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

3 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

FIXTURE NI FIXTURE

Last week we broke the internet.
What started as a simple story about a man called Agal Koko and 29 years of marriage somehow escaped the Facebook algorithm, jumped the walls and found its way into thousands of conversations I was never supposed to see.
By the time the dust settled, the article had recorded:

25,976 views, reached 14,069 unique readers and generated 2,626 engagements.

More interestingly, 70.9% of the people who read it were not followers of this page. They arrived because somebody sent it to them.
The algorithm contributed very little.
People did the heavy lifting. Friends tagged friends. Former classmates tagged former classmates.
Husbands quietly sent it to wives. Wives sent it to husbands.
Some readers appeared in the comments section carrying stories of their own.
Others arrived in my inbox. A few picked up the phone.
Which is both flattering and dangerous.

Kwanza, Asanteni sana. Jah Bless.

Because success has a way of making people lazy.
An old friend of mine called Lion has a saying:
Fixture ni fixture. Game ni game.
And fixtures must be honoured.
Yesterday’s win does not count today.
Last quarter’s numbers do not count this quarter.
The H1 target you exceeded will not help you hit the H2 target.
As a famous Nitpicker once reminded me after a successful article:
“You’ve created the beast. Now get ready to feed it.”
And so here we are again.
Another Sunday. Another deadline.
Another attempt to make sense of the world.

The FIFA World Cup is underway. The New York Knicks have finally climbed their mountain. Men’s Mental Health Month is in full swing. And as I looked around this week, I noticed something interesting. Men seem to be gathering again.

The first time I heard about men gathering in June was 117 years ago.

Sometime between the 2nd and 4th of June 1909, a group of Kikuyu men gathered to discuss what they believed was a problem.
Her name was Wangu wa Makeri.
To some, she was a pioneer. To others, a collaborator. To still others, a woman who had become far too powerful for the comfort of the men around her. Wangu was no ordinary woman. In a society where leadership was overwhelmingly male, she had risen to become a colonial headman, collecting taxes, enforcing rules and exercising authority over men who were unaccustomed to taking instructions from a woman.

Then came the Kibata dance. (I imagine it was the 2026 equivalent of a pole dance)

Accounts differ on exactly what happened, but the broad outline remains consistent. Wangu participated in a sacred dance reserved for initiated men.
Naked.
Whether it was confidence, defiance, miscalculation or a carefully prepared political trap depends on which historian you read.
What happened next is less disputed. The men gathered. The elders mobilised.
Her opponents found common cause. And within days, one of the most powerful women in colonial Kenya had fallen from power.

Now before the ladies reading this sharpen their tongues and prepare a strongly worded WhatsApp message — breathe.

This is not a story about whether the men were right or whether Wangu was wrong. It is a story about something far more interesting. Because as I looked around this June, I could not help noticing that men seem to be gathering again. Not around a dance. Not around a chief. Not around a rebellion. But around a very different question altogether.

What does it mean to be a man in 2026?

A few weeks ago I noticed a discussion on NTV built around pressure, purpose and power. Men talking openly about responsibility, expectations and the weight many carry quietly.

Then came an invitation to Ololua Forest. A poster from an old classmate.
Not a networking event. A wellness conversation.
Men stepping away from the noise for a few hours to compare notes on life.
A few days later my former Limuru Golf Captain & Tournament Director of the Magical Kenya Open Golf sent me a message.
”Mzae uko na roho” (Old man are you game)? Karen Country Club.
Different venue. Different speakers. Similar questions.
When A Man Fails. Midlife regrets. Recovery. Reinvention.
Not theory. Not motivation. Not social media wisdom.
Just men talking plainly about life.

Then I remembered that June is Men’s Mental Health Month. At first I thought these were isolated events. Then I stopped counting. Television discussions. Podcasts. Forest walks. Country club conversations. Church groups. WhatsApp groups. Former classmates. Coaches. Business leaders. Everywhere I looked, men seemed to be gathering. Not because they had all discovered the same answer. Perhaps because they had all arrived at the same question.

What does it mean to be the best man I can be?

The funny thing about brotherhood is that it often reveals itself when people are supposed to be competing.

As the FIFA World Cup kicked off this week, a statistic caught my eye. Four sets of brothers are representing different countries at the same tournament. Nico Williams plays for Spain. His older brother Iñaki Williams plays for Ghana. Désiré Doué represents France. His brother Guéla Doué represents Ivory Coast. John Souttar plays for Scotland. His brother Harry Souttar plays for Australia. Brian Brobbey represents the Netherlands. His half-brother Derrick Luckassen represents Ghana. Same parents. Same homes. Same childhood memories. Different passports. Different national anthems. Different dressing rooms. The World Cup is supposed to divide countries. This year it has also produced four examples of families finding themselves on opposite sides of international football. I suspect most non-football fans reacted exactly the same way I did.
“Wait... what?”
The salespeople in this room figured this out a long time ago.
The movies celebrate the lone wolf.
The rainmaker.
The closer who walks into a room, signs the deal and rides off into the sunset.
Reality is usually much less dramatic.
Most successful sales teams hunt in packs.
There is the morning huddle before the day begins.
The colleague who tells you a competitor has just changed prices.
The veteran who quietly shares a contact.
The rookie who spots an opportunity everyone else missed.
The individual may close the deal. The pack usually helps make it happen.
After over two decades in boardrooms and sales floors across East Africa, I have come to appreciate that some of the most valuable conversations happen before the customer ever walks into the room.

Perhaps that is why so many men seem to be gathering this June.

The New York Knicks have just won their first NBA championship in 53 years. Championship teams are often built around a single superstar. The Knicks took a different route.
The turning point came in 2022 when they signed Jalen Brunson in free agency. The following year they brought in his former Villanova teammate and close friend Josh Hart. Then OG Anunoby. Then Mikal Bridges. Then Karl-Anthony Towns. One by one the pieces arrived. Not overnight. Not through a single blockbuster move. Not through luck. Through a series of deliberate decisions made across four years. Sports fans will remember the points, the rebounds and the championship parade. What caught my attention was something quieter.
The title was not built in June.
It was built one relationship at a time.
One player. One trade. One conversation. One piece at a time.

Fifty-three years is a long time to wait for anything.
Irrefutable proof that doing it together still works.

