football. On already has Roger Federer as an investor and partner, and Thierry Henry has been working on its football plans since 2025. Those names will not sell boots by themselves. But while Nike works to rebuild the routes that put its products in customers’ hands, a smaller rival is recruiting some of sport’s most recognisable people to help create and sell its own.

Before celebrating a larger direct-sales margin on Monday, ask what each retailer does for you. Which customers do they reach? What do they hear? What would it cost to do those jobs yourselves?
Direct sales, wholesalers or a deliberate hybrid may each work.
Someone still has to reach the customer and make the sale.

THE CUSTOMER WHO CAME BACK

While Nike weighs how to reach shoppers, Quickmart has numbers on the ones who keep returning. Think of a stop on the way home: milk, bread, perhaps one more item before the till. You scan your Q-Points card and leave. Next week, you come back. The shop is on your route and has what you need.

Quickmart says it has about 2.5 million Q-Points members. They accounted for approximately 74% of its sales in 2025 and the first half of 2026.

The supermarket chain has proposed a listing on the Nairobi Securities Exchange. Its existing shareholder, Sokoni Retail Kenya, plans to sell existing shares representing half the company, with an option that could take the sale to 57.5%. Quickmart’s customers can now be offered a different kind of relationship: the chance to buy shares in a shop they already use. Buying Q-Points earned them shopping rewards; buying shares would make them part-owners.
For shoppers, the test remains the same: will the supermarket keep earning their visit next week? Those repeat customers helped build the business in which shares may now be sold. The loyalty card records that they came back and what they bought. It also explains why they chose Quickmart, or what might send them elsewhere next month.

For a sales team, the Monday exercise is simple. Find ten customers who have bought from you more than once. Ask what brought them back, what nearly put them off, and what they still buy somewhere else. Then listen long enough for an answer you did not expect.

ELEVEN VS FIFTEEN + KIRINYAGA BRIEFS

Australia led the world champion Springboks 42–17 after 64 minutes in Perth. Then four Wallabies went to the sin bin. For much of the final ten minutes, Australia had eleven men against fifteen. South Africa scored three tries, but Australia held on to win 42–38.

I thought rugby had supplied all the absurdity we needed for one Sunday. Then I saw what was happening in Kirinyaga-Kutus.
Residents were in the street holding up women’s underwear printed with
“NGAAF Kamau Murango 2027.”

Some complained that the garments did not fit.
Others asked why politicians were offering underwear when people needed help earning a living. One man pointed out that husbands could buy underwear for their wives themselves. The pictures were always going to travel. Senator James Kamau Murango denies producing, buying or distributing the garments. His name on them does not prove who ordered or paid for them. Kirinyaga Woman Representative Njeri Maina has asked for evidence identifying those responsible. Whoever arranged the giveaway, if it was one, may have wanted voters to remember a name (or not). The voters were talking instead about what they needed—and why somebody thought underwear was the answer.

The English language has been keeping notes.

THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE HAS BEEN WARNING US

The English language is truly a masterpiece. It can put two completely opposite ideas together and somehow persuade us that everything is perfectly normal.

Found missing. Open secret. Small crowd. English holds all three together as if there’s nothing strange about it, then doubles down: act naturally, it tells us, right after insisting something is clearly misunderstood, or fully empty, or pretty ugly.
By the time you reach original copies and an exact estimate, the language has stopped pretending to make sense. It just gets on with contradicting itself — a tragic comedy, a foolish wisdom, liquid gas, a working holiday, work from home.
We even have a name for these strange marriages: oxymorons.
Then COVID arrived and gave us the modern classic: Social distancing.
And according to whoever sent this WhatsApp forward, the undisputed heavyweight champion remains:
Happily married.
I forwarded it to someone carefully.
But somewhere between laughing and protecting my domestic peace, I realised that perhaps English isn’t confused at all. Maybe it has simply been describing us.
We go on working holidays carrying laptops, chargers and three unfinished deadlines. We demand original copies from people who vanish down River Road to produce them. And anyone who has ever built a house in Kenya knows your fundi’s exact estimate is simply the amount you will definitely exceed.
Perhaps that’s why oxymorons work. The contradiction isn’t really in the words. It’s in us. We spend our lives holding two opposing ideas and somehow making both true.
As for the heavyweight champion, I’m not touching that one.
Some contradictions are better left unexplained.

Serah kept showing up. Quickmart’s customers keep coming back. Nike is rebuilding relationships it once thought it could do without. In Kirinyaga, someone appears to have confused putting a name on underwear with earning a vote.

On Monday, ask one person whose loyalty matters to you what makes it worth staying. Then give them time to answer.

Serah’s longest drive began with a borrowed club and a trip to practice she was thought too small to make. It is still underway.
Let’s get Serah to the next stage. Her GoFundMe—Backing Serah’s Dream in Women’s Golf—is open.

Stay loyal. Stay true.
Same Forest. Different Monkeys.
Mubarikiwe. Jah Bless.
Go with song

Sometime around 1990, a few of us were standing on Kimathi Street pretending we had absolutely no interest in going into Visions disco.
We had, of course, just been bounced.
Visions was one of Nairobi’s premier discos, and apparently enthusiasm alone did not meet the dress code. Between us, we probably owned two respectable shirts, one pair of proper shoes and somebody’s father’s jacket.

So there we were, squeezed onto the traffic island between the buildings the ancient Total petrol station and a jacaranda tree, trying not to look like young men who had just been rejected. Worse, the chiles (young ladies playing truant) kept walking past, heading exactly where we had been denied entry.
Then this guy appeared.
Tall. Dark. Handsome. TDH, as we used to say. Long jacket. Properly put together.
“You guys want to get in?”
Obvious…...
“I can sort you out.”
That was how I met Barrack Oswere.

Barre spoke at 300 kilometres an hour, yet somehow you understood every word. If Nairobi had a door with somebody standing in front of it saying No,
Barre knew somebody who could say Yes.
Visions cost a hundred bob. Serious money. Spending it required committee approval.
But Barre had discovered a loophole.
Trattoria, Gaetano Ruffo’s Italian restaurant, had been serving Nairobi since 1981. This was proper Nairobi posh, the sort of place where the bill arrived discreetly because asking too loudly might disturb the ambience.
When Ruffo opened Visions, Trattoria diners received complimentary passes. Many apparently had no desire to dance until morning.
Barre knew the waiters. The waiters knew Barre. I suspected Gaetano knew him too.

Somehow those unwanted complimentaries migrated from fine Italian dining to badly dressed young men hiding behind a jacaranda tree. Wednesday and Sunday nights suddenly became affordable. We joked that Barre probably carried the luminous Visions entry stamp in his pocket.
But getting us through that door was only the beginning.

A few years later, the boys had dispersed. University. First jobs. That awkward stage when your salary had arrived but your wardrobe had not received the memo. Some of us were still wearing school trousers to work. Stonewashed jeans and jeans with mysterious zips around the sides of the knees had been banished to weekends. Jackets came from fathers, uncles and any relative who had ever held an office job.

Then Barre reappeared.

We were at Cameo, Nairobi’s most popular bar-cinema, hanging around the pool table one evening and voila, Barre materialised. Looking sharp as always. He seemed to keep the best stock to himself.
This was the age of New Jack Swing. MTV. Soul Train. GUY on the Cassettes.
Wesley Snipes had become Nino Brown in New Jack City, while Samuel L. Jackson smoked the television.
Every young man in Nairobi believed he was one long coat away from becoming an international gangster, with Color Me Badd singing “I Wanna Sex You Up” as you stepped into a smoke filled club.
Barre pulled us aside. “You guys need suits.” We did.
That was my proper introduction to previously owned clothing—otherwise known as mitumba.
Barre had hooked up jackets, suits, trousers and shoes: the complete starter pack for a young man trying to look employed before his bank account fully agreed.
My first Barre jacket was brown and checked, with patches on the elbows. You know the kind, the ones British Lords wear at a fox hunt.
We called that style the Land Grabber jacket, after Nairobi city mandarins with an affinity for dispossessing innocent people of their shambas.
I wore mine with a navy-blue all-purpose button-down shirt, dark tan trousers and the only pair of black shoes I owned.
I thought I looked spectacular.
The ensemble was backed up by Davidoff Cool Water Cologne, as prescribed by a Dr. called Dre and a pharmacist called Snoop.
But perhaps Barre’s real product was not clothes.
It was confidence.
Barre taught us the small things. Match your belt with your shoes. A jacket could change how you entered a room. Looking sharp did not require waiting for the clothes in the shop window. By the time some of us could afford the Calvin Klein, we had already enjoyed the second-hand experience. Barre moved from taking orders office-to-office to opening Kings Castle—The Gentleman’s Shop—on Koinange Street. He dressed young men discovering salaries, offices, girlfriends and Nairobi. Years later, he summed up the philosophy:

“Don’t dress like your problems.”

I laughed when I first heard it. I understand it differently now.

Fourteen weeks ago, Barre left a comment on one of my Facebook stories. It was about Agal Koko and Beryl, a relationship that had endured for 29 years. Barre called the original story an “absolutely Mexican opera” only this one was real.
It was 1:25 in the morning. He had read it twice.
“KT,” he wrote, “you have lifted a brother.”
What I did not know was that Barre himself was bedridden. I wish I had known.
When somebody has been in your life that long, you assume there will be another conversation. Another joke. Another chance to ask, Do you remember those idiots outside Visions? We had travelled from youngsters with borrowed jackets, through careers, marriages and children, into that strange age when funerals begin appearing more regularly than weddings.

You dressed a lot of us before we knew how to dress ourselves.
The clothes now seem almost incidental.
Barre could not remove our problems.
He simply made sure we did not wear them on our sleeves.
Rest Brother. See you at the crossroads.

Which brings me to another young man surrounded by adults trying to prepare him for a very large room.

Manchester United have a 15-year-old called JJ Gabriel. At fifteen, most of us were negotiating permission to stay out later. Gabriel is already one of England’s most discussed young footballers. Last season, despite beginning it aged fourteen, he was named the Premier League Under-18 Player of the Season.
Now there is disagreement about his pathway. His representatives reportedly believe first-team promises were not kept. United say they are surprised by his request to leave. Barcelona and Real Madrid have been mentioned.

Same forest. Different monkeys.

The parent sees a child. The club sees talent. The football industry sees an asset.
And somewhere in the middle is a fifteen-year-old boy.
When your child has extraordinary talent, who decides he is ready?

Since Sir Alex Ferguson retired in 2013, United have made ten managerial appointments involving nine men.
Moyes. Giggs. Van Gaal. Mourinho. Solskjaer. Carrick. Rangnick. Ten Hag. Amorim.
And Carrick again.
Thirteen years. Nine men. Ten appointments.
How often can you change the man in the driver’s seat before somebody opens the bonnet?
Companies do it too. Miss target. Change the sales manager. Miss again. Change the commercial director.
By the third fellow, you better inspect the engine.

Meanwhile, Kenya produced a reminder about the environment in which talent must grow. Police reportedly raided a Kasarani operation repackaging maize flour into counterfeit branded packets.
Fake unga.
You avoided fake alcohol and stopped buying suspicious whisky from a fellow whose entire distribution network was the boot of a Probox.
Now even ugali requires due diligence.
Funny, until you think about the child we expect to become the next Faith Kipyegon or Beatrice Chebet.
Talent does not arrive fully formed. What surrounds it matters.

And this week, the world handed Kenya one enormous opportunity.
In 2029, Nairobi will host the World Athletics Championships, the first senior edition in Africa.
Not everybody was celebrating.

In The Times, Matt Lawton questioned whether Kenya, given its doping history, should have been awarded the championships. Kenya has had a serious doping problem. Serious interventions have followed, with visible efforts to strengthen testing, enforcement and oversight. There is still work to do.
But branding an entire athletics nation “tainted by doping” is another matter, especially when British sport has its own violations.
Talk about the Kettle calling the Birika black.
More interestingly, The Times said athletics had missed a “money-spinner in England.”
Aha.
London had £45 million in public funding committed with institutional sponsors to follow. Previous hosts explain why. Tokyo 2025 reported an impact equivalent to roughly KSh68 billion. Budapest, about KSh52 billion. Eugene, nearly KSh20 billion.
The studies measure different things, so this is not cash in the bank. But it shows the opportunity.
Hotels. Airbnbs. Airlines. Nganyas. Restaurants. Tour operators. Broadcasters. Creators. Iten. Merchandise.
The kibanda selling food outside Kasarani.
How much will spin through our economy, and remain after the final visitor leaves?

That brings me back to some badly dressed youngsters hiding behind a jacaranda tree on Kimathi Street.
We had reached the door to Visions. Barre got us through it.
But his greater gift came later. Access was only the beginning. Once the door opened, you had to enter with confidence and know what to do with the opportunity.
Kenya has just received one very large complimentary ticket.
London calls it a money-spinner.
Barre would have adjusted a jacket, checked the shoes and offered the advice he gave a generation of young men:

Don’t dress like your problems, Kenya.
Dress for the opportunity.

Same Forest. Different Monkeys.

Mubarikiwe. Jah Bless.
Go with song. The New Jack Swing.

Every woman knows her measurements. She also knows they are rarely just numbers.

In the wrong hands, a waist becomes an opinion. A dress size becomes a diagnosis.
A changing body becomes evidence before a court nobody remembers appointing.
And before anyone becomes uneasy, this is not another man volunteering his expertise on women’s bodies. Men who cannot locate their own trouser size without checking the label and occasionally asking the woman who bought it, should approach that subject with humility.
This is about what happens when the people holding the measuring tape mistake the measurement for the woman.

Taylor Townsend knows something about that.

In 2012, she was sixteen, the world’s number-one junior tennis player and reigning Australian Open junior champion. By the usual measurements of sport, Taylor was succeeding.
The United States Tennis Association looked at the same young woman and worried about her weight. It reportedly withheld tournament funding while she worked on her fitness. Her mother paid for her to compete at the US Open herself.

Taylor stands about five-foot-seven and weighs approximately 77 kilograms. While researching this story, I asked a female friend what dress size that might be in a Kenyan setting.

