🎵 Human Nature

Early this week, I received a message from a close relative. One of those WhatsApp messages that you almost ignore… then leaves you staring at the wall.
She had just picked up her son from swimming. You know the routine. Towel. Bag. Water bottle. Half-finished homework. The child is talking. The parent is listening… but also tired.
They get home. She sits down for that quiet 1-on-1.
“How was your day?”
“What did you learn today?”
“Show me your homework.”
Then the boy pauses. Looks at her. And asks:
“Mama… when were you born?”

She laughs it off. “Forty-something years ago.” (Actual number withheld to protect the innocent.)
He does the math. “Ah… so around 1986?” She nods noting the compliment.
Then he leans back… completely serious… and says:
“So… how was it being a slave?”
Silence. The kind that is not empty… but full.
“He wasn’t insulting her. He was auditing her life.”
Her son was not being rude. He was being logical. From his perspective, the equation didn’t add up.
One job.
Multiple hustles.
Loyalty. Stability. Delayed rewards.
In his world?
You’re too busy.
So when he looked at her life… he didn’t see sacrifice.
He saw constraint.
“That question didn’t hurt. It exposed.”
Which is exactly where Dr. Eliza Filby enters the story.

🎵 Man in the Mirror

In a conversation with Simon Sinek on A Bit of Optimism, Dr. Filby reframes the entire debate.
Not: “What’s wrong with this generation?”
But: “What world did we hand them?”
She is 44.
Millennial.
A mother.
A historian studying generational inheritance.
Her central point is simple, generations don’t just behave differently. They respond to different systems.
After 2008, those systems shifted. Job security weakened. Housing moved out of reach. Cost of living outpaced income. One structure quietly replaced another:
the “Bank of Mum and Dad.”
Which means for many young people today, the biggest financial variable is not effort. It is access.
So when that boy asked his mother that question… he wasn’t comparing effort. He was comparing systems.
“And systems don’t reward effort. They reward position.”

🎵 They Don’t Care About Us

That same week, something else happened. Not quietly. But strangely… almost invisibly. Former journalist and editor Wallace Kantai put out a comparison of front pages; side by side, a simple visual audit of what was being prioritised.
What filled the space? Politics. Infighting. Recycled narratives.
What didn’t?
Excellence.
Front pages are not neutral. They are curated. They tell you what a system chooses to preserve. And in that moment, the signal was clear: we say we value achievement, but we consistently reward visibility.
“We don’t ignore excellence. We just don’t prioritise it.”
Then comes the proof. Sabastian Sawe ran a full marathon in under two hours. A barrier that has defined human endurance for decades — broken. In any structured system, that becomes a national moment. But the outcome didn’t match the input. Locally, muted.
Internationally, amplified.
That gap is not emotional.
It is structural.
People inherit systems that tell them what matters.
If the system rewards noise, noise dominates.
Sawe’s run had no shortcuts, no drama, no daily controversy — just performance.
The dominant narratives operate differently.
Built for reaction. Rewarding conflict. Easier to consume, easier to monetise.(or so they think)
When the system shifts, behaviour follows.
“If performance spoke louder than noise, our headlines would look very different.”

🎵 Smooth Criminal

Once you see the pattern, you can’t unsee it.
It shows up where decisions are made, in the market, in the boardroom, in the moment a customer quietly switches and says nothing.
For years, Nike didn’t just sell running shoes.
They sold belief.
Walk into a Nike store and the first thing you encounter is not the product, it is the story, the identity, the version of yourself you are being invited into.
Run clubs. Community. Belonging.
And for a long time, it worked, because when stakes are low,
People buy alignment.

Then something shifted. Not in the marketing. In the outcome.
At the London Marathon, athletes chose what delivered.
Adidas didn’t out-market Nike.
They out-performed them.
The requirement was not identity,it was efficiency, fatigue reduction, execution under pressure.
Every business, every salesperson, every brand operates across two systems:
the shop window and the outcome.
The shop window attracts.
The outcome answers the only question that matters when stakes rise:
What happens if I choose you?
When stakes are low, identity leads.
When stakes are high, performance decides.
Emotion opens the door. Performance closes the deal. Talent travels.
But value is captured by structure.
“Brand builds attention. Results close arguments.”
“Most people don’t change brands because of marketing.
They change when the outcome disappoints.”