On Saturday 27th June, a group of men will sit on a stage at Karen Country Club and discuss a topic that many men spend years avoiding.
When A Man Fails.
Midlife regrets. Recovery. Reinvention. Not theory. Not motivation.
Not social media wisdom.
Just a group of men comparing notes on what life actually looked like when the plan did not survive contact with reality.

By the time this conversation happens, the World Cup will still be underway. The Knicks will still be celebrating a championship 53 years in the making. Men will still be meeting in forests, churches, boardrooms and WhatsApp groups trying to make sense of life.

Which makes me wonder whether all these gatherings are really about the same thing. The men who gathered in 1909.
The men gathering in 2026.
The brothers on opposite sides of the World Cup.
The sales teams sharing intelligence before the day begins.
The championship teams built one relationship at a time.
Perhaps all of them are searching for the same thing.

Perspective.

Because age does not eliminate uncertainty.
Experience does not eliminate mistakes.
Success does not eliminate questions.
As we say in the mtaa (neighbourhood):
Piga luku bro. (Clean up). Tukutane “Keren” 27th.
Hata paka mzee hukunywa maziwa. (Even an old cat still drinks milk.)

And perhaps that is why men continue to gather. Not because they have all the answers.
But because they have finally become comfortable admitting they still have questions.

Same Forest. Different Monkeys.

Mubarikiwe. Jah Bless.
Go with song.

Last week a Luo man caused trouble.

Not Pawa trouble.
Not financial trouble.
The kind of trouble that begins when women start forwarding screenshots into WhatsApp groups and ends with innocent husbands being subjected to performance reviews Mid Quarter.

His name is Agal Koko.
Agal Koko woud Professor.
To celebrate twenty-nine years of marriage, he wrote a public tribute to his wife B. Anyone who has spent enough time around Luos knows they have many gifts. Storytelling. Confidence.
The ability to turn a simple greeting into a keynote address.
A Luo man can answer a yes-or-no question and take you through family history, three proverbs, a funeral in Alego and a brief detour into national politics before arriving at the answer.
So when Agal started writing, most people expected the usual eloquence.
What they did not expect was the reaction.
Women smiled. Men became uncomfortable.
I kept wondering…….when will he stop……
By the end of the post, Facebook had reached the only conclusion that mattered.

Whose husband is this?

The joke is that everybody focused on the words. The real story was the years.
Twenty-nine years.
School fees. Rent. Hospital visits. Family drama.
Good seasons. Bad seasons. Ordinary Tuesdays nobody ever posts about.
The difficult part is not writing a beautiful paragraph.
The difficult part is still being there when the anniversary arrives. That is the part nobody photographs.

The world celebrates milestones.
It rarely celebrates maintenance.
A marriage. A business. A reputation. A dream.
None built in one dramatic moment, but in thousands of small decisions repeated long after the excitement has faded.
It was not really about love.
It was about showing up
Again. And again. And again.

The Millennial Who Refused To Take A Beating

For the better part of two decades, Millennials have been everybody’s favourite punching bag.
According to the internet, they killed newspapers, golf, napkins,
marriage, home ownership, loyalty,
and Kapuka.
Boomers think they complain too much. Gen X think they overthink everything. Gen Z think they are old.
The middle child.
The one who got the hand-me-downs.
Caught between the aloofness of one generation and the chaos of the other.

They were told to study hard, get degrees, find jobs, buy homes and patiently wait their turn. Then they graduated into recessions, expensive housing and shrinking opportunities. When they asked questions, labelled entitled. When they challenged old systems, labelled difficult. Yet many of them kept showing up. Not by winning arguments on social media, but by surviving long enough to inherit responsibility.

Which is why Abelardo de la Espriella caught my attention.
El Tigre. The Tiger.
A Colombian criminal defence attorney with expensive suits and a habit of refusing to stay in the box people built for him. On May 31, 2026, he upended every pre-election poll to finish first with 43.7% of the vote. Country heads to a runoff on June 21.
El Tigre is the frontrunner.
What interests me is not his politics. It is what he represents. A generation that got tired of waiting for permission.
The funny thing about persistence is that people call it stubbornness right up until it works.

The Spreadsheet Problem

There is a line often attributed to Peter Drucker: “What gets measured gets managed.” The trouble is we started believing the opposite — that if something cannot be measured, it probably does not matter. I have sat in enough boardrooms across East Africa to know how this plays out.
Someone presents the numbers.
The numbers look clean.
Then you walk outside and reality does not match the spreadsheet. Because the spreadsheet measured what happened.
Nobody built a column for why.

Rory Sutherland, Vice-Chairman of Ogilvy, has a habit of making clever people uncomfortable.
His point is simple: human beings are not spreadsheets.
There is no formula for loyalty.
No dashboard for sacrifice.
No KPI for forgiveness.
Nobody has calculated the value of choosing the same person for twenty-nine years when life keeps giving you reasons not to.
Data documents what happened yesterday.
It struggles with what people hope will happen tomorrow, but
sometimes that future arrives on a flying carpet.

A Whole New World

There is a reason some songs survive long after the charts have forgotten them. They stop being songs.
They become time machines.
For many of us, the opening notes of A Whole New World transport us immediately. November 1992. Disney’s Aladdin.
A magic carpet. A princess. A street hustler pretending to be a prince.
Performed by Peabo Bryson and Regina Belle, it became the first and only Disney song to win Grammy Song of the Year. It dethroned Whitney Houston’s I Will Always Love You after fourteen weeks at Number One.

The song was never really about a flying carpet. It was about possibility.
Aladdin did not offer Princess Jasmine a strategic plan.
He offered her something more dangerous.
A different way of seeing the world.
Every generation inherits a map that stops working halfway through the journey.
Its no more about whether they can preserve the old map.
It is whether they have the courage to explore a new one.

Who’s Your Mama?

As the NBA Finals unfold, most attention is on Victor Wembanyama.
The Alien.
At over seven feet tall, with the agility of a guard and the wingspan of a small aircraft, he looks less like a basketball player and more like a software update. When people watch Wemby they ask the obvious questions. How tall? How many points? How many rings? The more interesting question is the one nobody asks.

Who raised him?