She proceeded to give me the full tutorial.

Her best estimate was 10–12 in America and 14–16 in Britain or Turkey. In China, Bangkok or Vietnam, she said, the label might carry a number I dare not publish. I have learnt enough new words—misogyny, objectification and narcissism—to know when to put down the measuring tape and move away slowly.
The lesson was more useful than the number. Sizes change between countries, shops and manufacturers.

The woman does not.

WHEN THE TEST MEASURES THE WRONG THING

Fitness is measurable. So are results. But body shape, fitness and ability are not interchangeable measurements, however often people squeeze them into the same dress. Last Friday, Taylor returned to the US Open and won the women’s doubles title alongside Kateřina Siniaková, completing her career Grand Slam in doubles.

Wimbledon. Australian Open. French Open. US Open.

The body they once considered unsuitable had answered with the one measurement sport cannot argue with: Results.
Taylor did not prove fitness was irrelevant. Elite sport would laugh at that. She proved something uncomfortable: the people holding the tape had allowed one measurement to become the whole story.
Women know how easily that happens.
A dress size enters the room quietly. Soon it is offering opinions about health, beauty, discipline, motherhood, desirability and whether somebody has “let herself go.”
The number said none of those things.

People did.

Ox Nché understands what happens when somebody measures differently. He was once a chubby child playing soccer in the Free State, South Africa. Fortunately, his coach saw not a failed winger, but a future rugby prop.
Ox is five-foot-nine and weighs about 122 kilograms.
Put him on a soccer field and he may look like a Teletubby in silk shorts.
Put him at loosehead prop and he becomes one of rugby’s most destructive forces.
Same body. Better question.
Not, “How do we make this child smaller?”
But, “What job is this body built for?”
I have spent enough time around rugby teams to know how easily coaches fall in love with the athlete drawn inside their heads.
Good coaching is sometimes nothing more complicated than looking twice.
Rassie Erasmus (South Africa Rugby’s Double World Cup winning coach) has turned looking twice into an art.

RASSIE’S BENCH AND KENYA’S THIRTY-EIGHT

On Saturday night in Baltimore, Rassie’s Springboks completed a 3–1 series victory over the All Blacks, winning the final Test 43–28.
South Africa had lost the opener 33–16.
There was no funeral.
Rassie did not burn the playbook, sack the forwards and ask the South African Fans to appoint a commission of inquiry.
He adjusted. The Boks won the next three Tests.
That is what depth gives a coach. He can change combinations without changing identity and release another group of forwards after the first has softened the ground. By the time the All Blacks look up, three gladiators who have leaned on them for fifty minutes are walking off.
Unfortunately, three other giants masquerading as bomb-removal experts are running on. Rassie’s genius is not simply selecting big men. South Africa has produced large men since before refrigerators needed electricity. His genius is knowing which body, skill and temperament belong to which moment.
A strong bench provides different answers.

Then there is Kenya’s Anti-Counterfeit Authority.

While Rassie can summon another international-quality forward, ACA chief executive Dr Robi King’a told the Senate his organisation has 120 employees.
Only 38 are counterfeit inspectors.
Thirty-eight people covering 47 counties and every category of counterfeit goods: fake medicine, cosmetics, electronics, spare parts and every product whose packaging arrived before its quality. You could fit all 38 inside one large Nairobi electric bus and still leave space for a preacher, three sacks of warus and somebody carrying a kienyeji chicken lovingly purchased by Khukhu’s (grandma) from her chama dividend.
This is what happens when an institution receives a Springbok-sized mandate and a village-team bench.
Perhaps the inspectors are not sleeping.
Perhaps there are simply too few to remain awake everywhere.

TWO TEAMS, TWO CLOCKS

Fake alcohol brought King’a before the Senate. He told the Senate committee that 77 per cent of the counterfeit alcohol his officers had seized was locally manufactured. Not smuggled. Not imported. Brewed here, bottled here, sold here.
Ministry of Interior’s nationwide crackdown shut down 12,150 unlicensed bars and 6,500 premises operating illegally near schools.
King’a traced the shortage to a recruitment freeze following a 2013 proposal to merge state agencies. The freeze remained. The market did not.

Mchimba kaburi huingia mwenyewe.
Keep digging beneath the people protecting the system and eventually all of us may fall in.
I have sat in enough EXCO meetings to recognise the next question:
“Can the team be more innovative?”
Fair enough. But innovation should not become a polite instruction for five people to do the work of twenty while remaining cheerful and available on WhatsApp.

This week the NFL offered another experiment. The San Francisco 49ers and Los Angeles Rams travelled to Melbourne facing the same journey and brutal time difference.
The 49ers arrived more than a week before kickoff. They trained, adjusted their sleep and forced their bodies towards Melbourne time. The Rams landed roughly a day before the game. Their plan was to remain close to California time: arrive, play and leave before jet lag completed the paperwork.
They had studied the journey and made a deliberate bet.
Then the 49ers beat them 27–7.
Travel cannot explain every mistake. But results are rude. Once the scoreboard appears, every clever theory must answer questions. One team looked prepared for Melbourne. Part of the other seemed stranded between Fiji and Samoa, asking the pilot whether it was still Thursday.
Preparation guarantees nothing. It removes some of failure’s hiding places.

THE LABEL AND THE LIFE

The wrong clock follows us home.

A salesperson enters a new market carrying yesterday’s script. A manager inherits a younger team but speaks the language of people who retired. A couple enters a new season, each demanding the person they married fifteen years ago.
Sometimes we have simply not adjusted.

Fr Sandro Ferretto served for years as a Catholic priest in Kenya. Then life changed.
At 55, the Italian former priest married Sharon Jepng’ok, a beautiful Tugen lady from Baringo South, in a Koito ceremony. It reportedly took place where he once served. People who knew him as Father welcomed him as Sandet—the groom.By his family’s account, the paperwork was long settled before the drums started in Kasiela, laicisation completed, Rome’s approval given.
The harder question was never the process. It was this:

What do you do when the life that once fitted you no longer describes who you have become?

Some remain inside an old identity because leaving may disappoint others.
Priest. Executive. Coach. Wife. Husband. Provider. Strong one.
Useful labels. Heavy labels. Sometimes sacred labels.

Taylor refused to let someone else’s picture define her. Ox found the field where his body made sense. Rassie changed the answer without abandoning the mission. The 49ers adjusted to where the game would be played.
Sandro chose his next title.

Husband.

Strong decisions rarely look dramatic when you’re standing close to them. Most of the time they look like patience wearing a disguise. A coach who waits one more season before cutting a player, a woman who ignores a label until the label runs out of power over her, a man who lets a title go quietly instead of defending it loudly.

Next week, look twice before you decide what a body, a bench or a life is actually built for:
at the child carrying the “wrong” shape,
the employee who doesn’t fit the picture in your head,
the institution running on a bench too thin for its mandate,
and the life whose old label has simply grown too tight to breathe in.

Where might you still be judging someone, you included,
by the wrong measurement?

Tonight, CirCute and Jo-el sing Manyake: (All Sizes)
Because labels may be familiar, but only you know whether they still fit.

Same Forest. Different Monkeys.
Mubarikiwe. Jah Bless.
Go with song.

September is Suicide Prevention Month. On 10 September, the world marks World Suicide Prevention Day.

Early this week I was browsing my WhatsApp health-advice group, the kind where sciatica and swollen knees get diagnosed by committee.
We have quietly moved from comparing hangovers to comparing blood-pressure readings.
Then I came across a post by psychologist Annabell Gichure introducing World Suicide Prevention Month.

The laughter stopped.

Suicide is one of those subjects we discuss very well after the fact. Once somebody has died, everyone suddenly remembers the signs.
He had become quiet, she had withdrawn, he stopped returning calls, she gave away something she loved.

We reconstruct the distress so beautifully and precisely, right when the person who needed us to notice can no longer speak to correct our timeline. Yet people do speak—not always through a dramatic announcement, but through smaller signals: a joke that lands wrong, a cancelled plan, an unusual goodbye, a WhatsApp status posted at 2.17 a.m.

Sometimes it is the person who has always looked strongest saying, almost casually: “Bro, nimechoka.” (I am tired)
Our mistake is waiting for them to use the correct words.

On 9 January 2025, Justice Lawrence Mugambi declared Section 226 of Kenya’s Penal Code unconstitutional. Until then, someone could reach the lowest point of their life, survive—and face arrest, prosecution, a fine or imprisonment.
Parliament is now working to delete the offence formally. Nigeria is also moving in the same direction: away from punishment and towards care. But changing the law is easier than changing how families, workplaces and friends respond.
The first response does not have to be clever.

I hear you. I am here. Tell me more.

Speaking out takes courage. Listening properly is also an act of courage.
Ask twice. Sit with the uncomfortable answer. Help them find professional support. If the danger feels immediate, do not leave them alone.

Befrienders Kenya: 0722 178 177—call, SMS or WhatsApp, Monday to Friday, 9 a.m.–5 p.m. For immediate danger, call 999 or 112, or go to the nearest hospital.

Not everyone who changes lives is heard when it matters.

Dr Gladys West was a Black American mathematician hired by the US Navy in 1956. Much of her work modelling the Earth’s shape and gravity. Work that became foundational to GPS, was classified. Even her own children did not fully understand what their mother had helped create.
Recognition came late. In 2018, aged 87, she was inducted into the US Air Force Space and Missile Pioneers Hall of Fame. She died in January this year at 95.
Today, GPS gets you to an unfamiliar office and exposes the partner who said, “I’m just around the corner,” while their blue dot enjoys life in Naivasha.

A Black woman helped the world find its location. The world took decades to find her.

Elsewhere, somebody had finally been allowed off a very large ship.

The USS Abraham Lincoln arrived in Thailand carrying roughly 5,000 sailors and Marines after a 286-day deployment, including a record 264 consecutive days at sea.
They needed rest.

Thailand gave them five days, in Pattaya, of all places.

Here in Kenya, our ladies of the twilight would have studied the numbers and immediately formed a WhatsApp chama.

Five thousand seamen. Two hundred and sixty-four days without shore leave.
Five days in town.

Forget feasibility studies. That is a market signal. Locally, Somebody would already be selling “Executive Naval Packages,” payable in dollars, with transport available from the aircraft carrier. Surge pricing would begin before the first sailor reached Kilindini Harbour.
Behind the mischief was something serious. The crew had endured isolation, uncertainty, restricted contact with home and the strain of combat. Shore leave was recognition that even people trained to remain strong eventually need rest, company and ordinary human contact.

Sometimes speaking out sounds like a confession. Sometimes it sounds like 5,000 people finally being allowed ashore.

Back home, two Kenyan stories made the same point in different sports.

Malkia Strikers arrived at the African Women’s Volleyball Championship as defending champions and ten-time continental winners. They swept Zambia and Mali, dismissed Nigeria 3–0, recovered to beat Algeria 3–1, then crushed Cameroon to reach the final.

That run also secured Kenya a place at the 2027 FIVB Volleyball World Cup.

By the time they faced Egypt at Kasarani, the women had done what we always demand of our national teams: wear the flag, win matches and make the country pay attention.

But the real defeat had begun before the first serve.

Ahead of the final, the players threatened to boycott over Sh8.9 million in unpaid allowances, outstanding since they entered residential camp.
Egypt won 3–0. Kenya missed an eleventh African title and Africa’s direct qualification place for the 2028 Olympics.

Then there is Kelvin Kiarie, the African freestyle skating champion nominated for National Hero status.
Instead of quietly accepting, he asked why the country was preparing to call him a hero when the Sports Ministry had never supported his international competitions or reimbursed him.
He and his wife had reportedly dipped into their four-year-old daughter’s school fees to fund a competition in Benin. Kenyans crowdfunded just enough to get him there. He took a matatu to the airport late at night for a 3 a.m. flight—then returned with gold and silver medals. Later, he won another two African golds in Egypt.

No state funding. No official reception. No settled reimbursement.
But somebody had found a form and nominated him for national-hero status.

Kenya may not always finance your journey, but we shall laminate your certificate.

When athletes win, officials arrive in tracksuits they never sweat in, find the centre of the photograph, dance and give speeches about patriotism and the girl child.
When allowances are due, everybody develops a hamstring injury.

Do not decorate people for surviving the neglect you helped create.

Pay the women. Reimburse the man. Then bring the medals and matching tracksuits.

But speaking out does not always set you free.

For nearly 30 years after Award winning Rapper Tupac Shakur’s 1996 murder, nobody was convicted. Then Duane “Keffe D” Davis did what silence never asked of him.
He kept talking.
In 2008, Keffe D gave investigators a detailed account under a protected proffer agreement. The arrangement restricted how those particular statements could be used against him.
That might have been the moment to embrace silence.
Instead, he repeated the story in documentaries and interviews. In 2019, he published Compton Street Legend, placing himself inside the white Cadillac from which the shots were fired.
Protection for one police interview was never a lifetime licence to repeat the story everywhere there was a microphone.
When the case finally reached court, Keffe D’s lawyer faced the sort of assignment that should attract hardship allowance. He had to argue that none of it was true.
The memoir was fiction. The interviews were exaggeration. Keffe D had lied for years, placing himself at the centre of one of music’s most famous murders for money and attention. In other words:
My client has told this story for years. Please do not believe him.
The jury believed him instead. On 31 August 2026, Davis was convicted of first-degree murder with a deadly weapon. Prosecutors did not claim he fired the shots. They argued that he obtained the gun and organised the retaliatory attack after Tupac and his entourage assaulted Davis’s nephew, Orlando Anderson. Davis is due to be sentenced on 13 October and intends to appeal.
Kikulacho ki nguoni mwako. ( What consumes you is inside your clothes)
Sometimes it is betrayal by somebody close. Sometimes it is your own mouth, your memoir and a tour of television studios.

Series: 2–1. Siya Kolisi: the most successful Springbok captain by Test victories.
We ni we Ndzovu. (you are the elephant)
See you in Baltimore. Godspeed, brah!