🎵 Dirty Diana

That same shift shows up on the ground.
This week, I was at my local gathering my thoughts waiting for my half kilo maji maji. Same place. Same routine.
Then my phone buzzed: a story about “nyama ya gumboots.”
Meat that didn’t follow the expected system.
I looked up. Walked to the proprietor.
A Frenchman from Nyahururu.
His name of course Monsieur (throw in Kinuthia, Njuguna or Kungu for local context)
Asked one question: Is your supply clean? He answered immediately.
Credible source. Showed me pictures. Ranch-based.
Transaction complete. Pricing understood.
But the decision had already changed.
In a system optimised for affordability and speed, the trade-offs are not always visible at the point of purchase.
Lower price often means a different process.
Faster access often means fewer checks.
Sometimes the cost has just been moved out of sight.
Two systems. Same market. Different outcomes.

🎵 Thriller

A bunch of billionaires had been watching.
Not tweeting. Not commenting. Watching.
Put up 3 million dollars.
Then the Rugby Premier League showed up.
Not with nostalgia,
Not with development narratives,
With hard cash.
Six franchises. Broadcast deals. Ten-year partnerships.
A format built for television, sponsors, and return.
This wasn’t a tournament. It was a system.
From Kenya’s sevens setup — Patrick Odongo, Samuel Asati, Nygel Amaitsa, John Okoth to Delhi Redz. Kevin Wekesa to Hyderabad Heroes.
Then the ladies showed up.
Not as dates. Not as “flower girls”.
Part of the main act.
Gracie Okulu to Mumbai Dreamers.
Sheila Chajira to Chennai Bulls.
That is not random selection. That is pattern recognition.

Top players earning $15,000 for a two-week window. Others $2,500.
Same player. Different system. Different outcome.
Kenya produces talent, that is not in question.
What changes is what happens after the talent appears.
One system supports.
Another packages.
We don’t inherit opportunity.
We inherit what happens to opportunity.
Because left alone, talent is just potential.
It is structure that turns potential into a contract, a number, a career.

“We don’t lack talent. We lack systems that can afford it.”

🎵 Remember the Time

Now the pattern is clear. A child’s question sounds disrespectful but is analytical. A historian explains that behaviour follows structure. A front page reveals what we choose to preserve. A marathon exposes the gap between effort and recognition. A market shifts from identity to performance. A league monetises what another system develops.

Same inputs. Different structures. Different outputs.
A good friend and colleague named after a murima Forest once told me….

“Talent gets you noticed. Structure gets you paid.”

“Let’s stop calling it patience.”
“Some of us weren’t waiting. We were stuck.”
But let me be honest, and I say this as someone who has sat in enough boardrooms, enough sales meetings, enough performance reviews to know how this goes.
We love to celebrate Kenyan talent. We put it on billboards.
We clap at galas. We repost the wins.
But the moment it is time to build the structure that retains that talent, compensates it fairly, creates a system around it, we go quiet.
Suddenly there’s no budget. Suddenly it’s not the right time.
Suddenly someone is asking why we need to professionalise something that has “always worked this way.”
Patrick Odongo didn’t need Delhi Redz to tell him he was talented.
He already knew.
What the league gave him was a structure that agreed with him financially.
There is a difference between being celebrated and being valued.
One costs nothing. The other requires commitment.
“Talent doesn’t change. The cheque does.”

And this is where I want to push you — not the system, not the billionaires.
You.
Are you operating in a system that matches your output?
“Or are you loyal to a structure that has never planned to reward you?”
Or have you been so conditioned by loyalty and delayed reward that you’ve started calling constraint sacrifice?
That boy wasn’t wrong. He just had better information.
The question isn’t whether he’s right.
The question is what you’re going to do now that you’ve heard it.