By the time we discover elite performers, somebody else has already spent years building them. The spotlight always arrives late.
Then Jalen Brunson. Long before Madison Square Garden was chanting his name, there was Rick Brunson teaching habits, standards and expectations. Confidence is often borrowed before it is owned. Somebody believes in you before you learn to believe in yourself.

And then Mike Brown. Hired by the New York Knicks in July 2025 with a career most people would politely describe as complicated.
Fired twice by Cleveland.
Fired after one season in Los Angeles.
Questioned.
Doubted.
Written off.
He kept showing up. He kept adjusting. When asked how he survived so many endings to reach the 2026 NBA Finals, his answer was three words.

“Me. I adjust.” (I think he’s Kenyan)

Which brings me to Aymen Onyango.
Many Kenyans know his father, Lucas “Lukaka” Onyango — a winger who wore the Kenya Sevens jersey for years, part of the Shujaa and Mean Machine pipeline that put Kenyan rugby on the map. Lucas has spoken publicly about his son’s football journey — the training, the sacrifices, the daily commitment to a dream most people around them could not yet see. Before any scout wrote Aymen’s name in a notebook, there was a father who already believed. #GodspeedAymen

We celebrate stars because they are visible. We celebrate trophies because they are measurable. But behind almost every success story sits a mother, a father, a coach — someone whose greatest contribution will never appear in any statistics column. The athlete gets the headline. The family gets the journey.

Who’s your mama? Who’s your papa? Who’s your coach?

Twenty-nine years after he started a conversation with a beautiful woman,
Agal Koko still chooses Beryl.
In Colombia, a generation told to wait their turn is on the verge of taking power.
Rory Sutherland keeps reminding clever rooms that spreadsheets cannot measure everything that matters.
Peabo Bryson left behind a song that still tells whole generations the horizon is not the end.
And Mike Brown, written off more times than most coaches get hired, is on the biggest stage in basketball because he refused to stop adjusting.

Different stories. Different countries. Different generations. Different outcomes.
Yet somehow they all arrive at the same place.
Consistency. Showing up.
Again. And again. And again.

Show me the person who stayed.
Show me the parent who sacrificed.
Show me the coach who kept teaching after being fired.
Show me the spouse who kept choosing the same person.
Because beneath every headline is usually a decade nobody saw.

The magic carpet was never really magic. The championship was never won in June. The marriage was never built on the wedding day.
The visible moment is usually just the receipt.
The real work happened earlier. Much earlier.

The forest changes. The monkeys change. The generations change.
But the rules rarely do.

Plant. Water. Wait. Repeat.

And eventually something beautiful grows.

As for Agal Koko and B… see you at your 30th.
If you hear noise at the gate, tie up the dogs.
J’okuyo has landed. With Karatina Juogi. Wadwaro donjo!!

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

See you next Sunday.

#SalesFundiKe #SameForestDifferentMonkeys

As I write this article, I am watching Kenya Lionesses vs South Africa on Rugby Afrique’s Facebook page.
The score keeps changing. 8-7 half time.The comments keep flying.
The referee is is hard of hearing and seeing to at least seventeen people.
75th minute. Snyder Mokaya receives the ball around half way dashes for about 20 metres steps one defender, rolls around another, drives low, Try Time!!
Kenya 20 South Africa 22.
She’s lining up the kick……

And I have a publishing deadline to beat.
And somewhere in the middle of all that, the camera pans to the crowd.
Parents. Fans. Former players.
People carrying flags. People carrying hopes.
And I find myself wondering how many parents in that crowd are having a silent argument with themselves.
Not about rugby. About their children.
Because somewhere in Kenya tonight, a mother is staring at a pair of rugby boots worth several thousand shillings.
A father is looking at the cost of chess lessons.
Another parent is being told that a smartphone is no longer a luxury. It is a necessity.
Then school fees arrive like an uninvited relative.
Again.
The committee meeting begins.
The practical member speaks first.
“Na hiyo rugby itamsaidia aje?” (how does this rugby help her)
A fair question.
Most rugby players never become Lionesses or Shujaa.
Most chess players never become Magnus Carlsen.
Most TikTok creators never see a sponsorship cheque.
Many dreams never make it past the starting line.
Which is why parents worry.
Because every dream looks expensive when viewed through the lens of school fees.
The funny thing is that every generation thinks it is being sensible.
The generation before us questioned Dee-Jaying.
Then the internet.
Then social media.
Then content creation.
Now many parents find themselves standing on the same ground, asking similar questions with different words.
The rugby field simply happens to be today’s version of the conversation. As the camera pans across the crowd again, I realise the debate may not be about sport at all.

Maybe the question is no longer: “Which dream should we fund?”
Maybe the better question is: “Which dreams are connected to the future we’re walking into?”

The real argument in my view is risk.

Parents are not arguing about rugby.
They are arguing about probability.
Because they have seen enough life to know that talent is common.
Success is not.

As I write this, Shujaa are in Spain fighting for survival on the World Rugby Sevens circuit.
The margins are tiny. One missed tackle. One dropped pass.
One conversion. One injury.
The difference between a hero’s welcome at JKIA and a difficult conversation with selectors.
Thousands of young Kenyans have dreamed of wearing that jersey.
Only a handful ever will.
“Na hiyo rugby itamsaidia aje?” (How will that rugby help?)
The funny thing is that the same question could be asked about chess.
Magnus Carlsen is probably the most famous chess player on earth. His net worth is somewhere between US$25 million and US$50 million.
That sounds impressive.
Until you compare it with the machine sitting next door

A Forbes graphic stopped me in my tracks.
Twenty of the world's 50 highest-paid athletes were NBA players.
The NFL had nine.
Soccer had seven.
Golf had four.
Formula One had three.
A rookie sitting at the very bottom of an NBA roster can earn over US$1 million a year.
Not Victor Wembanyama. Not Jalen Brunson. Not LeBron or Steph Curry.
The guy at the far end of the bench.
The one casual fans cannot even name.

Twenty. From one sport.

The question is no longer whether sport is risky.
Every dream is risky. The question becomes: why does one machine produce so many highly paid people?
Why does one ecosystem keep generating players, coaches, owners, broadcasters, sponsors, podcasters and investors at industrial scale?
Suddenly the parent staring at rugby boots is no longer comparing rugby against school fees.
They are comparing ecosystems.
Maybe we’ve spent our lives comparing dreams.
Instead of comparing the machines behind those dreams.