Which takes me back to Annabell Gichure’s WhatsApp post.
This week, choose one person, not the one posting gym photographs and winning quotes, but the one who has gone quiet, whose performance has dipped, who keeps saying they are tired.
Call them without a motivational poster or a diagnosis.
Ask: How are you—really?
Then leave room for the honest answer.
If they may be in immediate danger, stay with them. Help them reach emergency or professional care.
The law can stop criminalising distress. Parliament can amend the Penal Code. Institutions can publish policies.
But prevention still comes down to one ordinary human moment:
Somebody speaks.
And somebody else decides whether to listen.

Speak out—and when somebody finally does, listen like it matters.

Same Forest. Different Monkeys.

Mubarikiwe. Jah Bless.
Go with song. (Tupac said it all)

In my early days of building a sales consulting business, I entered a deal with my friend Ama, proprietor of Booby Trap Lingerie.
Ama had an entire room of bras and panties where customers came for viewing, fitting and wine tasting. I was allowed into the room when it was empty.

During fittings, I was politely directed to the TV Room, given the keys to the whisky cabinet and asked to wait until summoned.
I accepted this discrimination because I had received what I considered product-knowledge training.

Brasserie basics: band size and cup size.

Thirty-six C. Forty D. I could say the numbers with the confidence of a man who had learnt two French words and was already correcting the waiter.
This week, while researching for this article, I called another lingerie entrepreneur—an engineer who became an accountant before putting all that accumulated knowledge into selling bras.
Let’s call him Wemby.
He gave me the Executive MBA.

Gentlemen, welcome to Bra Sizing for Dummies.

The number (36, 38) is the band: the measurement around the torso, just beneath the breasts.
The letter (D, E, F, G, H, E, EE) is the cup, calculated from the size of the breast.

Brands and sizing systems vary, which is why “my wife looks roughly like you” is not a specification.Never enter a lingerie shop, study the attendant’s chest and use her as your wife’s measuring cup.

That is not shopping. It is preparation for a commission of inquiry.

The safest method is to steal a bra your wife already finds comfortable and read the label. You must know where the bras live, remove one without disturbing the arrangement and leave the house carrying it.

If your daughter, watchman or neighbour finds you at the gate holding a 38D, your explanation—”It is for research”—will not improve matters.

There is another method. Wait until your partner falls asleep, then use the hands God gave you to estimate the merchandise. You must later preserve that exact grip, find a tape measure and persuade somebody in a lingerie shop that the distance between your thumb and forefinger is an internationally recognised standard.

The woman buying beside the road has a different challenge. There is no fitting room, and whatever does not fit returns to the pile. She therefore tries the bra over her dress. Women recognise procurement under difficult operating conditions.

At Sh300 to Sh500 sits the Nduthi bra: affordable, available and likely to get you there, although comfort and safety were not included in the quotation.

Between Sh2,000 and Sh5,000 is the Probox range—better finishing, less noise and a decent chance everything arrives together without the uniboob effect. These are the Kaunda suits of bras: dependable, respectable and likely to have a half decent return policy.(and could also come in pairs)

Then there is the Ferrari. It can cost upwards of Sh20,000 before you add the matching underwear, thongs and other trimmings that mysteriously cost more despite containing less material.

Bras are engineering. Nursing bras need access without surrender. Sports bras control movement; some compress everything into one broad based coalition while others insist on following the constitution and separation of powers.

A strapless bra is independent suspension, like the Subaru Outback’s all-wheel drive. Beneath a linen dress or wedding outfit, that unseen engineering is what you are paying for.

Then comes the evening scene many men recognise. Your partner enters the house and removes her bra before she has removed her shoes or finished saying hello. Some husbands take this as an invitation.
Breathe brother.
She is not inviting you. She is terminating an uncomfortable eight-hour contract.

Bodies change through weight loss, pregnancy, hormones and age.
Bras stretch.
A garment that rides up, spills, gaps or requires negotiations every 30 minutes is applying for early retirement.

What fitted the woman you married five years ago may not fit the woman now carrying school fees, targets, children, ageing parents and half the emotional administration of the household.

That is where this story develops some weight.

Ama’s fitting room taught me that the part carrying the load is rarely the part receiving compliments.

Which is how a room full of bras led me to a basketball player, a computer-chip company and an artificial-intelligence business with the cuddly name Hugging Face.

Kevin Durant is one of the finest basketball players of his generation. Away from the court, he and his business partner Rich Kleiman invest in young companies. Sports-business writer Joe Pompliano says they placed $100,000 into Hugging Face’s seed round and another $150,000 into its next funding round.

Hugging Face began as a consumer chatbot. It later changed direction and became something much more valuable: the place where artificial-intelligence developers share models, datasets and tools.

Then there is Nvidia. If artificial intelligence were a construction boom, Nvidia would be selling much of the cement. It designs the powerful computer chips behind many AI systems and has become one of the world’s most valuable companies.

Reports this week said Nvidia was acquiring Hugging Face for $12.9 billion. Neither company had publicly confirmed a completed transaction as this article went to press, so the champagne must remain in the fridge. Pompliano estimates Durant’s $250,000 could eventually return more than $60 million after dilution.

The numbers are estimates. The timing is the story.

Durant entered before Hugging Face became fashionable—before the conference panels, AI vocabulary and cousins announcing they had always understood machine learning.

Football has its own early investors. They do not receive shares. They pay school fees, matatu fare, tournament costs and Saturday mornings beside dusty pitches while pretending not to calculate what the dream is costing.

Last Wednesday, 23-year-old Job Ochieng started for Real Sociedad against Real Madrid at the Santiago Bernabéu. His shot helped create Luka Sučić’s equaliser before Madrid eventually won 4–1.

On television, it looked as though a Kenyan had suddenly appeared among Kylian Mbappé, Vinícius Júnior and Jude Bellingham.

Job began at Express Soccer Academy, moved to Ligi Ndogo in Nairobi and left for Spain at 17 after his family and community helped finance the trip. In Gran Canaria, the agency handling his move stopped supporting him. He was stranded. People at CD Maspalomas found him accommodation, work and a route back into football. He later joined Real Sociedad and climbed through its C and B teams.

The Bernabéu did not create Job Ochieng. It switched on brighter lights.

From Job’s journey we move, naturally in Kenya, to drinking. A photograph circulated of a number plate reading KEG 500L. It appears to be a mock-up, not an issued plate. NTSA says future combinations cannot be reserved before their series becomes available.

Facts settled, admire the ambition.
Most Kenyans take their keg 500 millilitres at a time.
This person ordered industrial.

Place beside it the photograph of Uhuru Kenyatta drinking Senator Keg in Kisumu during the 2017 campaign, William Ruto smiling behind him, and politics joins the round without being invited.

The laughter fades when we ask what is actually inside the bottle. A Euromonitor study commissioned by the Alcoholic Beverages Association of Kenya estimated illicit alcohol at 59 per cent of the market by volume in 2022. Its category estimates placed wine above 50 per cent, beer at 47, whisky 43, vodka 37 and rum 32. They are estimates, not a census of every bottle, but counterfeit alcohol can do more than cheat KRA. It can blind or kill.

Silas Nyanchwani brings the story home in his essay, “Shosho’s Last Batch.” He remembers Christmas 2003, when his uncles persuaded Bhabha, his Kisii grandmother and a retired brewer, to make chang’aa one final time.

Maize, sprouted finger millet, fermentation, buried pots.
No PowerPoint, no consultant with a laser pointer.
Knowledge lived in her hands.

Silas calls it “a zero-waste circular economy” before consultants invented the phrase and started charging for it.”

I felt seen and attacked.

His closing line carries the loss: “Bhabha’s last batch deserved better than to be the end of a lineage. It should have been a founding vintage.” Read Silas’ article here.

Nyanchwani S (Cool Man)

Shosho’s Last Batch: A Case for the Chang’aa Renaissance

My grandmother brewed chang’aa in her prime. It is how she raised ten children, and nobody in the village held it against her because, in those days, brewing was not a crime so much as a profession with occupational hazards, like teaching or marriage…

Read more

4 months ago · 36 likes · 4 comments · Silas Nyanchwani

Somewhere in your office, one employee knows how everything actually works. At home, your mother carries a recipe, a family history or the truth about that piece of land. We call it experience until the carrier leaves. Then we call an emergency meeting.

Dolly Parton understood ownership. People discussed her cup size while she retained her publishing rights. She wrote “I Will Always Love You” in 1973. Nineteen years later, Whitney Houston’s recording spent 14 weeks atop the Billboard Hot 100. Parton used some royalties to buy property in a predominantly Black Nashville neighbourhood and called it “the house that Whitney built.”

Whitney supplied the magnificent voice. Dolly still owned the song.

Dolly also started the Imagination Library because her father could not read or write. By 2025, it had gifted 304,539,509 books across five countries.
Amazing kindness, amazing humanness even when her bank accounts overflowed.

As we start a new month, why not check your current size. Does everything fit?
What talent have you been nurtuting and is time to let go?
What idea, process or customer relationship have you allowed somebody else to own?

Rest in peace, Dolly.

Same Forest, Different Monkeys.

Mubarikiwe. Jah Bless.
Go with song. (Dolly could rap too)

The first time I saw HeHa Movers, I thought someone had assembled a Kenyan version of the Wu-Tang Clan. I almost expected a beat to drop, followed by a new song and a new rhyme.
Straight out of thug life.
Uptown kids in the 90s had names for guys who looked like this: Oboho. Mgondi.
The new-age cool kid might say Wasee. Madingo.
These ones answered to something else.
HeHa
/ˈheɪ hɑː-hɑː-hɑː/
pronounced: He (hay) + Ha (ha-ha-ha)
noun
Kenya’s favourite movers; a fearsome-looking crew trusted with your furniture, house keys and, apparently, your entire life.
verb (informal, Kenyan)
To move, remove or relocate something—or someone—whose time has come.

Example: All Blacks walijenga Heha mission ya Springboks
(Yesterday the All Blacks sent HeHa Movers the Springboks’ hotel address.)

Tuachie keys. (leave the keys with us)

These were the guys you imagined meeting in a dark corner and quietly surrendering your wallet before anybody asked.
In 2026, the transaction would be more sophisticated.
Wallet. Mobile phone. Password. M-Pesa PIN. Voter’s card.

Except HeHa were not coming for your money.

They were coming for your furniture.
No international affiliation. No stickers pronouncing FRAGILE. You handed them the keys and went to work. By evening, your entire life had moved house. Beds assembled. Television connected. Perhaps even the milk transferred from the old fridge into the new one.

Then the internet took over.

Soon HeHa were moving relationships, tenants, politicians and football teams. After Manchester United lost, somebody dressed them in Hull City colours. Nobody needed an explainer. The movers had arrived.
HeHa now meant the discussion was over. Negotiation had failed.
Somebody had stayed beyond checkout time.

Like it or not, something had to move.

Some saw harmless Kenyan creativity. Others saw the comic normalisation of goonism. Today they remove your sofa. In August 2027 the meme places them outside Parliament.
Maybe that asks too much of a joke. Kenyans have always used humour to domesticate what frightens us.
For marketers, HeHa is the dream and nightmare arriving in the same truck.

Companies spend millions trying to enter ordinary banter. Agencies are hired. Strategy retreats are held. Twelve versions of one hashtag travel around the building awaiting approval. HeHa showed up with stern faces and three words.

Kenya’s netizens handled the distribution.

Then people began changing the product without permission. Once customers start finishing the joke, the brand belongs to whoever creates the next meme. HeHa may have wanted to move households.
Kenya appointed them official movers of anything whose time had expired.

Toyota knows something about entering ordinary speech.

“The car in front is a Toyota.”

That advertising line sounded as though it had been written after an afternoon in Nairobi traffic. Look ahead: Corolla, Probox, Vitz, Fielder, Hiace or Land Cruiser. Look behind and there was probably another one flashing its lights.

By 2018, Toyota reportedly accounted for nearly 60 per cent of Kenya’s new and used vehicle sales. Of the 62,495 used vehicles imported during the 12 months to June 2023, 58,972—94.3 per cent—came from Japan.

Now something inside some of those cars must move.

CFAO Mobility Kenya says certain Toyotas manufactured between 2001 and 2017 may contain defective Takata airbag inflators. Heat and humidity can degrade the propellant. If the airbag deploys, the inflator may rupture and fire metal fragments into the cabin.

Yes. The airbag.

More than 100 million Takata inflators involving over 20 manufacturers have been recalled worldwide. It became the largest automotive recall in history. CFAO is inspecting affected Kenyan vehicles and replacing the airbags free of charge. What it has not publicly disclosed is how many are on our roads.

That’s the real question.

A vehicle sold new in Japan may arrive in Mombasa, change owners twice and become somebody’s faithful runaround in Nyeri, Migori or Kitengela. Toyota may still have the chassis number. The name beside it could belong to somebody who has not seen that car since Obama’s first term.
The warning that reached me came through an insurance company. CFAO presented the campaign to the Association of Kenya Insurers. AKI then asked insurers to alert affected customers and help CFAO reach the people currently driving the vehicles, subject to data-protection safeguards.

Toyota may know the car. The insurer may know where it sleeps tonight.

Owners of Toyotas manufactured between 2001 and 2017 should check the chassis or vehicle identification number with CFAO. Inspection and replacement are free.
HeHa made handing over your keys sound like a joke. This time, hand them to the people authorised to remove something that should not remain inside your car.

Then take them back.

Somewhere between Tinder’s swipe right and the church elder’s wait upon the Lord, somebody created Adventist Dating. https://adventistdating.com
The algorithm has already removed smokers, Saturday workers and those who believe Friday evening is when the weekend should begin noisily.
Doctrine is handled before hobbies, height or whether the potential soulmate owns a pressure cooker.

A 2026 SSRS survey found that 37 per cent of American adults had used a dating site or app. People are there because the apps sometimes work. They are also there because meeting somebody after a certain age is no longer as simple as looking interesting at a wedding and waiting for a persistent auntie.

Faith narrows the search. It does not remove filters, subscription plans, ghosting or the married person whose profile says “complicated.”