Before I leave you, I want to come back to her. Not as a data point.
As a woman who drove to a swimming pool after a long day, sat in traffic with a wet towel on the back seat, asked her son the right questions — and got one she wasn’t ready for.
She could have been defensive. Instead she sat with it. Let it land.
Sent a WhatsApp and said: can you believe this child?
That is the quiet intelligence of a mother who knows her son is not her enemy — he is her mirror.
“And mirrors don’t lie. They just arrive earlier for some generations.”
What he reflected back was not a failure of effort. It was a question about whether it was time — not for regret, but for revision.

There are a lot of women and men like her in this forest.
Running homes and businesses and teams, carrying the weight of both the old system and the new one.
They don’t get the billboards.
They get the quiet 1-on-1 at the kitchen table.
Sometimes, if they’re lucky, a question sharp enough to make them think.
That is worth more than any front page.

Which brings us back to the beginning. That question:
“Was it like being a slave?”
It wasn’t disrespect. It was analysis.
A different generation, looking at a different system.

So the real question becomes: what system are you operating in… and what happens when someone chooses you?
Because in the end, its not the story that carries the weight.

Its the outcome.

Pull up a seat — wherever you’re reading this from.
Nairobi. London. Cape Fear.
What does this look like on your side?
Share it. Tag your squad. Comment.

Same forest. Different monkeys.

Mubarikiwe. Jah Bless.

Go with song.🎵

There was a time when we were the problem.
Not “these days kids.”
Not Gen Z. Us.

Friday evening had a rhythm back then.
Not planned. Not structured. But somehow always the same.
I had a friend called Webster — not his real name — who was our Mobility Mobiliser. Keys negotiated, sneaked, or justified with a story that would not survive five minutes of cross-examination.
Someone fuelled the car — just enough.
Someone else contributed something liquid.
Then we’d link up with the Nairobi campo crew.
Awala, Boozer, The Loved, Jamo, Franco, Michael Jegzen— six or seven of us, identities protected for their safety.
First stop: Uchumi, Sarit Centre

The hole in the wall.
Slightly flickering lights, a kiosk window that knew what a car full of young men wanted without asking.
Engine idling. Music low but confident. Heat, laughter, noise.
A Mzinga of Vodo, Ksh 100 Smirnoff — that erased ones memory and reduced every girl who partook to tears by the halfway mark.

Pre-game.

Like we were preparing for something important.
The game itself was usually unclear.
But the pre-game?

Sacred. Ritual. Identity.

Our parents thought we were unserious. You’d hear it — not always directly — in passing comments, in adult conversations they assumed you weren’t tracking.
This generation… Lazy. Distracted. No direction.
Too much fun. Too little focus.
Sound familiar?

Because now we are the ones saying it.
We became the voice we used to roll our eyes at.
Today it comes packaged better — LinkedIn posts, newspaper columns, WhatsApp forwards, long voice notes that open with “Let me tell you something about these young people…”
Same verdict. Same confidence. Same blindness.

The Boardroom Consensus

Gen Z has been tried, judged, and sentenced. Lazy. Entitled. Addicted to screens. Unwilling to grind. And the certainty with which we deliver this verdict is dangerous, because we are not guessing.
Boardrooms, family dinners, chamas, rugby clubs. Same conclusion, different tables: “They don’t want it bad enough.”
But here is what we keep skipping

Same week. Two headlines. One — thousands of young people lining up, degrees in hand, for jobs paying thirty thousand shillings.
Long queues. Desperate hope. Serious faces.
The other — same week, same generation — lazy, soft,
WiFi-addicted, mzinga on the weekend, no ambition.

Both cannot be true. Or maybe they can. Because what we are actually looking at is not a lazy generation. We are looking at a filtered generation. A system that takes in millions and allows only a few through.

Over 4.6 million Kenyans are in the diaspora.
Opportunities are global.
Competition is global.
At home, youth unemployment is at levels that force people to improvise in ways that don’t look structured from the outside.

What we call chaos might just be creativity inside a broken system.