Let’s stay with the NBA for a moment.

Back in 2004, Jay-Z reportedly bought a small stake in the New Jersey Nets for about US$1 million. Most people saw a rapper buying into a basketball team. Today the Brooklyn Nets are worth more than US$6 billion.

Then Justin Timberlake. Not a player. Not a coach. Part of the ownership group of the Memphis Grizzlies — valued at over US$3 billion.

Then J. Cole. Another musician. Another audience builder. Another owner. Charlotte Hornets. Roughly US$3 billion.

Three artists. Three cities. One recurring idea.

People who understand audiences eventually buy the places where audiences gather.

Then the pattern crossed the Atlantic.
In 2025, Tems became part of the ownership group of San Diego FC. Reports put the MLS expansion fee at around US$500 million. Half a billion dollars just to join the league.
That should tell you something about the value of attention.
A few years ago, if somebody told you that Bien-Aimé Baraza and Chiki Kuruka would invest in a basketball club, many people would have laughed.
Yet they bought into Nairobi City Thunder.
Not because they suddenly became obsessed with pick-and-rolls or Zone defence.
“A crowd has value.
A fan has value.
A community has value.
Ask any politician, church, football club or salesperson.”

The people making these moves are not buying sport.
They are buying proximity to the future

Which brings us to Kahawa Pride FC.
Because most people still think they are looking at a football club.
The numbers suggest something else.
223,590 views. 679 paying Discord members. 109 jerseys sold.
US$23,568 in revenue in a single month. (Figures published publicly by their founders — “they said it I didn’t :)”
Most Kenyan football clubs would kill for that kind of direct relationship with their supporters.
Because the traditional model looked like this:
build a club, hope fans come, hope sponsors come, hope money comes.
Kahawa Pride ran the equation backwards.

Build an audience. Build a community. Build content. Then build the football club.

The football club becomes a media company.
The media company funds the football club

I work in sales. I have spent years watching talented salespeople lose to less talented ones.
The difference is almost never product knowledge.
It is almost never price.
The difference is almost always this: one person built a relationship before they needed it.
The other arrived when they needed something.

That is the same logic Kahawa Pride is running. That is the same logic Bien is running. That is the same logic every creator earning KSh 100,000 from their bedroom is running.

Build the audience before you need it. Because the day you need it is too late to start.

And suddenly the argument about rugby boots, chess lessons and smartphones starts looking different.
Because a smartphone is no longer just a smartphone.
It is a camera. A studio. A sales desk.
A distribution channel. A broadcast station.
A community-building tool.

Today there are Kenyan creators quietly earning KSh 10,000–50,000 a month from content. Others are making KSh 100,000–200,000 and beyond.
Not millions. Not private jets.
Just enough money to make parents start saying: “ulikuwa serious.” (you were serious)

Here is what I want to say plainly.
Kenya has never been short of talent.
We are in a machine shortage.

We keep producing world-class people and sending them into systems designed to eliminate most of them. We celebrate the one who survives and call the rest unlucky. Then we feed the next generation into the same machine. Again. And again.

The parents in that crowd are not wrong to worry.
But maybe they are asking the wrong question.
The question is not whether the dream is risky.
The question is whether their child understands how the machine works.
Because the machine doesn’t care about talent.
The machine rewards people who understand the machine.

So maybe the rugby boots are an investment.
Maybe the chess set is an investment.
Maybe the smartphone is an investment.
The answer depends less on the tool and more on whether the child understands what they are building.
Not just a skill.
A machine.

So let me ask you something.
If you had KSh 10,000 to invest in a 15-year-old today — boots, chess set, smartphone, or something else entirely — what would you choose?

More importantly: would you tell them why? (share in the comments)

Because that conversation — the one where a parent explains how the machine works instead of just funding the dream — that might be the most valuable investment of all.

The forest hasn’t changed.

The monkeys who thrive are the ones who finally understood the trees.

Same Forest. Different Monkeys.

Mubarikiwe. Jah Bless.
Go with song.

The Orange Light

There is a meme doing the rounds: a glowing orange fuel light on a dashboard. The caption reads: “This little light of mine. I’m gonna let it shine.”
Funny. Until it isn’t.

That light isn’t celebrating; it’s warning you that your tank is empty. If you don’t stop to refuel from something real, you will sputter and stop somewhere inconvenient, pretending you meant to pull over. This week, major stories in sport and business asked the same question: when things stop working, do you reinvent? Or do you remember?

Not reinvent.
Not rebrand.
Not another post filled with words like pivot, disruption, and ecosystem.
Refuel.
Go back to your roots, your depth, and the things that worked before the world convinced you they were outdated

Do You Remember?

You can walk into almost any party gathering—a wedding in Nairobi,
a nyama choma joint on Friday night, an old school reunion where someone has had two shots more than wisdom recommends.
Or just go to 213 Lavington. Ask For NiJo.
When those first notes drop, something strange happens.

The young, the old, the cool,

and even the people with bad knees suddenly remember the choreography. For four minutes, human beings agree on something. No one is arguing about politics, fuel prices, or MMF returns. Everyone is just there, in the same forest.

That song is September.

Maurice White understood something modern creators still struggle to learn:
people rarely remember perfection;
they remember feeling.
His lyricist, Allee Willis, once begged him to remove the famous “ba-dee-ya” line, (the hook sung on September) asking what the f*** does it mean.
Maurice White replied: “Who f****** cares?”
But there was a deeper reveal.
Questlove recently shared that the “21st night of September” was connected to the expected birth date of Maurice White’s son—a secret love letter hidden inside a joyful anthem.
When his wife Marilyn finally heard the meaning years later, she said,

“My whole body smiled.”

Suddenly, the groove becomes something else entirely. Not just disco or nostalgia, but memory. The real genius of Maurice White was where he went looking for it.
He went back to Kemet—ancient Egypt. He put the Ankh and the Eye of Horus on album sleeves. He took the kalimba—a thumb piano from Zimbabwe—and turned it into a sound that conquered American radio. He went backward thousands of years to sound timeless.