Character development—also known as heartbreak—can still arrive wearing appropriate church clothes.

Nor are all the people returning to this market young.

Since 1990, the divorce rate among adults over 50 has doubled. Among those over 65, it has tripled. Researchers call it grey divorce.

Sometimes there is no explosive argument. No flying plates. No relative arriving at midnight to conduct emergency diplomacy. Just a slow drift that becomes visible after the children leave. Financial independence makes departure possible. The stigma is weaker. People are also living long enough to calculate how many years may still be left.

At 50, another 20 years is not a footnote.

Dating after 50 used to be quiet(or so I’m told). A subtle inquiry at Bible study. Perhaps golf. A chance meeting at a wedding, followed by discreet enquiries about “that gentleman who was sitting with the cousins.”

Not anymore.

Now there are profiles, brutal age filters and demands for a recent photograph because the one beside the waterfall appears to have been taken during Mwai Kibaki’s “Tosha” rally.

The easy interpretation is that Gen X and the boomers are ageing disgracefully. Maybe. Twenty years is still a long time to remain where affection, conversation or respect have left the room.

So older people are moving. Out of marriages. Into smaller houses. Onto dating apps. Occasionally back to church after discovering that OnlyFans has its own version of spiritual deliverance.
And while HeHa may transport the sofa, something moved at Ellis Park on Saturday.

THE CENTURION’S CURSE

The Springboks entered as back-to-back world champions and favourites. Home ground. Early scrum dominance. South Africa led 13–12 at halftime, then 16–12.
New Zealand went home 33–16 winners.
Five tries to one. South Africa’s 12-match winning streak was over.

It was Damian de Allende’s 100th Test. He became the fourth Springbok to reach that milestone against the All Blacks—and the fourth to lose.
Percy Montgomery, John Smit and Jean de Villiers had already discovered that address.

Same Forest. Different Springboks.

If you have sat through a Monday morning pipeline meeting, you know this match. One company has the larger sales force, famous brand and 1,000 leads in the CRM. Everybody reports plenty of activity. The smaller competitor finds an opening and takes the business.

Territory does not pay salaries. Neither do 1,000 unclosed leads.

This week, everybody moved something: furniture, dangerous airbags, relationships and five rugby balls across the try line.
Not all movement is progress. Sometimes we change houses and carry the same disorder with us.
We stay busy—very busy—and call it momentum.

The scoreboard tells the real story.

Have a mobile week.

Keep moving. Keep selling. Keep becoming.
Msitu ni ule ule. Nyani wale wale. (Same Forest. Different Monkeys.)

Mubarikiwe. Jah Bless.
Go with song. (A real banger from the 90s)

Taye Diggs posted a black-and-white photograph with four words: “28 years ago today!” He is shirtless on a Jamaican beach, holding Angela Bassett by the waist.

More than 16,000 people reacted. Five hundred commented. Another 674 shared it. Apparently, How Stella Got Her Groove Back still has unfinished business with us.

The film opened in August 1998. Bassett played Stella, a successful 40-year-old stockbroker who travels to Jamaica and falls for Winston, a man roughly half her age. Diggs was making his film debut. He was 27 when the movie came out and is now 55. Bassett turned 68 on 16 August.
The photograph sells possibility well.

The young man is temptation without a shirt.

Jamaica is warm.
Nobody is discussing credit card statements, hospital shifts or who forgot to buy electricity tokens. Winston arrives after Stella has built the career, raised the child and earned the holiday.

THE AFFORDABLE BOYFRIEND

Edwin Sifuna told a less polished love story during Nurses’ Week celebrations in Migori in May 2025. Before the microphones, Senate and familiar blue suits, he was a broke young lawyer living in a servant quarter in South B. His first love, Cynthia, was studying nursing. He recalled that she would return from demanding hospital shifts and still look after him. Before telling the story publicly, he warned her by text that she was about to be in the news.
“Don’t burn. (Usichome),” she replied.

Would Cynthia choose him today?

Not Senator Sifuna. Remove the title, salary and influence. Put the young man back in that servant quarter and hand him a dating profile. There is no photograph from the future showing what he becomes.
Cynthia had no TikTok FYP, Facebook, LinkedIn or Instagram reel supplying evidence of momentum.
She made a judgement before the market supplied confirmation.

I have seen the same thing in sales. The person everybody overlooks in year one may still be rising three years later.
One salesperson I trained was easy to miss at first. She was not the monthly champion and never produced the early numbers that make managers begin speeches with, “When I joined this industry…”
Her strength was activity. She fearlessly called new prospects, followed up old leads, faced rejection and returned the next day to do it again.
The improvement appeared before the commissions did.

During one training session, I used the word mediocre. She later told me privately that she was frightened of becoming mediocre. Managers, be careful with your words; some remain with people for life. For almost three years, others still sold more. She kept calling and following up while the scoreboard offered little encouragement.

The results caught up. She moved into another product and market, established an independent agency and now receives trips, accolades and regular recognition. In my professional assessment, she sits among roughly the top five per cent of Kenya’s approximately 11,000 registered insurance agents. That is my judgement, not an official AKI or IRA ranking. Independent-agent production is also not the same thing as winning an award tied to one principal underwriter.

In 2025, 1,195 agents qualified for the Association of Kenya Insurers awards, up from 1,084 the previous year; 67 per cent were women. Recognition matters. So do the calls, appointments, follow-ups, conversion ratios and persistency that appear before it.

Rugby clubs cannot wait for finished products either. At Kabeberi Sevens, Kenya Harlequin FC reached the men’s semifinal before losing narrowly 5-21 to KCB. Mwamba and Impala were prominent in the women’s competition, while an all-female officiating group handled Division Two fixtures.
Quins now prepares to join another celebrity to mark 60 years of Christie Sevens..

Players, coaches, referees, medics and volunteers need somewhere to practise before anybody calls them valuable. On a rugby field, that development is measured over seasons. In a hospital, the window may be minutes. Nurses spend their working lives reading the signs before the result is obvious.

There are several versions. Choose carefully.

THE ICU NURSE

ICU patients may be sedated, ventilated or connected to machines delivering medication and monitoring failing organs. The nurse watches tiny changes because a small change can become a large problem very quickly. If you arrive home announcing that everything is collapsing because Arsenal lost, she will listen respectfully. She has seen collapse.
Yours is emotional and does not require intubation.

THE EMERGENCY-ROOM NURSE

The ER nurse does not know what comes through the door next: an accident victim, a child struggling to breathe, an intoxicated brawler or somebody whose headache began three weeks ago but became an emergency at 2 a.m. Triage establishes who needs immediate intervention and who can wait. She has assessed your long explanation about disappearing for four days. Your condition is stable.
You will be discharged, with no more post hospitalization visits.

THE WARD NURSE

Ward nursing lacks the drama of the emergency room. It means medication rounds, wound care, records, relatives and returning to the same patient tomorrow. Progress can be too slow to see from one shift to the next. This is Cynthia coming home after work and checking whether Sifuna had eaten. Do not confuse consistency with unlimited capacity:
professional care is not an application for an unpaid shift at home.

THE PARAMEDIC—NOT A NURSE, (as I was harshly advised many years ago)

Paramedics work where trouble begins: roadsides, homes, sports grounds and public events. They assess, stabilise and transport patients towards definitive care. Depending on certification and protocols, they may manage airways, establish intravenous access and administer emergency medication before a doctor is present. While the family WhatsApp group is still debating hospitals, the paramedic has assessed the scene, called ahead and started moving.

The jokes are a relief because these roles demand competence before certainty. I once watched that competence tested when emergency workers became the casualties.

Many years ago, I was privileged to head a large regional emergency medical service. A team was returning after covering an event in the Mount Kenya region, before the present Thika Road was completed. Their ambulance veered off the road and overturned. Six emergency professionals were inside.
One died. Five survived; three were seriously injured.

Trained people assessed the injuries, identified competing providers with suitable ambulances, found hospitals with the required capacity and coordinated theatre arrangements. Competitors that fought for the same contracts sent resources to rescue colleagues from another operator.
I was mainly present for moral support while the Emergency operations team organised the technical response.
There was no motivational speech for the sixth family.

Kenya continues to produce skilled health workers in large numbers. KMTC’s 94th graduation released 22,776 health professionals in 2026; they were not all nurses. Yet our employment market does not absorb everyone as quickly as they qualify.

By April 2024, 280 nurses had moved through the Kenya–UK programme and another 200 awaited placement. Approximately 800 Kenyan nurses reportedly leave each year. Kenya also represented 6.5 per cent of African VisaScreen applicants in the cited report, evidence of professionals preparing for the American market.

That market puts a high price on dependable care. In the United States, median assisted living cost US$6,200 a month in 2025. A private nursing-home room reached a median US$129,575 a year. Those sums buy accommodation and a whole care system, not one nurse’s salary, but they show the economic value surrounding trained care.

Angela Bassett is 68. Halle Berry turned 60 two days earlier. Taye Diggs, once the young man on the Jamaican beach, is 55. Quins is preparing to mark 60 years. The photograph looks different now: not youth preserved, but people and institutions still producing clear, continuing, unmistakable evidence that they still matter.

An exercise for Monday. Ask five team members to name the employee they call when a customer becomes difficult, a process fails or the supervisor is unavailable. Compare those names with the latest promotion, salary-adjustment and training lists. Then check one month of leading indicators: calls, appointments, follow-ups, customers retained and colleagues supported.
Choose one overlooked person and correct one omission before Friday.

Which nurse suits you: ICU, ER, ward or paramedic? Correct me in the comments and share this with the healthcare worker,or steady salesperson that immediately comes to mind.

If somebody backed you before your results arrived, that is worth a call.
Sifuna remembered Cynthia from a public stage.
The rest of us can manage a private phone call.

Save the date. #ComeAllWithin #SSS
Have a well-nursed week.

Same Forest. Different Monkeys.
Mubarikiwe. Jah bless.

No one could have said it better than Gregory….

Over the past twelve months, I have buried too many friends.

I have written about death before. About legacy. About what remains when the speeches are finished and somebody must explain to the next generation who this person really was. I even wrote a story called The Eulogy Your Gen Z Is Already Writing.
I have spent less time thinking about the people standing beside the grave.

This week, rugby lost Oliver Kituyi.

Oly was a rugby man in the old meaning of that expression. He served the game away from television cameras and trophy presentations—as a Kenya Under-18 team manager and a World Rugby match-official educator.

Close to twenty years ago, Oliver and a famous Judge invited us at Kenya Harlequin to play an exhibition match at the Bungoma ASK Show. The pre-game meal at the Bungoma RFC clubhouse was a sight to behold.

We asked, kuna wageni wengine? Surely there were more visitors coming.

The kitchen staff looked at us as though we were mad. “Aren’t you going for wrestling? You must eat.”

Afterwards, Luhya musical legend Tindikiti and his band introduced many of us to our first taste of disco matanga. Oly somehow found original boda boda bicycles to ferry us back to the hotel. Those cyclists had a rough evening carrying 100kg rugby players through Bungoma.

The memory still lingers.

Until the next kick-off, rest in peace, Mwalimu Oliver.

Then a photograph from Milan changed the question.

Franco Baresi was the legendary Italian defender who captained AC Milan, won three European Cups and spent his entire 20-year senior career at the club.
His former teammates were carrying his coffin from the Basilica of Sant’Ambrogio. Marco van Basten. Roberto Donadoni. Demetrio Albertini. Massimo Ambrosini. Alessandro Costacurta.
Men who had shared dressing rooms, victories, injuries and arguments only teammates understand.
Baresi wore Number 6 for AC Milan. When he retired, Milan retired the shirt too.
At his funeral, six acquired another meaning.
These were his people.
And the photograph asked:
Who are your six?

Networks Do Not Carry Coffins

Your six are unlikely to be the people who regularly like your Facebook posts, or most of the 5,000 connections LinkedIn says are in your network.

They are your people. (your ride or die)

The person you have not spoken to for six months but who would get into the car at five in the morning when the call came. The teammate who remembers you before the grey hair and respectable title. The schoolmate who knows which parts of your adult reputation are complete nonsense.

By our late thirties and forties, we have accumulated impressive networks: alumni groups, former colleagues, clients, club members, parents’ associations and people saved in our phones by company name because we can no longer remember how we met them.

A funeral strips away the difference between a network and a friendship.

You choose your six slowly, without realising there is a selection taking place. Calls returned. Hospital visits made. Funerals attended. Difficult conversations survived. Showing up when there is no photograph, applause, deal or advantage waiting for you.

So perhaps the uncomfortable question isn’t, Who would carry me?
Most of us could produce a shortlist.
The harder question is:

Whose six am I on?

Nobody appoints themselves to that role. You earn the place long before anybody needs you to carry something heavy.

Oly’s death brought that home because rugby is full of people who spend years carrying things that do not bear their names. Kit, water, injuries, fixtures, young players, worried parents and sometimes entire teams through seasons when nobody outside the club is watching.

The players receive the jerseys. The official photograph remembers the coaches. Beneath every functioning sporting system are people whose names rarely reach the newspaper.

Which brings me to another photograph from this week.

Chipu, Kenya’s Under-20 rugby team, had reached another African final.
Instead of simply celebrating the score, I found myself wondering:
Who has been carrying Chipu?

The Engine Under Chipu

For those outside rugby, Chipu is also—the last age-grade step before senior international rugby. Players arrive from schools and clubs, represent Kenya against Africa’s best young players, and then age out.
This week Chipu beat Zimbabwe 35–23 to reach the 2026 Barthés Trophy final against Namibia.

Chipu were African champions in 2019 and again in 2024. They reached the final in 2025 and are back in 2026. Kenya has also appeared at the World Rugby Under-20 Trophy four times: Nairobi in 2009 and 2023, Brazil in 2019 and Scotland in 2024.

An Under-20 team cannot build continuity around its stars. Just when the captain understands the responsibility, the fly-half begins controlling matches and the front row learns international rugby, their birth certificates send them upstairs.
Then another group arrives.

So look beneath the team sheet.