The Engineer Who Didn’t Complain

In 2021, Joseph Nguthiru was on a boat on Lake Naivasha with Egerton University classmates. The boat stopped moving. Not engine failure. Water hyacinth — the world’s most invasive aquatic weed — had surrounded them completely. Five hours. Trapped. Going nowhere.
Most people complain. File it under bad luck. Tell the story at dinner.

Nguthiru went home and built a company.

HyaPak converts water hyacinth — the very weed that swallowed their boat — into biodegradable packaging that breaks down within three to six months. A working business that has cleared over twenty acres of weed from Lake Naivasha while creating jobs for fishing communities whose livelihoods the weed was destroying.
The Obama Foundation noticed. UNEP named him Young Champion of the Earth. COP28 — one hundred thousand dollars and a global platform.

The same generation we call distracted is solving problems we have debated for decades. And they are not waiting for systems to approve them.
They are building while we are still discussing them.

What Sales Has Always Known

Out of thirty prospects, twenty-five will not pick a cold call.
Of those who do, most will say no — four, five, sometimes ten times.
80% of deals only close after the fifth to twelfth contact.
Follow-up is not a tactic.
It is the system.

And here is the number that should worry anyone in sales:
44% of salespeople quit after the very first rejection.

Nearly half. After one no.

What you are seeing in outcomes — a few people closing,
most not — is not talent or character.
It is a filter.
The ones still in the room are simply the ones who stayed.
That is the only variable that consistently separates results.

Now bring that back to the generation conversation. What looks like laziness is often just someone who stopped after the first no.
What looks like success is usually someone who stayed long enough to find the timing.
Same generation. Different outcomes.
Not because of character.
Because of persistence inside a system designed to remove the ones who leave early.

The Pacer Who Didn’t Stop

Sabastian Sawe grew up in Barsombe, Uasin Gishu. Mud walls. No electricity. During secondary school, he didn’t even compete — Leseru High School prioritised academics.
By our traditional metrics, already behind.
Late start. No pipeline. No exposure.

In 2022, he was hired as a pacemaker at the Seville Half Marathon. Set the tempo. Lead the field. Then step aside. Know your role.

At seven kilometres, he felt strong. So he didn’t stop.

Past the point where his job description ended. Past the elites. Past the course record. First place — a man who had never raced beyond 5,000 metres.

He flew home from Seville immediately. Not for media.
To bury his grandmother, Esther Sitienei, who passed away while he was running in Spain.
She was the one who believed before there was evidence worth believing in.

Valencia 2024 — marathon debut, second fastest in history. London and Berlin 2025 — back to back wins.
World Athletics Out-of-Stadium Athlete of the Year.
Twenty-five voluntary drug tests before Berlin.
Clean.
Then London, April 26, 2026: one hour, fifty-nine minutes, thirty seconds.
Four marathons. Four wins. One world record.
One grandmother who never got to see London, but saw Seville — and knew.

We call it talent. What it actually is, is consistency under conditions where most people stop.

Welcome to Philly

Joshua Weru started watching rugby at Kenya Harlequins the moment he could walk. At 7 age grade rugby. Age 13 Rosslyn Park School 7s (UK) representing Kenya IAPS. Then at fourteen, the UK — Rugby School, Northampton Saints Academy.
Coaches calling his ball-carrying world-class before he’d played a professional minute.
August 2022 — first professional contract, Northampton Saints, while studying at Loughborough.
November 2022 — contract terminated.
Not performance. Not attitude. Visa rules.
Tier 3 rugby nation. Needed ten international caps.
Made his debut with Kenya Simbas got only three.
Door closed. Cleanly. Bureaucratically.
France. US Dax. Still building. By 2024 — a decision most people would have found impossible.
Start over. Focus on education. Enrol Arizona State. Degree in Global Business Management.
Then the agent called.
Different sport entirely. NFL International Player Pathway.
178 Africans fighting for a space.
Only 13 picked.
Training camp Florida 10 weeks.
Bodies pushed to limits unknown.
Draft night Pittsburg 2026 — 805,000 people in attendance,
Undrafted.
All 257 picks without his name.
Then the Philadelphia Eagles called.
UDFA. Undrafted Free Agent.
On the team.
Six foot four. Two hundred and forty-four pounds. 4.45 seconds in the forty.
A Kenyan with a flag over his shoulders, holding an Eagles ball, in front of a stadium that seats sixty-nine thousand.