That is not nostalgia. That is architecture.

The Special One, The Professor & The Apprentice

Florentino Pérez did not call José Mourinho because he ran out of options;
he called him because he ran out of excuses.
After two seasons without a major trophy and a fractured dressing room full of expensive players behaving like HR problems with shin guards,
Real Madrid looked past the fresh tactical geniuses.
They picked the 61-year-old who already knows where the walls crack.
Sometimes you don’t need somebody new; you need somebody who knows where to tap.

Across London, Arsenal just won their first league title in twenty-two years. Mikel Arteta was never the superstar in that story; he was the apprentice. He sat quietly in Arsène Wenger’s dressing room, absorbing ideas, rhythm, discipline, and culture. People mocked Wenger for years, claiming football had moved on. Then, his student quietly rebuilt a champion using Wenger’s core principles: technical discipline, attacking identity, and cultural cohesion.
Modern kit,
Old architecture.
Same Forest. Different Managers. #COYG

The Headmaster is marking papers again

Across rugby, the All Blacks did the same. Dave Rennie took the job with less than 500 days before the Rugby World Cup. With the rugby public behaving like panicky corporate shareholders, his first call was to Sir Graham Henry ( The Headmaster)—who is nearly 80 years old.

Critics called it sentimental.

Many teams love pretending experience expires like yoghurt.
Yet, Henry walked into their first meeting having already scouted over 60 Super Rugby players, complete with a working shortlist.
That is not a man trapped in the past; it’s a man who never stopped doing the work. Rugby understands what business forgets:
Experience is not the opposite of innovation.
Most times, it is what stops innovation from becoming stupidity.

The Man with Two Gloves

Until recently, Aaron Rai was mostly known as the PGA Tour golfer who wears two gloves. Now he is a major champion. But the beautiful part of the story is the ritual.

Rai turned pro at 17, convinced he was ready. He was not. He lost status twice and nearly disappeared into the brutal machinery of professional golf. His mother, Dalvir Shukla, immigrated to England from Kenya as a teenager. His father used to clean Aaron’s clubs with baby oil because replacement equipment cost money they didn’t have.
Aaron still cleans them that way today.

Then came the PGA Championship. A 68-foot putt on the 17th hole made history. He became the first Englishman to win it since 1919, and the first player of Indian heritage to win a men’s major—achieved with clubs still cleaned the old way. The ritual survived the success.

Compare that to the sales manager who replaced her veteran rep with someone younger, cheaper, and more “dynamic.” The veteran knew clients by name and knew which objections were fake before the tea arrived.
The new rep had energy, a clean LinkedIn profile, and buzzwords like
generating new leads using Linkedin, scalability and cross platform storytelling.
Twelve months later, the pipeline is halved.
Experience reads the room before the meeting starts;
Enthusiasm walks in ready to pitch.
Know the difference.

Bank Otuch. K’Ogalo Pawa.

Eish yawa Gor Mahia.
K’Ogalo.
The club Nairobi built, feeds, and the one that somehow survives every funeral prediction Kenyan football throws at it. This season, they didn’t just win matches; they monetised identity:

• Ksh 15 million in league prize money

• Ksh 12.9 million from CAF preliminary rounds

• Ksh 85 million from SportPesa

• Ksh 38.2 million from Azam TV

• Ksh 22.78 million from gate collections

That is roughly Ksh 179.88 million in one season, built stream by stream, gate by gate, win by win.

People love the trophy photo, but very few respect the repetition that created it.
That is why most people quit too early;
they want harvest-season emotions without planting-season discipline.
Bank otuch does not arrive because you manifested it.
It arrives because you kept showing up long after the applause disappeared.
K’Ogalo bende nigi dhiang’ (Gor Mahia also has money)—we are no longer beggars, we are the standard!”
— Ochieng’ Jalamo, Lifelong Gor Mahia Supporter

What Light Are You Letting Shine?

Stop rebuilding from zero every time life punches you in the mouth. You already have lived experience, scar tissue, and the knowledge of where things break.
There is a difference between nostalgia and architecture.
Nostalgia says, “Those were the good old days.”
Architecture says, “These foundations still hold.”
That orange fuel light is not your enemy—it is honesty. It is telling you that whatever you abandoned too quickly might still contain the answer.

Three Truths:

Depth is not defeat: Going back to roots, systems, and rituals is not a retreat. It is reconnaissance.

The ritual is the architecture: Aaron Rai still uses baby oil on his clubs.
Maurice White went back to Kemet.
Arteta modernised Wenger without disrespecting him.
The ritual remembers what success forgets.

The cheque will always arrive: Gor Mahia’s millions are not luck; they are compound interest on years of identity and consistency.
Build properly, and eventually,
bank otuch.

The Braai is on Sunday

The Kenya Lionesses beat Uganda 43-10 yesterday. Faith Livoi walked away with Player of the Match in front of a loud home crowd at RFUEA. Earlier, South Africa dismantled Madagascar 64-5. The Bok women arrived in Nairobi looking like people who already believe the trophy belongs to them.

Wednesday is Madagascar, where every bonus point matters. Because Sunday is South Africa—the four-time defending champions who have ruled since 2019.

But hosting changes things. This time, the noise will not be green and gold from a distance.
It will be Kenyan isikuti, Kenyan lungs, and Kenyan expectation sitting right on the touchline. The Lionesses—forever cast as “almost there”—finally get to hunt this title at home.
We snacked on the Cranes;
We sharpen the fangs against the Makis on Wednesday.
Then comes Sunday:
The braai.

The Benediction

Dalvir Shukla left Kenya as a teenager and watched her son chase golf using equipment cleaned with baby oil.
“He had already lifted a trophy on Kenyan soil at Muthaiga.
Years later, he lifted a major.”
That is not a golf story;
it is a mother story.
It is the kind of quiet faith that keeps producing people capable of carrying heavy things.

To everyone being told their best chapter is behind them: maybe the answer is not to start again.
Maybe the answer is to remember properly.
What did you leave behind that was actually working?
Please share your thoughts in the (forest) comments.