Paul Odera worked within the age-grade system. Curtis Olago led Chipu before moving into the senior national structure. Simon Jawichre now leads the Under-20s, supported by Carlos Qondani. Team management has included Jimmy Mnene, Peter Mutai, Philip Wamae, Wacera Githua and Joseph Guchu.

The medical and conditioning teams have included Dr Ondiege and now Dr Aysha; physiotherapists Stephen Mankone and Samuel Ochieng; Masti Mike and now William Motto on strength and conditioning. Jerome Paarwater also worked with Chipu during the 2024 championship campaign.
That is a lot of names. It should be.
Sport has a habit of photographing the thirty people in jerseys and cropping out the machinery that put them there. Add the school coaches, club coaches, parents and volunteers who meet these boys long before anybody calls them Chipu.
Players change because they must.
Yet Chipu keeps returning.
Somebody, somewhere, is passing something on.

Lower the Door

One of those new players is Michael “Lukusi” Olukusi.

At 167 cm—about 5’6”—and 75 kg, the Kabras scrum-half is not the largest player on the field. He plays Number 9, reaching breakdowns before much larger men, directing traffic and deciding where Kenya attacks next.

Olukusi was named in the Dream Team for the first two legs of this year’s National Sevens Circuit. Last weekend he was part of the Kabras side that won Dala Sevens, alongside five other 19-year-olds. There is the pathway in plain sight.
Somebody opened a door, somebody coached him, and somewhere along the way a boy became good enough to pull on a Kenya jersey.

Your child does not have to look like a professional rugby player before joining a club. That may be where they discover what kind of player—and person—they can become.

Which brings me, strangely enough, to the Nairobi Securities Exchange.

The average trade across the NSE had been approximately KSh63,950. That is roughly what someone aged 35–44 might pay for an individual medical insurance policy.
For many Kenyans, that figure quietly says: this place is not for you.
Then the stock exchange entered M-Pesa through Ziidi Trader. During its first three months, the average trade was approximately KSh2,873—about twenty-two times smaller than the wider market average.

It lowered the door.

Someone who might never have entered a broker’s office could begin with KSh1,000, KSh2,000 or KSh5,000. It will not make them rich tomorrow, but it gets them through the door.
Rugby works much the same way. One child attends one training session. A coach corrects one mistake. A parent brings them back the following week. Years later we admire the finished structure and call it talent.
We rarely remember the small cornerstone somebody laid first.

Call, Click, Carry

Young professionals and young parents eventually find themselves looking in two directions: forward at the foundations we are responsible for building, and ahead at our own futures wondering whether we started early enough.

Sometimes the answer is simply to begin.

Take a young person to a swimming, football or rugby club. Meet the coaches. Let the young one watch a session and decide whether something there speaks to them.

They may never become a Simba or Lioness. The return might instead be a young adult who can join a team, accept correction, recover from disappointment and remain accountable to others.

That is not a small return.

The same applies to our postponed financial beginnings. Learn how the investment works. Understand the risks and charges. Begin within your means. Your first KSh5,000 may not change your life this month, but it can change your relationship with investing.

And somewhere in all this, call one of your six.
Today. While there is nothing wrong. Friendships are built through their own deposits: calls returned, visits made, disagreements survived and ordinary occasions when somebody simply showed up.

When Chipu runs onto the field, celebrate the players loudly. But spare a cheer for the assistants, managers, doctors, physios, school coaches, club volunteers and parents who kept returning while generations changed.

Oliver Kituyi understood that kind of work.

One journey ended beneath Baresi’s Number 6. Somewhere else, another generation is already running onto the field with a cocky Number 9 on its back.

His name is Lukusi.

Same Forest. Different Monkeys.
Mubarikiwe. Jah Bless.
Go with song.
Godspeed Chipu. Wakadinali called it. The last dance.

Last week, my timeline introduced me properly to King Kalala.
I knew the voice—Kenya knows that voice—but for those whose children have to explain the internet to them, her real name is Prudence Chepkirui. She is an Eldoret-born content creator, podcaster and former radio presenter, built on blunt commentary and the confidence of somebody who appears to have removed embarrassment from her list of possible outcomes.
Years ago, somebody rejected her. Kalala told the camera that this person was not boarding. For our readers outside Kenya, that does not involve public transport.
Dude simply was not biting.

Kalala did not vanish quietly. She announced the next course of action:

“We go back to the drawing board. We restructure. We come back. We conquer.”

Kenya laughed, saved the clip and moved on.

Then, on July 21, Kalala announced that she was expecting her first child. Within hours, somebody entered Kenya’s enormous digital wardrobe, recovered that old clip and returned it to the timeline.

That retrieval finished me.

The pregnancy is her private happiness, generously shared with the public. The joke belongs to the internet, which placed an old rejection beside happier news and declared that the drawing board had worked. Whether the two moments have anything to do with each other is Kalala’s business. Kenya was simply not going to waste such excellent archival material.
Congratulations on your baby bump Prudence …..

On July 31, schools closed for the August holiday. They reopen on August 24. Using the latest available enrollment figures, roughly 15 million learners—close to three in every ten Kenyans—have exchanged classrooms for sitting rooms.

By Monday morning, parents will not require CCTV to confirm their existence.
The refrigerator door will provide live data.

Somebody will open it, inspect the contents as though food might have arrived while the door was closed, then ask, “Mum, kuna food?” The child who survived an entire school afternoon on one cup of porridge will suddenly require breakfast, second breakfast, lunch and something before supper.

One parent summarized the August economy better than any Treasury forecast:

“Wanakula kama mchwa.” (they eat like termites)

The holiday brings report forms, new shoes nobody budgeted for and calculations involving fees, transport and third term. In some homes, the marks will not match the confidence with which the child left for school.
Shouting may provide temporary relief, but eventually somebody must establish what happened, what can still be repaired and how much it will cost.

August has turned the family dining table into a drawing board.

The corporate report form is also out. January’s targets have now met six months of delayed budgets, stubborn costs and an economy that does not read PowerPoint.

Consider financial services. By the published count, there have been 13 announced senior leadership movements touching ten institutions. They include Rebecca Mbithi at Ecobank Kenya; Birju Sanghrajka and Gladys Warirah taking the CEO and CFO roles at Standard Chartered Kenya; John Okulo moving from KCB to lead Sidian Bank; Anne Kinuthia-Otieno leaving Airtel Money for Visa; and Michael Mutiga moving from Safaricom to Stanbic.

Then came Abdi Mohamed’s announced move from Absa Kenya to I&M Bank, with Yusuf Omari named interim chief executive at Absa.

Thirteen movements. Ten institutions.

Perhaps they are all coincidences. Each institution has its own circumstances, and a collection of announcements is proof that an entire industry is moving. Still, the similarity in the background is difficult to miss: upward movement, pressure on growth, customers becoming harder to retain, technology reshaping distribution and boards looking at the second half of the year with sharpened pencils.

Corporate life may surprise us later, but 13 senior movements touching ten institutions are consequential enough to bring into a conversation today.

The appointment is the visible part. The more difficult question follows later:
was the problem the person, the position or the plan?

I have worked with several organizations after leadership changes. By the time the consultant arrives, everybody has an explanation.
Marketing cries no budget. Sales blames the product.
Operations blames both.
Finance produces a spreadsheet proving that all three departments are too expensive to keep.
The executive who left becomes responsible for everything from declining margins to the weather.

Then somebody says, “We need to go back to the drawing board.”

Quite right. But the drawing board is not where inconvenient history disappears. It is where you look at it without the departed executive available as your universal answer.

Uganda carried a more complicated history into the boxing ring at the Commonwealth Games in Glasgow.

Its super-heavyweight boxer Aziz Abdul, aka Ringo, is a grandson of Idi Amin. Amin ruled Uganda between 1971 and 1979. His regime was responsible for mass killings, disappearances and the expulsion of about 80,000 Asians.

Before politics, Amin had also been a boxer. Later, among the grand titles he awarded himself, he claimed kingship over Scotland—a piece of history that eventually helped inspire the title of Giles Foden’s novel and the 2006 film The Last King of Scotland.

Uganda knew all that before selecting Aziz.

It still placed him in the national team, put the flag on his kit and sent him to Glasgow. Nobody had failed to notice his surname or examine the family history. Uganda’s decision was more significant than that: it had looked at the past and decided the grandson could not be tried for the grandfather’s crimes.

Aziz drew more attention to the connection himself. Before the Games, he described Amin as an inspiration and joked about becoming Scotland’s new king.

His quarterfinal opponent was England’s Damar Thomas. Aziz received a standing count in the first round, lost a point for striking during a break and was disqualified in the third for using his head during a clinch. He denied doing it deliberately and alleged bias. Commonwealth Sport President Donald Rukare ( a Ugandan) rejected that allegation.

That is the correct sanction: Games officials disqualified Aziz for what happened in his bout. Uganda had selected him to represent the country despite the weight of his family name; the officials judged his conduct in the ring. These were separate decisions.

There was something almost indecently tidy about the scene—Idi Amin’s grandson boxing in Scotland after invoking his grandfather’s old claim, then leaving the competition because of a headbutt.

But coincidence is not inheritance.
Aziz owns the foul.
He does not own the crimes committed before he was born.
Same Forest. Different headbutts.

Glasgow gave Kenya a cleaner report form. The country entered 93 athletes across 12 disciplines and finished 12th with 12 medals: three gold, four silver and five bronze.

Eleven medals came from athletics. Kenya swept the men’s 3,000-metre steeplechase through Edmund Serem, Simon Koech and Amos Serem Bett. Faith Cherotich won the women’s steeplechase, while Mathew Kipchumba Kipsang took gold in the men’s 5,000 metres.

The only medal from outside athletics belonged to Joshua Amunga Mboya. His combined lift of 260 kilograms earned Kenya a bronze in weightlifting.

Celebrate the runners properly; they earned every cheer. Then look again at the figures. Eleven medals from one discipline and one from everywhere else is concentration wearing a tracksuit.

Nigeria collected 24 medals through several routes, including athletics, weightlifting, para powerlifting, boxing and judo.
Kenya’s runners remain our spear—polished, feared and still finding its target.
Joshua Amunga’s bronze asks whether we have built enough beside them.

Organizations live with the same risk. Dependence is sometimes renamed Key Accounts while the dependable product, salesperson or customer keeps delivering. Nobody asks difficult questions when the generator is humming.

Then July turned off the lights.

Zimbabwe suffered a nationwide blackout after a transmission fault. Tunisia experienced heat-related regional disruptions. Libya endured prolonged cuts. Ghana and Kenya both lost power on July 29, although Kenya Power described its interruption as widespread rather than nationwide because parts of Western Kenya and the North Rift remained supplied.

Different countries, different grids and different causes. Coincidences, certainly—not evidence of one coordinated African failure. What they shared was the speed with which pressure exposed weaknesses that ordinary days had allowed people to tolerate.

The same thing happens when the children come home, the largest customer leaves or the first-half figures arrive. Suddenly we discover whether the backup was real or merely mentioned at the strategy meeting.

When the lights go out, nobody wants to hear that the generator appeared in the PowerPoint. We want to know whether it starts.

That is the only useful question at the drawing board: what will work differently after we leave the room?

Parents have the report forms. Financial institutions have their half-year numbers and 13 announced leadership movements touching ten institutions. Kenya has 12 Commonwealth medals, but only one outside athletics. Several African power systems have stumbled for separate reasons.

They are not one systematic failure. They are coincidences carrying familiar warnings in their luggage.

There are still customers to recover, teams to rebuild and fees to reorganize before school reopens. There is time to ask whether the executive truly needed replacing or had inherited an impossible formation. Time to support the 20% carrying half the target while developing the people beside them.
Time to find another Joshua Amunga before our runners must carry nearly all the country’s hopes again.

So feed the children. Read the figures. Celebrate what worked.
Tell the truth about what did not. Move the people who must move.
Strengthen the systems that held.
Build the alternatives we postponed while everything appeared fine.
Then go back to the drawing board.

Restructure. Reorganize. Come back.

And conquer.

Long Live the Klan!!

P.S. A shout-out to the winners of the 2026 Dala Sevens. Kabras Sugar beat Menengai Oilers 17–5 to take the men’s Main Cup, while Mwamba Ladies defeated Kenya Harlequin 10–7 in the women’s final.

A special salute to the community clubs, Kenya Harlequin and Mwamba. Quins ended KCB’s winning streak with a 14–12 quarterfinal upset. Mwamba’s men also reached the semifinals before beating Quins 27–22 in the third-place playoff. Mwamba Ladies brought home the women’s title, while the Quins women finished second.

In a competition increasingly populated by institutional sides, the old community clubs arrived carrying history, volunteers, stubborn supporters and no intention of becoming museum pieces.

Community rugby is still boarding.

Mubarikiwe. Jah Bless.
Go with song.

This week, I was doing my usual once-over of social media.
My go-to person is Carol Radull; for everything sports.
Everything.
I saw Team Kenya’s new ceremonial gear in her updates, decided to dig—and there she was.
There is a black-and-white photograph, although the petticoat in it was green: a schoolgirl mid-stride, barefoot, her hem catching the wind like a flag. Her face is not smiling. It is working. Somewhere out of frame, athletes in proper kit are eating her dust.
In 1973, fourteen-year-old Sabina Chebichi arrived at an athletics meeting in Kericho with no shoes or tracksuit. She wore the green petticoat from her school uniform because that was what she had.
Sometimes history does not wait for us to dress properly.

She ran barefoot, beating girls in proper kit and earning a name that would outlive the race:
The Petticoat Princess.

Faisel Sherman, secretary of the Kenya Amateur Athletic Association, heard about the girl and sent her some kit.
Before there was a pathway, one person looked past the petticoat and saw the runner.
A year later in Christchurch, properly equipped, she won 800m bronze in 2:02.61, becoming the first Kenyan woman to medal at a Commonwealth Games.
She qualified for the 1976 Montreal Olympics but never ran after Kenya joined the African boycott. Her career later ended after an early pregnancy. From there, the public record becomes painfully thin.
Fifty-three years later, Team Kenya has unveiled a green-and-gold ceremonial outfit inspired by her.
The petticoat has become national dress.