Not drafted. Chosen anyway.

I’m not going to say much more about Joshua. Those who know, know why this one lands differently for me.
What I will say is this: the system said no more than once.
He did not translate no into never.
He changed the sport he was playing,
not the direction he was moving in.

The Correction

The boys in that Uchumi parking lot — engine running, music low, plans unclear, energy high — eventually found their way. Not because we were special. Because the system eventually made space. And because we stayed in it long enough for that space to appear.

We don’t get to claim wisdom about resilience and then deny that same story to the generation behind us.

Mambo ni matatu (3 things)

If you lead a team — stop measuring noise. Track who is still in the room after the third rejection. That is your talent.

If you are coming up — stay longer than the system expects. The reward is on the other side of the timeline you were given. When you feel strong, don’t stop at the distance you were assigned. That is where the separation happens.

If you are watching from the sidelines — update the lens. Or you will miss the next breakthrough. And you will have been wrong, loudly, in public, just like every generation before us.

Gen Zs are here. They are already in the building.

Pick a side.

Or move out of the way.

Some people don’t wait to be invited. They just show up and become undeniable.

We danced to Motownphilly in living rooms, in discos, in borrowed moments.
Today… we sit back and watch one of our own dance to that same rhythm.
But this time — the world is watching too.

Same Forest. Different Monkeys.

If this story stirred something in you
Pull up a seat. The music hasn’t changed.
Only the stage has.
Subscribe. Like. Share

Mubarikiwe. Jah Bless
Go with song.

Earlier in the week I was having lunch with a good friend of mine. One of those Kenyans who have made a life out there and still create time to come home.
We appreciate you. And those who don’t too but still fly the flag high. Hat tip.
Lakini I asked myself, lest I upset her — “when do you guys work?”
When you’re here long enough to watch the baby mbuzi (goat) your grandma gave you in December grow horns, we start wondering.

Ama huyu amefutwa job.

You know how we roll outchea in Haters Ville….
Anyway, somewhere in the banter, the WhatsApp Republic coughed up one of those long forwarded messages about love languages.
You know the type.
Too neat.
Too sure of itself.

Written like it has solved relationships for the whole world in eight bullet points and a pastel-coloured diagram.

I had heard the phrase before. Nodded at it. Seen people quote it like gospel.
But I had never stopped to ask what it actually meant.
Not the imported version. Not the TED Talk version. The real one.
The one that can survive rent, traffic offenses, silence, 101 missed calls, school fees, and somebody saying “sawa” with a full stop.

So I asked her to break it down. Properly.

She said it’s simple.
Some people need words. To be told. To be reassured. To hear it.
Others need action. Not speeches. Things done. Burdens carried. Life made lighter. Others need time. Real time. Not this modern arrangement where you’re in the same room but one of you is scrolling and the other is explaining themselves to a forehead. Others respond to gifts. Not because they’re materialistic — because thought has weight. And then touch. Warmth. Presence. The quiet language that says “I am here.”

Same love. Different reception.
And that’s where most people get it wrong.
You think because you’re doing your part… it must be working.
But effort is not the same as being understood.
(and you question why we ate the apple)

Now translate those things into Kenyanese, and the fog clears quickly.

Words of affirmation is simply: Usinyamaze. Hata kelele ni sawa. Talk to me.
Tell me I matter. Tell me you see me.
Because around here, silence is not always maturity. Sometimes silence is confusion. Sometimes it is the beginning of a meeting that has not yet been called.

Acts of service is even simpler:
Babe you know Friday golf is with the boys.
Love is….. gas imejazwa mbele iishe. (gas bill done)
A problem handled before it becomes a discussion.
Someone noticing you are struggling and stepping in
without making a documentary about their sacrifice.