This week’s hymn
Fittingly, Questlove’s new HBO documentary Earth, Wind & Fire: (To Be Celestial vs. That's the Weight of the World) releases to the public on June 7 on HBO Network, and globally on Max — nearly fifty years after Maurice White taught the world that rhythm, memory and roots could still sound futuristic.
Not just because the groove is medicine.
But because Maurice White hid a love letter inside one of the world’s happiest choruses and nobody noticed for nearly fifty years.

Same Forest. Different Monkeys.

Mubarikiwe. Jah Bless.
Go with song.

Somewhere inside a sleek Nike boardroom last week, there must have been panic.
Not normal panic.
Corporate panic.
The kind where PowerPoint decks suddenly become prayer requests.

Adidas had just spent the week dancing on everybody’s timeline after Sebastian Sawe’s marathon heroics. Records broken. Screenshots everywhere. The internet doing what it does best — emotionally printing money for whichever logo happens to be standing closest to greatness.
Meanwhile somewhere in Oregon, a quarterly sales target was quietly gasping for oxygen.
I imagine the Monday morning sales meeting was tense. One executive loosened his tie, stared at the numbers and muttered:
“Y’all need prayers.”
Unfortunately, somebody in the room took that literally.

So now I imagine some Armani-suited Nike executive squeezed into a cramped Catholic confession booth.

“Father, I have sinned. It has been three product launches, five major sporting events and two celebrity campaigns since my last confession.”
The priest sighs. God does not judge he whispers. “Say 52 Hail Marys.”
Hail Mary number 11 — nothing. Number 24 — still nothing.
By number 38 he is bargaining directly with heaven about market share.
Then somewhere around the 52nd, his phone vibrates.
An image.
Pope Leo.
Old-school Nikes.
No paid influencer. No Super Bowl commercial. No emotionally authentic campaign. Just a photograph.
The internet did the rest.
One viral image later, Nike’s quarter two numbers must have filled the dashboards faster than Kenyans on the eve of the fuel hike.
And somewhere inside Adidas headquarters, a man who had watched their $500 Sebastian Sawe sneakers sell out and reappear online at $1,500 probably whispered the same thing every struggling salesman eventually whispers:

Ni God manze. (Its God man)

Funny line. But modern life runs on belief systems more than we admit.
A football fan buys a jersey after a terrible season.
A politician survives another scandal.
A Kenyan abroad sends money home after saying “this is the last time” for the sixth consecutive month.
Which is why the diaspora remittance story has become impossible to ignore.

Ali Hussein and the FINTAK newsletter highlighted this week that Kenya’s diaspora remittances crossed $5 billion in 2025.
Bigger than tea.
Bigger than coffee.
Bigger than sectors we proudly debate on TV panels every evening.

That is no longer supporting relatives.
That is infrastructure.

One cousin abroad quietly becomes school fees, hospital cover, funeral committee, b…k tax headquarters and emergency liquidity facility for an entire family tree. You see them quietly shaking their hears as they read the message.

“Nitumie kakitu.” (Send something)

Small sentence. Massive economy. Banks know it. Telcos know it.
Fintechs definitely know it.
Entire products are now being built around emotional obligation.
People rarely wait for perfect systems before surviving.
They start rebuilding first.
Then institutions arrive later — pretending it was their idea all along.

By the mid-1980s, Vietnam was exhausted.
Not “I am done with this relationship” exhausted.
Properly exhausted.

They had fought the French. Then the Americans. Won both wars. Reunified the country. Then nearly collapsed trying to run the economy through rigid Soviet central planning. By 1985, inflation was estimated to be above 700%.
Farmers were struggling. Food shortages were real. The Soviet aid pipeline keeping them afloat was drying up fast.

The country had beaten foreign powers only to start losing to its own system.

That’s what got me most. Because many countries can unite against an external enemy. Very few can admit: “Maybe the problem is now us.”
Then came 1986. The 6th Party Congress. Vietnam introduced what became known as Đổi Mới.
Renovation.
Not revolution. Not motivational quotes on social media with sunsets in the background.
Renovation.
But the most important detail is the one most people miss. The Vietnamese people had already started adapting before the government officially changed policy.
Farmers were already informally trading. Workers were already improvising.
Markets were quietly emerging underneath the formal structure.

The people renovated first. The government eventually caught up.

Between 1993 and 2014, over 40 million Vietnamese people rose out of poverty. (they are over 100 million people)
Vietnam went from food shortages to one of the world’s major rice exporters.
That is why Đổi Mới means more than it sounds. Not because Vietnam became perfect. But because ordinary people started rebuilding before the system fully believed rebuilding was possible.

Kenya has its own quiet renovators. Most just don’t get documentaries made about them yet.

Take Felista Mutheu Mugo.
Born in Kibwezi. Grew up in South B. Studied baking and pastry.
Not exactly the traditional origin story of a professional cage fighter.
Mixed Martial Arts (MMA) was never the plan. She started karate for self-defence in 2019, became a national champion, then slowly realised she needed more.
Boxing. Grappling. Kickboxing. Discipline. Pain.
Then came a very modern African story. She started posting training clips on Instagram. In Lubumbashi, a Congolese MMA coach called Yadad Moser saw them and reached out.
And like every sensible African woman taught not to trust random men on the internet — she ignored him. For almost a year. Eventually she replied. Eventually she moved. Eventually her life changed. Not through an institutional program. Not through a federation masterplan. Not through a motivational seminar with tips on how to get what you want.
Lubumbashi.
Her first professional fights did not go well. Losses. Hard lessons. Reality arriving quickly. But she stayed. Better grappling. Better striking. Better composure. Quiet renovation.
Last month she became the first Kenyan woman signed by the Professional Fighters League and beat Uganda’s Annet Kiiza in Pretoria. Zero federation support. Friends and family rooting for her.
Resonable prize money all on her own.

Just years of rebuilding quietly before cameras arrived.