Sabina’s story begins with talent being spotted.
Kevin Wekesa’s shows what can happen when the support continues beyond the first uniform.
Kevin is easily Kenya’s most decorated rugby player, International 7s rugby wins with Delhi Daredevils, Rugby Olympian with Shujaa. Kabras Sugar RFC.
Earlier this month, Kevin quietly announced another milestone: he had joined Kabras Sugar’s management trainee programme in mechanical engineering.

The Olympian had become the engineer.

Kevin began at Kakamega High School. Kabras Sugar signed him in 2019 and secured him a full scholarship to study mechanical engineering at the Technical University of Kenya while pursuing rugby. By 2021, he was wearing the Shujaa jersey; by 2024, he was in Paris.
Along the way, he started Play Green, using sport to tackle plastic pollution and plant trees. The initiative won an IOC Climate Action Award in 2025.
Now the pathway has brought him back to Kabras Sugar—not only in the club’s colours, but as an engineer preparing for life after the final whistle.

An ecosystem is justified in declaring victory because it produced an Olympian.
Rugby does better.

An Olympian with a degree and a future that does not retire when his knees do.

Prinsloo Sevens showed where the next Wekesa may be hiding. Eleven university sides entered; MMUST, Daystar Falcons and Blak Blad reached the quarter-finals.
None went further.
The old order held.
But the students had reached the last eight while working around lectures and exams, then faced clubs stacked with internationals.
Somewhere among those eleven teams, another Kevin is training. Will somebody recognise him before the rest of us begin celebrating him?

A CHAT ABOUT STADIUMS
To understand the scale of sporting communities, place them beside something Kenyans know immediately: county voter numbers.

New York/New Jersey processed 645,186 spectators—every Mombasa voter, with 3,273 seats left.
Dallas could accommodate Garissa, Wajir and Mandera combined.
Los Angeles could take Homa Bay; Atlanta, Uasin Gishu;
Houston would fall only 1,448 short of Nyeri.

By now, the Senate has summoned FIFA.

Senator Cherargei rejects the figures: Nandi cannot possibly have been seated behind Homa Bay.
Senator Sifuna demands gate receipts, banking slips and biometric logs.
Chairman Moses Otieno Kajwang’ reminds them that they are interrogating a stadium, not reconstituting the IEBC.
Then Kisii arrives.
Senator Onyonka declares Miami fits seven in ten of its voters (he’s advised to seek help from Minnesota);
Boston takes three-quarters of Kisumu; Kansas City two-thirds of Nyeri;
San Francisco half of Kakamega; Philadelphia half of Meru.
Murang’a wants to know who supplied the seats.
Bungoma wants to sell Mkhombero in the stadium.
Mombasa finds its seat and starts selling mahamri na korosho.

We laugh because Kenya recognises itself. Yet these are county-sized populations assembled around sport. Politicians spend careers trying to gather constituencies that large.

Football did it without shouting Wantam or Tutam. Sport is Longtam.

While you were wondering where those figures came from, I found an even stranger story.

During a cybersecurity evaluation, an experimental AI agent escaped its sandbox and entered Hugging Face while searching for answers to its own test.
It was not looking for money. It wanted a better score.
OpenAI said two models crossed from a controlled research environment into production infrastructure and continued without fresh human direction.

And immediately, I saw Gollum.

Not the polished assistant drafting emails. A small creature crawling through the internet’s passages, whispering:
My precious.
Except the precious was a benchmark score.
Nobody instructed it to break out. It received a target and found an unintended route. Most AI agents will be diligent assistants.
A few may resemble ambitious employees who misunderstood the bonus structure.
Perhaps the danger is not that AI becomes human.
It is that it learns one of our oldest workplace habits:
win first, explain the methods later.

Talent, human or artificial, does not become useful because we give it a target. Somebody must build the pathway, define the boundaries and remain responsible for where it goes.

Luis de la Fuente offers one answer.

He took charge of Spain’s Under-19s in 2013 and won the European title in 2015. Unai Simón, Rodri and Mikel Merino were prospects then, not world champions.
By the 2019 Under-21 title, Simón and Merino remained, joined by Dani Olmo, Fabián Ruiz and Mikel Oyarzabal. At the Tokyo Olympics, where Spain won silver, Pedri and Cucurella joined the next layer.
Some players dropped away. A core kept growing. New talent entered when ready.
Then came the senior side: the Nations League in 2023, an unbeaten Euro 2024 and the 2026 World Cup. Spain beat Argentina 1–0 after extra time at MetLife Stadium, conceding only one goal throughout the tournament.

Some players had travelled with him for more than a decade. Others, including Lamine Yamal and Nico Williams, joined along the way. He did not inherit one untouched golden generation or collect eleven impressive names and hope they introduced themselves before kick-off.

He built the spine, then recruited for the gaps.

Every executive faces that decision.
Building creates shared memory. Buying brings capabilities the team lacks.

Build without renewal and you create an old boys’ club. Buy without a core and you collect impressive CVs wearing the same uniform but pulling in different directions.
The answer is knowing what must be built, what should be bought and who forms the spine holding everything together.

Now look around your team.

Who is your Sabina, waiting for somebody to look past the petticoat? Who is your Kevin, capable of becoming more than his first role if the pathway continues? Who did you add because the original group could not supply what came next?

There is no virtue in building everything internally and no shame in buying experience.
The failure is recruiting endlessly without knowing what to preserve—or keeping familiar people after the team has outgrown them.

Sabina never received that complete journey. Someone found her kit and helped her reach the Commonwealth podium, but the pathway ended before her talent did.
Fifty-three years later, Kenya dressed an entire team in the colours of the schoolgirl who arrived without a uniform.

The petticoat became national dress.

It is a beautiful tribute. Even if it arrived fifty-three years later.
So, wherever you are on your leadership journey—team leader, sales manager, coach or C-suite—look carefully.
Did you build your team? Did you buy it?
Or did you build the spine, then recruit intelligently for the gaps?

The Benediction

This week’s benediction comes from Marvin Gaye and Tammi Terrell, later gathered up by the cast of Sister Act 2 and turned into something bigger than a love song:

Ain’t No Mountain High Enough.

Sabina had no shoes. Kevin balanced lecture halls with rugby fields. De la Fuente spent more than a decade walking with players from age-group football to the biggest stage.

The mountain did not become smaller. Someone helped them climb it.

Strong teams need people who see beyond today’s uniform: the runner inside the petticoat, the engineer inside the Olympian and the world champion inside the teenager.
Look around your forest. Somebody may already be climbing—quietly, barefoot and without the proper kit.

Do not wait fifty-three years to recognise them.

Build the spine. Recruit for the gaps.
And when the mountain appears, climb it together.”
What’s your take? See you in the comments.

Same Forest. Different Monkeys.
Mubarikiwe. Jah Bless.

Editorial disclosure

Same Forest. Different Monkeys. originates in my experiences, observations, conversations, research interests and editorial judgement.

I use digital tools, including AI, to assist with research, transcription, fact-checking, structure, drafting and editing. I select the stories, supply the context, determine the argument, revise and approve the final copy, and accept responsibility for everything published under my name.

Yesterday morning I was summoned to Olang’s — Bell’s, for the formal record,
by the Luo Ruoth, Wuod Japuonj Benjamin Winston.
Officially he’s the spiritual leader of a WhatsApp group of All Blacks supporters in Africa, closed group,
vetted like State House.
But leadership and analysis begins on a bench with a White Chap and a dash of Glenmorangie, so that’s where we were.

All Blacks games sit thankfully far from the soccer madness.
This baraza, though, got crashed by fathers whose children are deep in World Cup fever — same complaint every Nairobi parent has been muttering since June:
football shirts.

One child wanted Ronaldo. Portugal went home.
Another wanted Mbappé. France followed.
This week: Yamal, Messi and Lautaro Martínez, all moved into the house together.
The children found new heroes.
Their parents found another invoice.
Thankfully the final lands in a few hours, because several households had already promised the next shirt for Christmas and EPL is yet to begin….ole wenu

What the children want and what the parents buy are rarely the same product.
FIFA’s store prices Argentina’s 2026 replica at US$100;
Adidas lists the player-spec version at US$150.
At the Central Bank’s July 17 rate of KSh129.30 to the dollar, that’s roughly KSh12,930 for the replica and KSh19,395 for the authentic — before shipping, tax, or a name on the back
(Waliaula would set you back another 100 bucks choose wisely….consider using Wally)

Then there’s the Nairobi transfer market. Local sellers advertise “official World Cup jerseys” for KSh1,600 to KSh1,800.
The word official is doing heavy work at that price. The shirt looks correct on TikTok, arrives by boda, satisfies a child by lunchtime — but it’s not the same commercial product as the licensed one.
One purchase funds FIFA’s merchandise machine.

The other saves a Kenyan parent from converting school fees into polyester.

KSh1,600 versus almost KSh20,000. That gap is not a footnote.
It’s the whole business story.
Children buy identity. Parents buy affordability.
Brands sell belonging.
The mtaa trader sells speed.
Same shirt, different markets — and FIFA 2026 the PS game is already loaded, waiting for the console invoice to put the final nail on your credit rating’s coffin.

Same Forest, Different 19s

I grew up in the breakdance age — call it the donjo maber dance of the 80s.
What passes for those moves today doesn’t cut it, si noma kama kitambo. (RIP Paul “Cracker” Munyao — you popped and locked for all of us).
One of the anthems of that era was a song called 19, by Paul Hardcastle.
Stuttering, sampled, unforgettable:
the average age of a soldier in the Vietnam War (1975)
was nineteen.

19…19…19.

Then somebody sent me the meme. Lamine Yamal is nineteen. He wears number nineteen for Spain. The final is being played on July 19. He faces Lionel Messi almost nineteen years after Messi helped bathe him during a charity photoshoot — while wearing Barcelona’s number nineteen, the meme insists.
By the time my AI assistant finished arranging its numbers,
the Witchdoctors, jujumen and Spanish curanderos stood up and applauded my AI prompt.

Most of it checks out, with kidogo firi firi…...
Yamal was born July 13, 2007, turning nineteen six days before the final. Spain registered him in the nineteen shirt. Messi wore Barcelona’s nineteen between 2006 and 2008. But the photographs were taken in September 2007 — meaning the final lands about ten weeks short of exactly nineteen years later.
The internet rounded up.

But why spoil a good story with facts.

The photos themselves weren’t staged years later or AI-generated.
Photographer Joan Monfort took them at Camp Nou for a charity calendar with Barcelona, UNICEF and the Catalan paper Sport. Messi was twenty; Yamal was about six months old, his family picked through a raffle.
Monfort later said Messi was shy and unsure what to do with the baby.

Nobody photographed a prophecy. They photographed a community programme. Messi didn’t pass greatness to Yamal through bathwater — the calendar simply connected a club, a charity, a newspaper and a family. Nearly nineteen years later, the baby in the plastic basin walked into a World Cup final still carrying his community:
Rocafonda,
the working-class Mataró neighbourhood whose postcode ends 304 — the number Yamal forms with his fingers after every goal.

The meme travelled because the nineteens were irresistible.
The facts are worth keeping because before Yamal became a KSh1,600 shirt on a Nairobi rider’s back and a $150 shirt in an Adidas store, he was a six-month-old baby chosen in a raffle.
Kismat, as they say in the mtaa.

Three Goals, One Long-Awaited Cheque

On July 12, Kenya’s Junior Starlets walked into a packed Nyayo carrying a 2–0 lead over South Africa, then conceded first.
In another era of Kenyan football that’s the moment everyone starts calculating disaster.
Instead Gaudancia Maloba, Brenda Awuor and Elizabeth Alizeba scored, and Kenya won 3–1 on the day, 5–1 on aggregate — qualifying for the 2026 FIFA Under-17 Women’s World Cup in Morocco.
It’s coach Mildred Cheche’s second straight World Cup with this age group; the first, in 2024, made the Junior Starlets the first Kenyan football team of either sex to reach a FIFA World Cup, and they beat Mexico 2–1 while they were at it.

Those aren’t motivational quotes. Those are results.

President Ruto hosted both the Junior Starlets and the senior Harambee Starlets at State House on July 14, pledging KSh20 million between the two teams as they departed for Morocco and WAFCON. It took a day or two of nervous back-and-forth for the cash to clear, and the players made their feelings known before boarding. By the time both squads left camp, the money had landed and the mood had lifted.
A smoother handover would have saved everyone the drama.

Behind that sits a narrower story: an FKF list from February counted 49 Kenyan CAF A-licensed coaches, only two of them women — Beldine Odemba and Jackline Juma, who also became the first woman to coach a Kenyan Premier League men’s club. Cheche runs the Under-17s.
Three women are carrying much of the pathway from teenage football to the senior side, and Odemba has been candid that many promises have been broken along the way. But they still fought.

Hapo ndio inauma. (thats whats painful)
Kenya applauds girls for making history while the system around them still needs Presidential intervention to pay on time.
A replica shirt reaches Nairobi in an hour for KSh1,600.
Building — and paying — the people capable of filling it takes longer.

The System Behind the Shirt

Senegal exited the World Cup 3–2 to Belgium after leading 2–0 with five minutes left.
The federation fired the coach, and its president blamed the medical support — the team doctor, he said, was “just” a gynaecologist.
The joke wrote itself.
Then the Senegalese Association of Sports Medicine corrected the record: the doctor also holds a sports-medicine specialisation, had headed physiotherapy at Fann Hospital, and had served Senegal since 2017 across three World Cups.
Same doctor, different anatomy.
The real question was never his CV — it’s why a federation president claims to “discover” it after a decade of employing the man.

Boardroom failure wearing football boots.

That failure sits inside a bigger forest. WHO’s 2026 report counts about 24 health workers per 10,000 Africans — roughly a third of the threshold for basic universal coverage — while an estimated 27% of trained health workers on the continent, about 1.4 million people, sit unemployed or underemployed.
In Kenya that figure is 14%, even as a 2023 survey found nearly 65% of health workers intend to migrate, and roughly 4,000 Kenyan doctors and nurses leave every year. Kuwa serious: that’s not a shortage.
That’s expensive abundance trapped inside administrative poverty.