Receiving gifts is not about money. Niliona hii nikakukumbuka. (I saw this and thought of you)
That small thing that says you occupy space in somebody’s mind even when you’re not physically there.
Sometimes a thoughtful KSh 500 beats a lazy KSh 5,000.
Because effort has its own exchange rate.
There’s two others, Quality Time and Physical Touch. I will write about those later.
They probably need a whole article.
I see synergies.
But today I write about Receiving gifts — because it connects to something thats interfereing with my love language this week.

Safaricom’s OneApp

.You know something is off when you have to enrol to learn how to use an app that was meant to simplify your life.
Not log in. Not navigate.
Enrol. Tutorials. Step-by-step guidance. For an app.
(Ok I've ongezad firi firi (added chilli)… but the meat is real)
Somewhere between the idea and the rollout, we crossed a line.
We stopped building tools for people.
We started building systems people must adapt to.
And at almost the same time,
I’m here trying to build this story — and my AI assistant has already given me a full structure.
Beginning. Middle. End. Lessons.
Everything lined up before the idea has even settled.
It didn’t wait for context. It didn’t wait for facts. It didn’t even wait for me.
And that’s when it clicks.
This is not just a Green Giant problem.
This is not just an AI problem.
This is a mindset problem.

We used to struggle to execute what we were thinking. Now we are struggling to think before we execute.

Launch now.
Start the year with a BANG!!!
Respond now. Fix later.
Kesi baadaye.

And the most uncomfortable truth?
It works just enough for us to accept it.
Because speed sometimes creates the illusion of progress.

SAME EFFORT, DIFFERENT OUTCOME

Sport is where the truth lives. No spin. No PR. Just results.
Take Augusta.
Rory finishes at -12. Walks away with $4.5 million. Scottie sits at -9. Takes home $2.4 million.
Three golf shots.
Roughly $600,000 to $700,000 per shot.
Same course. Same weather. Same preparation.
Same level of excellence.

The difference was not effort. It was who read the moment correctly.
One putt that needed a softer touch.
One drive that needed restraint instead of aggression.
One moment where understanding mattered more than power.
That’s the gap.
And once you see it there, you start seeing it everywhere.

WHEN SYSTEMS FAIL, LIFE ADJUST

There’s a joke doing rounds.
Simple. Clean. Straight to the point.
“Dear parents, please remind your kids to bring 5L of petrol for a science project tomorrow.”
No panic. No apology. Just instructions.
And the scary part? It makes sense.
Because right now, fuel is no longer just fuel. It’s uncertainty. It’s queues. It’s “system iko down” becoming a normal sentence in places where money has already been paid. So what happens?
We adjust. Not to reality.
To dysfunction.
What used to be a crisis becomes a workaround.
What used to be unacceptable becomes manageable. And before long, nobody is asking “Why is this happening?” The question becomes “How do we survive it?”

Bring that same energy into the home

Schools are opening. Kids have been around long enough for routines to collapse. Parents are tired. Quietly overwhelmed. And slowly, without saying it out loud, we have taken the language of work and brought it into our relationships.

Targets. Expectations. Performance. Structure.

We are managing life the way we manage teams. If we are honest, we are one step away from formalising it. Thirty days. Clear objectives. Weekly check-ins. Improvement required.

We are applying structure where understanding is required.
Managing behaviour where connection is required.
Fixing outcomes without reading the situation.

WHO READ THE MOMENT RIGHT

Then rugby does what rugby always does. It tells the truth without explaining itself.
I say this with a bit of Schadenfreude — the kind only community clubs understand when one of the “CMB” boys gets clipped. (Cash Money Brothers, a famous rap group who’s leader was called….. Prezzo)

Nondies didn’t just beat Oilers. They disrupted a narrative. The same Oilers — structure, power, consistency, the kind of team people pencil into semi-finals without thinking twice. And then suddenly — not so certain.

The jokes write themselves. Oil cartel… exposed.

But strip away the banter. This was not about strength. It was about reading the moment. Who understood what the game was asking for, when it mattered most.

Same goes for Shujaa in Hong Kong. They didn’t collapse. They competed. They adjusted. They even led. But sevens is not a 14-minute game. It’s a 2-minute test at the end. And that’s where the difference shows.
Same effort. Different outcome.