David Raya’s story is basically Đổi Mới wearing goalkeeper gloves.
He has a tattoo on THE BASE OF HIS NECK. The date 13-08-21. No big deal, right?Well. That date commemorates his Premier League debut — a moment worth remembering forever.
Except Raya’s debut happened to be a 2-0 victory over a certain club called Arsenal.
He tattooed the day he beat his future employers, onto his skin.
That is not arrogance. That is a man who understood exactly where he had come from and refused to let himself forget. Because the journey to that tattoo was not glamorous.
At 16 he left Barcelona for Blackburn Rovers. Alone. Barely spoke English. Living by himself while most 16-year-olds were still negotiating curfew and asking for fare.
Raya got loaned to Southport. Fifth tier of English football.
Cold mornings. Small crowds.
Win bonuses that mattered because they helped pay bills. Blackburn had spoiled him — meals ready, laundry done, structure provided. Southport changed that quickly. Do your own laundry. Handle your own life.
Play against men whose mortgage depended on Saturday results.
That is where the renovation happened. Not the Emirates. Southport.
He climbed every level properly. League One. Championship. Brentford.
Then Arsenal — where Aaron Ramsdale had just been in the Premier League Team of the Year.
Raya arrived on loan carrying all the emotional warmth of a KRA return.
Four games later, Arteta changed goalkeepers.
Now: three consecutive Golden Gloves. Record clean-sheet pace. Champions League final. Potentially the greatest clean-sheet season by a goalkeeper at an English club in UCL history.
But the part that stayed with me wasn’t the trophies.
It was the tattoo. 13-08-21.
The day before everything. Inked permanently.
A quiet man’s loud reminder that the renovation — all of it — was worth it.
#COYG

And next week the renovation comes to Nairobi.
The Rugby Africa Women’s Cup arrives at RFUEA Grounds on Ngong Road. May 23 to May 31.
Kenya Lionesses. South Africa. Uganda Lady Cranes. Madagascar.
Circle May 31. Kenya vs South Africa. Potential title decider.
Women’s rugby across Africa has survived mostly through stubbornness for years — shared physio tape, small allowances, long bus rides, players balancing jobs and training simultaneously.
Quiet renovation. Same pattern as Vietnam, Felista, and Raya. Rebuilding before recognition.
Go find your Kenya shirt. Tukutane RFUEA grounds.
Wishing coach Simon Odongo, Captain Sheila Chajira and the Lionesses success.
The rebuild is on show. Godspeed.
#LetsGoKenyaLionesses

Tukuwe serious kidogo though. (lets be a bit serious)
One of the strangest things about modern African life is how quickly we notice failure and how slowly we notice rebuilding.
A team loses one match — everybody becomes a tactical expert.
A project delays — national mourning on social media.
But quiet rebuilding? That rarely trends.

Nobody claps for the woman doing double shifts abroad quietly paying school fees. Nobody claps for the Lionesses doing gym work at 7am. Nobody claps for the athlete training in an empty South B gym while the country debates softer things.

That work is boring to watch. Until one day it suddenly looks like overnight success.

Sometimes our governments behave like this. They arrive late to momentum and then speak like they created it personally. Meanwhile the real renovation had already started — in estates, in WhatsApp groups, in diaspora apartments, in muddy training grounds, in fifth-tier football towns, in Lubumbashi gyms, in tired households surviving another month.

Perfect systems are the reward at the end of rebuilding. Not the beginning.

I saw the stat above recently.
79% of men admit apologising even when they believe they are right.

Really? That number felt way too low.

Because by a certain age, most men are no longer arguing purely for truth. They are calculating consequences. School fees. Rent. Co-parenting. Office politics. Family WhatsApp groups. Emotional fatigue.
Starting over at 43.
Three-day silence in the house over something that started with “did you call me fat.”
Sometimes “I’m sorry” is not surrender.
It is infrastructure maintenance.
And maybe that is still part of renovation too. Less ego. More continuity. Less performance. More rebuilding. Most people are honestly just improvising adulthood one month at a time — hoping the system around them does not collapse before payday.
Which is why next week I will go find my old Kenya shirt and those battered old Nikes at the back of the house and head to RFUEA.
Not because the rebuilding is finished.
Because it isn’t.
But because sometimes the most important thing you can do is show up while the rebuilding is still happening.

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

The WhatsApp Message

It’s a Monday morning. You’re back at your desk. Last month’s “conjugal visit” is a warm memory — good weekend, good vibes, you handled your business like a responsible adult. Life is good. The Premier League run-in is heating up.
West Ham tuko disco matanga (1-0 full time).
Burnley on the 18th. Palace on the 24th. Champions League final on the 30th —
and the end-month Q1 commission bonus is sitting pretty.
Calendar sorted. Priorities clear.
Then the WhatsApp notification drops.
“Babe... niko na ball.”

You smile. Immediately you go into fixture mode. Ball? Which game? PSG is the 30th. West Ham is buried. Burnley the 18th. Palace the 24th — actually, let me check if that’s on a Saturday because the boys were talking about—

She drops the second message.

“Si football. I am pregnant.”

The room changes temperature. You put the phone face down. Pick it up again. Open the calculator. Open Google. Type “safe days calculator” with the fingers of a man who is suddenly very interested in biology. You check your M-Pesa messages — specifically the one from the pharmacy three weeks ago that you filed mentally under “handled.”
You count backwards. Count forwards. The math is not mathing.
The Champions League final is the least of your problems. Because in approximately nine months, a human being is arriving. And unlike West Ham, Burnley, and Crystal Palace —
this fixture cannot be rescheduled.
Welcome to the most important match of your life.
You haven’t even started warming up.

The Numbers Nobody Told You

Kenya just crossed a line the World Health Organisation drew thirty years ago.
Twenty percent of all facility-based births in this country are now C-sections.
The WHO ceiling is fifteen.
We blew past it and didn’t stop to discuss it.
Kirinyaga — 40%.
Kiambu — 33%.
Kanairo — 21 to 25%, depending on which side of the insurance divide you sit. Mandera — below 2%.

Same country. Different realities.

These numbers are not just medical.
They are a map of class, planning, and what happens when a man spends the first trimester calculating safe days instead of calculating costs.
SHIF (Social Health Insurance Fund) covers Ksh 32,600 for a C-section.
An executive private hospital charges at least 180k. That gap — Ksh 140,000 minimum — lands in your lap. Before complications. Before NICU. Before anything goes sideways.

You have nine months to close it.

The Virile Kenyan Dude’s Birth Preparedness Starter Kit

This is not an attack. This is a briefing.

The same man who can quote Haaland’s expected goals, who has a WhatsApp group dedicated to analysing Arteta’s tactics, who knows the UEFA away goals rule — that same man often cannot tell you the difference between SHA maternity cover and a private hospital top-up. Has not spoken to his insurer about pre-authorisation. Does not know Linda Mama has been absorbed into SHA. Has not looked at a single maternity package brochure.