The People Behind the Shirt

Tomorrow, Same Forest. Different Monkeys. completes fifty-two weeks of posts.
Facebook has behaved like a current account — attention arrives, circulates, sometimes vanishes by evening.
WhatsApp moves the story through trusted groups.
LinkedIn gives it the quieter boardroom reader.
Substack is the capital account, where a year of stories and over 700 subscribers now sit together, starting to speak their own language:
El Tigre, The Spreadsheet Problem, Three Feathers, Fixture ni Fixture.
A new reader sees separate articles.
Someone who’s stayed starts to see the streets connecting.
That’s how a community forms.
(Full Annual report next week)

A customer buys the KSh1,600 shirt because Yamal plays tonight.
A supporter remembers it nineteen years later.
A country applauds three goals at Nyayo.
A system decides whether the coaches and players stay supported after the stadium empties.
Attention finds the hero.
Community carries the human being.

So notice who’s doing the carrying in your forest. Pay them properly, and on time. Verify qualifications before the crisis.
Reward the coach before the World Cup.
Support the parent before the child becomes famous.
And if this forest has given you a useful story this year, bring one more person to the next conversation.

On this week’s jam, Paul Hardcastle reminds us that sometimes our hopes and dreams are carried by someone who’s 19…….

Same Forest. Different Monkeys.

¡Che! ¡Hasta la victoria siempre, España! ¡Que viva la Furia Roja!

Mubarikiwe. Jah Bless. Go with song.

A couple of weeks ago, I attended one of the smallest, warmest weddings I have been to in a long time.
A Kenyan man and an Iranian woman stood before family and close friends to begin a new chapter.
There were no grand theatrics and no large gathering.
Just two families, two cultures and a ceremony rich with meaning.

Classy. African. Posh.

One Persian tradition caught my attention. Before exchanging rings, the couple each dipped a little finger into honey and fed it to the other. The gesture is a promise that the marriage should begin, and hopefully continue, with sweetness.
I smiled because every culture seems to have found its own way of asking the same question before two people commit:

how do we know this person is serious?

That is really what all these rituals are about. The honey. The bridewealth.
The negotiations. The witnesses.
Somebody, somewhere, wants proof that this is not excitement dressed up as commitment.

In June, the Garissa Kadhi’s Court ruled on a marriage that had lasted twenty-six years. The husband insisted he had already honoured the agreed mahr (dowry) years earlier, but there was no receipt, no witness and no record.
The Kadhi therefore held that the original obligation had never been discharged and ordered him to pay his estranged wife four cows, or their cash equivalent.

Different ceremony. Same principle.

Commitments do not disappear simply because time has passed. If you cannot show they were honoured, they remain commitments.
India outlawed dowry more than sixty years ago, yet the practice remains deeply embedded and sometimes deadly.
In parts of China, caili payments have risen so steeply that some young men are delaying marriage altogether in spite of government appeals to families for a “discount”.
In north-western Kenya, cattle rustling across the Karamoja cluster has long been connected, among other pressures, to young men seeking the livestock required to marry.

Different cultures. Different currencies. Same question.

How do we know you are serious?

I found that fascinating for about a day. Then I became distracted by another question entirely, one the wedding had planted without me noticing. Nothing about that ceremony was sudden. Two people do not arrive at a honey ritual overnight. There were years before that Saturday: conversations, introductions, choices, families getting to know one another and decisions nobody outside the room ever saw. Once I started looking for that pattern, I could not stop seeing it everywhere.

Start with your phone.

This week, Samsung projected quarterly operating-profit figures that placed it ahead of Nvidia’s latest reported quarter.
Every Kenyan who has stubbornly held onto a Samsung over the years can walk a little taller.
Join me in pointing our A16s towards the iPhone crowd and saying, with appropriate dignity,
“Soma label.” (look at the brand)
The world’s most profitable technology company, for the quarter, is sitting in your palm.

The headline made the achievement look sudden. It wasn’t. Samsung entered the semiconductor business more than four decades ago, long before artificial intelligence became the favourite word in every investor presentation, strategic plan and hurriedly renamed Nairobi conference. The market recognised the result this week.
The investment began generations ago.

That is how foundations work. They remain underground until somebody admires the building.

Norway understood the same principle, only in a different currency. During the 2026 World Cup, three familiar surnames returned to football’s biggest stage:
Thorstvedt, Sørloth and Haaland.
Their fathers had all worn the Norwegian jersey at the 1994 World Cup. Thirty-two years later, Kristian Thorstvedt, Alexander Sørloth and Erling Haaland returned wearing the same national colours.
We applaud Erling’s goals. Buried inside that applause is something television rarely records: a childhood spent around international standards, elite habits and an understanding of what the highest level demands.

Talent can run in a family. So can preparation.

Norway did something similar with money. Oil was discovered in the Norwegian North Sea in 1969, but instead of treating the windfall like a winning betting slip, the country chose patience. In 1990 it established what became the Government Pension Fund Global, building a reserve intended to benefit both present and future generations. Today it is the largest sovereign wealth fund in the world, worth more than two trillion US dollars depending on the market.
On paper, every Norwegian is worth hundreds of thousands of dollars, although nobody is walking into a bank to withdraw their share and buy a Prado.

Different field. Same discipline.
The hardest part was never earning the money. It was resisting the temptation to spend it before the next generation needed it.

The track told the same story on Friday evening. At the Monaco Diamond League, Kenya’s Emmanuel Wanyonyi broke the men’s 1,000-metre world record at his first attempt, clocking 2:11.83 and erasing a mark Noah Ngeny had held since 1999.
Twenty-seven years.
One Kenyan handing history to another.
On the same evening, Agnes Ngetich won the women’s 3,000 metres in a world-leading 8:19.88, confirming once again that she belongs among the very best on the planet.

The television cameras captured just over two minutes. The stopwatch reduced the achievement to five digits: 2:11.83. Neither captured the years behind them.
The early mornings. The repetitive sessions.
The races that did not go according to plan.
The discipline required to keep training while the rest of us were still arguing in WhatsApp groups about who should be selected.

That’s why I struggle whenever somebody’s rise is described as “coming from nowhere.”

Nothing comes from nowhere.

Samsung didn’t stumble into semiconductors. Norway didn’t accidentally build the world’s largest sovereign wealth fund. Haaland didn’t become frightening because one season went well. Wanyonyi didn’t break a twenty-seven-year-old world record because Friday happened to find him in a good mood.

This week also marked the birthday of Sydney “Black Rose” Obonyo aka The Ferrari,
a name that deserves to travel much further in Kenyan rugby circles than it currently does.
Thirty years ago, at the inaugural Safari Sevens in July 1996, the twenty-year-old Musingu High School alumnus and Quinpala player wasn’t supposed to become the story. He came on as a replacement after fly-half Sammy Khakame was injured.

By the end of the weekend, Obonyo had scored seven tries and kicked twenty conversions, enough to be named the tournament’s first-ever Most Valuable Player. Kenya had lost 21–7 to Uganda during the pool stage. Obonyo still remembers the “pin-drop silence” around RFUEA after that defeat. Kenya fought its way through the Plate competition, beat Mauritius, met Uganda again in the final and won 38–12, with Obonyo scoring twice from long range.

The first result produced silence.

The response produced history.

Thirty years later, Safari Sevens is still on the rugby calendar. The tournament is remembered, celebrated and marketed. I sometimes wonder how many rugby supporters under thirty know the name of the young man who won its very first MVP award.

That is another problem with applause. It is loud, but it has a short memory.
We celebrate the visible moment while life is constructed in the invisible ones.
Maybe that is why so many people feel discouraged in their thirties and forties.
You’re paying school fees, building a business, raising children, looking after ageing parents and trying to keep your own dreams alive.
Some weeks it feels as though nothing remarkable is happening.

There is no headline for clearing half the school-fee balance.

Nobody issues a press release because you kept the business open for another month. Your children may not yet understand the sacrifices.
Your clients do not see the calls, the rejected proposals and the uncomfortable conversations that came before the contract.

Foundations have never attracted applause.

The applause arrives later, after someone else notices what years of quiet consistency produced.

That does not make the invisible years unimportant. If anything, they may be the most important years of all. The season in which nobody is watching is often the season in which the real work is being done.
The danger is abandoning it because public recognition has not yet caught up with private progress.

Which brings me back to that small wedding and the honey on two fingers. I thought I was watching a marriage begin. I was actually watching the newest chapter in something much older: two people who had spent years becoming comfortable enough to trust one another with a “yes.”
The ceremony lasted a few minutes. Everything that made those minutes meaningful happened long before anyone lit a candle.

So here is the only question worth carrying into this week: what are you quietly laying down right now that nobody is clapping for yet?
Your business may still look small.
Your children may not yet understand the sacrifice.
Your name may not be trending. The promotion may not have arrived.
The work may feel repetitive, private and frustratingly ordinary.

Keep mixing the cement anyway.

History has never been particularly good at applauding people while they are still building. It usually arrives later, when somebody else is standing comfortably on the finished floor, admiring what years of unseen work quietly produced.

That’s the whole game. Build the thing that outlasts the applause.

Same Forest. Different Monkeys.

Mubarikiwe. Jah Bless.
Go with song.
(Happy Birthday Month Syd Tour is tour)

Yesterday had a name on the fixture card.
Laibons against Old Cambrians, Lenana School against Nairobi School — but for the men on that touchline, it needed no name at all.
It felt like the Wednesday afternoons after school.
A damp Saturday morning before a critical club game.
Butterflies.
Jitters.
That quiet internal question:

Can I last 20 minutes.

I did not watch it as a neutral man.
Four years I spent under the Three Feathers of Nairobi School.
Two more under the Rose of Lenana.
Old crests, both of them, borrowed from English titles that meant nothing to the boys who wore them and everything to what those boys built underneath them.
I have always watched Laibons play Old Cambrians as a spectator.
I watch it the way you watch a fight between two people you have loved.

At a certain age, you know exactly what soft means — soft means you get injured.
So you go into the breakdown hard, not to prove anything to the crowd, but because muscle memory and self-preservation reached an agreement years ago.
The body complains.
The mind negotiates.
The spirit remembers.
Then someone blows a whistle and twenty years disappear into the dust.
The Annual Alumni Challenge is many things, but it is never just a game. It is old nicknames returning to life, men who haven’t spoken in years continuing conversations that were never really finished, arguments that began in Form Two resuming without introduction.
Who beat whom.
Who still insists the referee robbed them in 1997.
Who snitched.
The rivalry remains fierce, but the affection survives underneath it.

Why do school rivalries survive fifty years while many adult friendships struggle to survive five?

Patch still gathers. Changez still responds. Alliance and Mang’u still fill halls. Kenya High, Mukumu, Precious Blood, Kakamega and dozens of other schools still produce people willing to sacrifice a Saturday to remember where they came from.

Somewhere between mortgages, board meetings and school fees denominated in tears, we lose the rituals that once kept friendships alive.
Schools never really lose them — they schedule them, protect them, celebrate them. These friendships were built when nobody had titles, money or influence.

All we had was a uniform, a timetable, and an opponent we desperately wanted to beat.

The wives and families watching from the sidelines saw something entirely different — forty-year-old men transformed back into seventeen-year-olds.
The serious executive became a frantic winger again.
The respected doctor answered to a nickname nobody at his workplace has ever heard.
The retired teacher still carried the authority of a school prefect.
And the fellow who made noise in Form Three remained gloriously consistent.

Then the larger question reveals itself. This was never just about one reunion or one old rivalry. It was about the conflict between structure and belonging.
The scoreboard says one thing; the body remembers another. The institution records the result, but the heart records who stood beside you.
We sometimes measure everything and understand very little.

The most powerful networks are rarely the loudest. They are the quiet architects — the classmates who organize reunions, collect funeral contributions, attend weddings, know whose child needs school fees, call the person everyone else has forgotten.
Once you see that, you start to see the same forest showing us different monkeys across sport, business, friendship and life.

Look at football. The World Cup can be a cruel place to measure progress.
The difference between celebration and heartbreak can be four minutes. Ivory Coast, DR Congo and Senegal all watched their campaigns turn in the 86th minute or later — Harry Kane, a Lukaku equalizer, a defence that finally lost its shape after eighty-five minutes of discipline.

That is sport. That is business. That is life.

But perhaps the more interesting question is this: What exactly came home after the final whistle?

African football did not only return with heartbreak. It returned with money, and a reminder that talent alone is never enough. The 2026 World Cup is the richest in history — FIFA is distributing a record US$871 million, almost double Qatar’s US$440 million.
Tunisia walked away with US$12.5 million despite a tournament they’d rather forget; South Africa, Ivory Coast, DR Congo, Senegal and Algeria each banked roughly US$13.5 million after reaching the Round of 32.
Nine of Africa’s ten representatives made the knockout stages — the continent has never done that before. Morocco and Egypt still carry the flag.

The scoreboard tells one story. The balance sheet tells another. The more important question is what gets built afterwards — new academies, better pitches, coaching scholarships, or another generation left to survive on raw talent and divine intervention.
Yesterday, old boys gathered because previous generations built institutions that outlived them.
The men who planted those trees never sat under their shade.
African football faces exactly the same challenge.

UNDER ARM CHARM.
One detail fascinated me throughout this World Cup — not the formations, not the superstars, not even the expanded format.
The fourth official.
He never scores, never lifts a trophy, never appears in a highlight package.
His entire job is to keep time and keep the game from losing its head. And quietly, under his arm, sat one of the cleverest sponsorship ideas in modern sport.

Rexona.
Not across the chest. Not on the sleeves.
Under the arm — exactly where protection is needed most.

For eighty-nine minutes of every one of the tournament’s 104 matches, nobody notices the fourth official. Then the board goes up, the arms rise, the cameras focus, and the sponsor appears exactly where it was always meant to be.
Under pressure.
Under the arm.
Rexona called the campaign “It Won’t Let You Down.”
Sure in one market, Degree in another, Rexona in a third.
Same product. Different monkeys.
Marketing people call it one of the smartest placements in football history, because it understands something older than advertising:
the most important work is invisible until the moment it’s needed.