Now bring in Madina Okot

“Madina Okot posing with WNBA Commissioner Cathy Engelbert after being selected 13th overall by the Atlanta Dream in the 2026 WNBA Draft at The Shed in New York City on April 13, 2026.”

Last week she was a story. The kind people clap for politely and move on. Potential. Promise. “We are watching.” This week? Drafted into the WNBA. Atlanta Dream.
That’s not narrative. That’s proof. And the moment proof arrives, everything changes. The same people who were quiet become loud.
Because the system does not reward effort. It rewards conversion.
And while we are still debating effort, intention, potential — others are converting. Others are positioning

Look at our neighbours Rwanda.
While teams fight for results on the pitch, Rwanda is doing something else entirely. Arsenal. Bayern. PSG. Atlético.
Not on the table. On the sleeve. On the screen. On every replay.
In swahili we say….”waliona mbele”
In corporate hiring its called “the ability to see round corners”
To the spiritual….is this … “Serendipity” or “kuangukia” (to fall on something)
That is not marketing.
That is understanding the game behind the game.
In a world where everyone is moving faster, the advantage is not speed. It is clarity.

THE LINK

We are not failing because we are not trying. We are failing because we are not reading the moment correctly.

In relationships → we are speaking the wrong language.
In golf → we are misreading the putt.
In business → we are building for ourselves, not users.
In systems → we are explaining instead of fixing.
In rugby → we are competing but not closing.
In success → we celebrate effort, but reward proof.

Same forest. Different monkeys.

The difference is not effort. It is interpretation.
Most people are not losing because they are lazy.
They are losing because they are misreading the moment.

Before you say things are not working
Before you say people don’t understand you
Before you say the system is broken

Ask yourself one question:

Are you doing the right thing…
or are you doing things right?

Because sometimes the gap is not effort.

The gap is understanding.

Same Forest. Different Monkeys

If this one landed somewhere… don’t just scroll. Don’t sit with it.
Share it with someone who needs that reminder
or someone you’re still trying to understand.
And if you’re new here… pull up a chair. Subscribe. Tag. Share.
We’re building something. Slowly. Intentionally.

Same Forest. Different Monkeys.

Mubarikiwe. Jah Bless🙏🏾
Go with song.

.

As I watch the KSSSA Term 1 games, my mind drifts back to the last century when we played those same games in Term 1.
The Kadenge Cup.
Under 55 kilos.
That was the rule.
Simple. Clean. Binary.
You either made weight or you didn’t.

Now around that time I was in that awkward phase.
Voice cracking somewhere between soprano and alto.
Eating like food might be banned tomorrow.
Half a loaf of bread compressed into 2 fat slices.
Condensed before your senior could say
“One rabble”.(mono,junior etc)
Disappearing without discussion.
Every term a new shoe size.
Parents looking at you and saying to themselves “Seriuosly?”.
I was sitting at 60 kilos.
The cutoff was 55.
Close enough to dream.
Far enough to frustrate.

So I did what desperate boys do. I starved myself for two days.
Dropped to 57.
Still not enough. Still outside the line.
But I had to play.
I walked toward the weighing area, there was that old scale.
The heavy one.
The type used to weigh warus (wedges), vitunguu (onions) and carrots for the dining hall.
No digital forgiveness. No rounding off. Just truth.

Before I stepped on, a dimunitive guy pulled me aside.
Quietly. Like he was about to show me something important.
He pointed to a group of boys upside down against a wall.
Not quite a handstand. Something in between.
“That’s how you do it,” he said. Ten minutes upside down.
Lose two, three kilos on the scale.
Game live.
That’s how I played the Kadenge Cup.
Not because I couldn’t make weight.
Because I had just been introduced to something NEW.

We met it on a school field.
That one team everyone feared. Not because they were better.
Because they were older.
The bearded striker with shoulders like a teacher.
The “transfer” that happened just before the finals.
Quiet. Efficient.
Nobody asking too many questions.
The name on the team sheet that didn’t match the face warming up.
And in the stands?
Adults clapping. Coaches explaining. Officials looking away.
That was the first classroom.
Not where we learned how to win.
Where we learned that winning could be negotiated.
Last week the KSSSA released an audit for the 2026 Term One Games in Kisumu. Western Region alone. Thirty-eight students flagged. Overage players.
Falsified documents.
Names not in NEMIS.
Faces that didn’t match the portal.
Thirty-eight.
One region.
One term.