He was busy with the fixtures.

So here is the kit. By tier.

Public — KNH, Pumwani, Mbagathi: SHA covers you. What you need is not money — it is presence. Be the man who brought the delivery kit, stayed the night on the plastic chair, and did not treat it like a sacrifice.

Mid-tier — Coptic, Neema, St. Mary’s: Budget Ksh 50,000 to Ksh 70,000.
Not locked in a 91-day T-bill that matures after the baby has arrived.
Liquid.
A money market fund with monthly access. Or a SACCO loan — 9-month repayment, most SACCOs will structure it if you ask early. The interest is manageable when you plan. Criminal when you panic.

Executive — Aga Khan, Nairobi Hospital, MP Shah: Budget Ksh 250,000 minimum. Call your insurer this week — not in month eight. Know your co-payment. Know your annual limit. The paediatrician’s receiving fee will appear on the bill and surprise you if you weren’t paying attention.
A real emergency fund is one positive pregnancy test away from becoming a maternity fund.

Virility without liquidity is a high-risk strategy.

When Volkswagen Left the Building

In 2021, Volkswagen sold Bugatti to Rimac — a small Croatian EV startup. The headlines celebrated it as liberation. Bugatti, finally free. Ready to show the world what it was really made of.
Then the world started watching.
Because Bugatti without the Volkswagen ecosystem — the engineering pipelines, the supplier relationships, the institutional capital quietly holding the scaffolding — had to answer a question it had never been asked before:
Are you actually as good as you looked?
Sit with that for a bit. Not because you are a car.
But because you are a salesperson.Or a manager.
Or a Coach/CEO who has spent years performing brilliantly inside a particular organisation and is now either thinking about leaving — or has recently left — and is finding that the numbers are not travelling with you the way you expected.

The most dangerous illusion in professional life is attributing your environment’s results to your personal talent.
The market that was growing anyway. The brand that sold itself.
The territory that was warm before you arrived.
The manager who quietly cleaned up your messes while you collected the commission.

The ones who were genuinely good rebuild. The ones who were riding the machine spend eighteen months explaining why this new company doesn’t understand them.
You already know which category you are in.
The market is simply waiting to confirm it.

Gandalf at the Goan Institute (A rugby story)

Last week I was at the Goan Institute on Juja Road when the Mwamba Ladies lifted their fifth consecutive Kenya Cup trophy.
Five in a row.
Unbeaten two full seasons.
Final score 30–20 against Kenya Harlequin Queens. After the trophy, after the photographs, after the ululation that belongs exclusively to women who have worked for something and taken it without apology — I walked into the clubhouse.

And there, alone behind a laptop, surrounded by cables, dressed in the manner of a man who has been in every room that mattered in Kenyan social life for six decades and has no intention of vacating any of them — was Douglas Pereira.
Kenya’s oldest working DJ. Born 1949. DJing since he was sixteen — which means he was probably rocking the house at the very first Madaraka Day in 1964.
Still present. Still adapting. Still there.

The Goan Institute was founded in 1905. It has outlived colonialism, independence, three constitutions, and the kind of Nairobi real estate pressure that erases institutions without the stubbornness to survive. As of January 2025, it is the official home of Mwamba RFC — Kulabu — formed in 1977, forty-nine years of Kenyan rugby, relegated from the Kenya Cup in 1994 and again in March 2025.

Every commentary called it the end of an era. It was not the end of anything.

Under Chairman Edwin Waita, Mwamba went into the Championship and rebuilt. April 18 this year — promoted. May 9th, yesterday — KRU Championship winners, 34–33 over JKUAT Cougars in a final that probably shortened lives.
They came back with a Ksh 9 million sponsorship and a 120-year-old home on Juja Road — where 5,000 government affordable housing units and another 5,000 from private developers are going up.
Ten thousand young families moving in.
Children being born into estates hungry for community, for a team, for somewhere to belong.
Mwamba, relegated and bruised twelve months ago, is now positioned at the centre of the next generation of Nairobi rugby.

And Gandalf is still behind the decks.

Some institutions survive because of money.
Most survive because a few stubborn people refuse to stop showing up.
Douglas Pereira is not a relic.
He is the proof. And so is Mwamba RFC.
R Family Buda (whatever that means)

3 Things This Week

Planning is love. Not flowers. Not words. The man who opened a spreadsheet in month one and calculated the gap between SHA cover and the hospital bill — that man loved his partner in a language that actually pays the anaesthetist.
Love without a plan is a feeling.
Love with one is a foundation.

Systems reveal talent. When the ecosystem falls away — when you change companies, when the sponsor leaves, when the relegation comes — what remains is the truth of what you actually built. The ones who built something real will prove it. The ones who were riding the wave will have a very educational next eighteen months.

Rebirth requires showing up. Gandalf behind the laptop. Mwamba back in Kenya Cup after a year of soul searching.
A mother in theatre at 3am while the man she chose is in the room — not in the car park.
Showing up is not complicated.
It is simply the decision to be present for the thing that matters,
Without requiring an audience.

As you face the new week

To the woman who has been through the cut — any version of the cut, surgical or otherwise, visible or invisible — this one is for you.

You carried it.
You planned it when nobody was planning with you.
You managed the fear and the finances and the family opinions and the body that was no longer entirely your own.
You are not the opening scene of somebody else’s story.

You are the infrastructure.

Every family functioning in this economy, every child fed, every household held together — behind almost all of it is a woman who decided to show up every day without a trophy ceremony, without a sponsorship deal, without a five-peat announcement.

Happy Mother’s Day.

The forest sees you, even when the monkeys don’t.

The Benediction

2Pac — Dear Mama ▶ Listen here

Tupac wrote it in 1995. Thirty-one years later, every word still lands. Some truths don’t age. They just wait for the right moment to find you.

Play it for your wife, mother or baby mama today.
Or play it quietly, alone, and let it do what music does when words have reached their limit.

Same Forest. Different Monkeys.

Mubarikiwe. Jah Bless.

Share with the man who needs to sort his virility budget —
and the woman who already sorted hers.