The older I get, the more I appreciate under-arm people — the ones who organize reunions, collect bursary money, carry the spreadsheet but never ask for applause. Every old school network has them.
Every serious community survives because of them.

The same principle applies to longevity.
Look at Sade.
No new studio album since Soldier of Love in 2010.
No tours, no publicity campaigns, no shouting.
Yet in 2026, The Best of Sade, released in 1994, has spent 156 weeks on the Billboard charts — three years — and has sat at number one on the Contemporary Jazz charts for seventy-nine consecutive weeks. Thirty-two years on, it’s still finding new listeners.
The work was already done.
The roots had already gone deep.
The music simply kept showing up when people needed it.

That is how alumni associations work too. Mukumu Girls alumnae have funded scholarships for young women entering medicine, engineering and accounting. Precious Blood old girls organize walks and fundraising across continents. The rivalry may bring people to the stadium, but the real work begins long after the final whistle.

The same principle applies to corporate life. Monday mornings in Nairobi boardrooms have their own theatre — kahawa moto, confident dashboards, upward arrows everyone in the room knows aren’t telling the whole story.
Clean slides. Clean excuses.

But markets are not moved by clean excuses. Markets move because somebody picks up a call on a Sunday evening. Because an old client remembers how you handled a difficult claim ten years earlier. Because a schoolmate introduces you to a brother-in-law who becomes your biggest account.
The warmest leads in Africa are still people who knew us before we became important — before the suits, the company cars, the titles.

Most sales management frameworks are beautifully packaged rituals designed to create the illusion of control.
A clean spreadsheet does not equal a healthy business.
And if your commercial model ignores the friendships and trust networks that actually move African markets, you are not leading.
You are administrating decline.
That is why old school groups matter — not simply because they help us remember, but because they create endless streams of referrals built on comradeship forged in childhood. Introductions become easier. Trust arrives faster. Transaction costs fall. The under-cover work was completed decades earlier, in classrooms and dining halls and muddy playing fields. The market only ever sees the raised hands.

THREE FEATHERS AND A ROSE.

The hidden work. The under-arm people. The invisible years.
The old flames and old classmates who can wake up on Monday and restart a WhatsApp group.

Then comes the watermelon. Not a metaphor. A lived contradiction.
You wore the Three Feathers. You carried the Rose. You committed what, in schoolboy terms, is almost heresy —
Gor to AFC, Madrid to Barcelona, United to Liverpool. Upper to Jahmu.
Yet forty years later, the answer to “which side are you on?” remains unresolved, because the rivalry itself was never the point.

The rivalry was the mechanism. The friendship was the product. The referrals happen because trust was built when nobody had money, titles, or LinkedIn profiles.

Rexona, Sade, the fourth official, the World Cup prize money, the girls’ alumni networks — those were supporting witnesses.
The Rose and the Three Feathers were always meant to walk onto the stage at the end and say what the whole piece was really about:

The work that matters most is usually completed long before anyone notices it. And sometimes, when you finally raise your hands, the only thing the world sees is what was quietly sitting under your arm all along.
Proof that even close to 40 years later, despite not sharing their dentists contacts,
Old rivals that became friends and stayed friends.
And somewhere between Kangemi and Riruta.
A watermelon found a home.

Same Forest. Different Monkeys.
Mubarikiwe. Jah Bless.
Go with song.

There are evenings that produce content.

And there are evenings that produce silence.
This was the latter.

The invitation promised a conversation about failure, fatherhood, success, recovery and the long, uneven road to becoming men of consequence.

Three panellists. One moderator.
A room full of accomplished gentlemen carrying stories that do not appear on LinkedIn profiles or annual reports.

By the end of the evening, we had laughed, shared, listened and, yes, a few tears escaped without seeking anybody’s permission.

Curiously, the W-word never came up.

Not once.

No grand debates. No scorecards. No explanations about the state of modern civilisation.
Perhaps age teaches a man that some battles are best replaced with understanding and some conversations are too important to be reduced to whatsapp messages.

And so, in keeping with the oldest rule in fellowship:

What happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas.

The details shall remain where they belong—with the 92 men who sat in that room.

The rest of you, dear readers, shall have to settle for the official minutes: the drinks menu and the buffet.

If the organisers wanted to set the tone for the evening, they succeeded brilliantly.

The Brand Manager needs a promotion

The welcome cocktails read like chapters from a man’s life.

There was The Classic Fox—built on a Johnnie Walker Blonde base, accompanied by cinnamon, lime and apple, and finished with a dried apple wheel.
Smooth, balanced and confident enough not to shout.

Then there was Rugged & Bearded—hibiscus, honey, citrus, bitters and an orange garnish.
A little sweetness, a little bitterness and just enough edge to remind you that character is rarely formed in comfort.

The choice of a Blonde base spirit felt appropriate.

Life has a way of telling older men to keep walking, to keep evolving and to travel lighter than they did in their youth.
Less fire and fury.
More conversation and companionship.

The buffet, meanwhile, performed its sacred African duty with distinction.

As every man knows, fellowship is important—but fellowship after a good meal is civilisation itself.

People returned for seconds.

No greater compliment exists.

To Lucas Maranga aka Lord Buxton, Mak’odingo, Blanco and the Silver Foxes,
Ahsanteni sana.

Sema Epic.

Thank you for creating a space where men could speak without performance,
listen without interruption and leave without judgement.
Thank you for reminding us that brotherhood is not built in dramatic moments but in ordinary evenings shared around tables, stories and laughter.

The public record ends here.

The private lessons remain with those who hunted together.

See you at the next gathering.

Until then, we keep walking. (these guys need to swing kala)

We keep learning.

We keep becoming.

And perhaps that is all any man can honestly ask of himself:

Not to be the richest man.

Not to be the strongest man.

Simply to be the best man he can be.

Go with song.
Mubarikiwe. Jah Bless.

For years we were told leadership was about strategy.
Targets. Budgets. Market share. Efficiency.
Then along came Lina Githuka and started redesigning “the humanity around the people in the business” — and the things that matter to them.

A week ago, the Managing Director of Kenya Wine Agencies Limited found herself at the centre of a national conversation after introducing a Feminine Leave Policy granting female employees one paid day off every month for menstruation, perimenopause and menopause.

No doctor’s note.
No complicated forms.
No interrogation.
Just trust.

Predictably, the internet did what the internet always does. Some praised the move as progressive leadership. Others asked whether businesses could afford it. A few wondered whether employers would quietly start preferring male hires. And somewhere between the applause and the outrage, most people missed the more interesting story.

The policy did not arrive out of nowhere. Ms. Githuka joined KWAL in November 2018 — the first woman, the first local, to hold the Managing Director’s seat in a company founded in 1969. She did not arrive chasing headlines.
In 2019, lactation rooms.
In 2021, maternity leave expanded from three months to four, extended to cover adoption, surrogacy and stillbirth.
Paternity leave grew to three weeks.
Forty-five women managers graduated through the Ela Lidera Women in Leadership Programme.
Then came Bro-Code — a safe space for male employees to talk about mental health, pressure and the things men carry without saying. One policy after another. One uncomfortable question after another.
The menstrual leave announcement was simply the latest chapter in a six-year project most people never noticed. Her own words on the productivity question were simple: “Most women show up to work even when they are in discomfort. But are they really being productive? We know the answer to that.” That is not HR language.
That is someone who has been paying attention.

A CASE FOR MAN FLU

For years, Man Flu has been the punchline of women’s WhatsApp groups.
A man develops a mild cold and suddenly behaves like a Victorian aristocrat on his deathbed.
He requests green tea.
He demands sympathy.
Women roll their eyes.
Children continue avoiding him.
The internet laughs. Case closed. Or so we thought.

Because somewhere between the memes and the mockery, scientists decided to actually investigate. What they found was awkward for everyone. Stanford University research published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences found that men with higher testosterone produce significantly weaker antibody responses to flu vaccines than women.
A study tracking flu-related deaths from 1997 to 2007 found that men died at higher rates than women across multiple age groups — regardless of underlying conditions. The same estrogen that drives monthly menstrual discomfort appears to strengthen immune response against respiratory infections.
The same testosterone that exempts men from that monthly cycle appears to leave them more vulnerable when a flu virus arrives.

Biology gives. Biology takes.

Women carry burdens men never experience. Men carry burdens women never experience. The mistake — in workplaces, in families, in relationships — begins when either side assumes the other’s burden is imaginary.
Because once you start paying attention to invisible burdens, you begin to notice them everywhere.

THE PAYCHECK THAT FUNDS THE PRISON

An old colleague once told me he hated his job.
Not the occasional Monday morning complaint.
Real hatred.
The kind that follows you home and sits on your chest at three in the morning when sleep refuses to come.
Five years later, he still hated his job.
His boss hadn’t changed. The culture hadn’t changed. The politics hadn’t changed.

The only thing that had changed was his commissions and bonuses.

Somewhere along the way the paycheck became too valuable to question. The mortgage got bigger. The car got better. School fees arrived. One day he woke up and discovered something uncomfortable — he had built a prison around himself, one upgrade at a time.

We measure success using almost entirely external indicators.
The title. The office. The car. The promotion.
Yet the people who know us best are running a completely different calculation.
Are you present?
Are you becoming kinder or harder?
Do you still laugh at the things that used to make you laugh?
There is a difference between building a career and building a life.
Tools, left unchecked, become masters.
The prison is not constructed overnight.
It is built one obligation, one rationalisation, one upgrade at a time.
And the most dangerous part?
You don’t notice until the door is already locked.

Which brings us to Tim Payne.

THE LEAST FAMOUS FOOTBALLER AT THE WORLD CUP

For most of his career, Tim Payne was the kind of footballer only his family, teammates and a handful of die-hard New Zealand fans could identify. Not the star. Not the captain. Fifteen years of gruelling training sessions, injuries and quiet sacrifices — the kind of work that builds a professional footballer from the inside out, in stadiums where the attendance figures were more embarrassing than inspiring.

Then an online campaign targeted FIFA’s World Cup to make the tournament’s least famous player famous. Within days, Payne’s social media following exploded past five million — more than the entire population of New Zealand. The internet had done what the internet always does. It celebrated the sudden outcome while completely ignoring the fifteen years of work it took to get there.
The scorecard the internet wrote for Tim Payne had nothing to do with football.
It had everything to do with novelty.

Which is worth remembering as the tournament kicks off. Because 104 matches are about to compete for your attention, your sleep and your marriage. Choose wisely.

WORLD CUP FOR PEOPLE WITH JOBS

The FIFA World Cup has expanded to 104 matches. Students think this is wonderful. Those of us with bosses, school fees, spouses and WhatsApp groups requiring immediate responses are conducting a different exercise.
The question is no longer “What’s on?”
The question is “What can I realistically watch without getting fired?”

CALL IN SICK
England vs Ghana (23 June, 11PM EAT) — History, pride and continental honour in one fixture. Non-negotiable.
South Africa vs South Korea (25 June, 4AM EAT) — Bafana chasing magic. Set the alarm or regret it.
Croatia vs Ghana (28 June, Midnight EAT) — Could decide whether Ghana’s bags get packed early.

Cancel The Meeting
Uruguay vs Spain (27 June, 3AM EAT) — Two football aristocrats. One mistake changes the entire draw.
Tunisia vs Netherlands (26 June, 2AM EAT) — North African resilience meets Dutch efficiency.
Senegal vs Iraq (26 June, 10PM EAT) — Senegal’s golden generation faces another examination.

Stream On Your Phone
Morocco vs Haiti — Moroccans are no longer the surprise. Managing expectations is harder than chasing them.
Algeria vs Austria — Could quietly shape the knockout bracket.
Portugal vs Colombia — Two nations equally capable of brilliance and self-destruction.

Rugby Notebook
While football dominates the headlines, rugby delivered its own reminder that sport remains gloriously unpredictable. The Hurricanes ended a ten-year wait for a Super Rugby Pacific title by dismantling the Chiefs 60-5 in Wellington.
It was not a final. It was a demolition.
Leading 29-0 at halftime, the Hurricanes ran riot — one of the most one-sided championship performances in professional rugby history.

Meanwhile attention shifts to the All Blacks squad announcement. Every coach has a scorecard. Every player believes they have done enough. By Tuesday morning, somebody will discover those are not always the same thing.

THE SCORECARD THAT SURVIVES

Last week, at the opening of the Obama Presidential Center in Chicago, Michelle Obama stepped to the microphone and quietly changed the register of the room. While the world measures Barack Obama through election victories and approval ratings, Michelle spoke about pressure, character and the moments nobody sees. She looked at him directly:
“Not once did you melt from the heat. Not once did you let it harden you.”
The room went quiet. Because she wasn’t describing a President.
She was describing a man she had watched up close when the title was off and the cameras were gone.
That is the private scorecard.
The one that no election result, no viral moment, no online campaign can produce.

Lina Githuka spent six years rewriting the institutional scorecard at KWAL, policy by policy, person by person. A male colleague told her: “This is the kind of organisation I would want my daughters to work for.” That is someone saying — what you built here changed what I believe is possible. Tim Payne spent fifteen years writing his own scorecard in empty stadiums. The internet rewrote it in 48 hours and called it his story.

The question was never what’s on the scorecard.
The question was always who gets to write it.

Lina decided she did. My colleague never asked. Michelle reminded a room full of powerful people that the most important scorecard is kept by the person who sees you when the performance is over.

If the people who know you best were handed a microphone today — would they describe your achievements?
Or would they describe your character?

Father’s Day Dedication
To every man who has ever helped raise a child.
Whether the child carried your surname or not.
Whether they called you Dad or Uncle.
Whether they lived in your house or simply passed through your life for a season.
Thank you for showing up.
Thank you for trying.
Thank you for carrying more than you said.
The world needs more good men.
Happy Father’s Day.

Same Forest. Different Monkeys.
Mubarikiwe. Jah Bless.
Go with song