The whistle that didn’t blow in 1987 is the same whistle that didn’t blow last week. Only difference is now we have systems to prove what we already knew.
Here’s the real problem. Once you see something wrong happen often enough without consequence, it stops feeling wrong.
It becomes normal.
And once it becomes normal, nobody needs to teach it again.
It just shows up later.
In offices. In tenders. In boardrooms.
Same script. Bigger stakes.
That’s when you realise… nobody is coming to fix it for you.

The Line
Somewhere else, far from school fields and excuses, a man walks into a ring.
Looks his opponent in the eye and says,
“I’m sorry… I love you.”
Then proceeds to thump him with Burukenge-ish fervour.
(severe, merciless, or thorough beating)
Deontay Wilder
That line sounds mad until you understand the context.
This is not a game.
Fighters have died in that ring.
That’s not storytelling.
That’s record.
And yet, inside that violence, there is something the school field didn’t have.
A line.
Not a referee’s line.
A personal one. Internal. Non-negotiable.
You don’t walk into that ring hoping the other guy cheated.
You don’t hope the officials look away,
You either respect the line… or leave with serious injury.
Sport exposes you like that. Eventually.
You can fake documents. You can manipulate systems.
But when it’s just you and reality, the truth comes out.
Always.

Accumulation Doesn’t Make Noise
While some of us were learning how to bend rules, someone else was learning something slowly.
Madina Okot started playing basketball in 2020. Not 2010.
Not with much backing. Not with an elaborate plan. 2020.
Six years later, the numbers start telling their own story.
12.8 points. 10.6 rebounds. 22 double-doubles. SEC leader.
First-round WNBA projection.
Same origin. Same environment everyone complains about.
Different response.
No shortcuts. No tricks. No negotiation.
Just repetition.
The thing about accumulation is that it’s invisible while it’s happening.
Nobody claps for practice.
Nobody celebrates discipline.
Nobody trends consistency.
It looks boring. It feels slow. It tests your patience.
Until one day the numbers arrive.
And then people call it talent.
It’s not talent.
It’s time.
Applied properly.
For longer than most people can tolerate.

The Almost Trap
Then there’s Arsenal F.C. Top of the table. One goal up. Game under control. Everything in their favour. They lose 2–1.
Not because they’re bad.
Because they didn’t close.
That’s the uncomfortable truth most people avoid.
Failure doesn’t always collapse loudly. Sometimes it leaks.
Quietly. Slowly.
You don’t notice it until it’s too late.
Almost winning. Almost finishing. Almost getting it done.
Almost is dangerous.
Because it feels like progress.
But it pays like failure.

The Excuse We Love
Kelvin Kiarie boards a flight alone.
No federation. No ministry. No delegation.
Crowdfunds his trip. Lands in Benin. Competes.
Gold. Silver. Clean.
Same flag. Different mentality. The system didn’t show up.
He showed up anyway.
That story is uncomfortable. Because it removes our favourite excuse.
“We’re waiting for the budget.”
(some pundits argue that skating falls under ministry of transport)
He didn’t wait. He moved. Results followed.
Simple. Not easy.
Hungry

Your WhatsApp Is Not the Problem
You’ve sent that message. “Hi boss, hope you are well.”
Blue ticks. Silence.
You wait. You justify. “Maybe they’re busy.” You follow up. “Just checking in.”
Silence.
Let’s stop lying to ourselves.
That message was never going to get a response. Because you didn’t ask for anything.
You didn’t direct anything. You didn’t close anything.
You started a conversation you had no intention of finishing.
This is not a WhatsApp problem. It’s a clarity problem.
The old email culture trained us badly.
Long intros. Politeness before purpose. Padding before point.
That world is gone.
Today you have two seconds.
Not five.
Two.
Appointment seeking. A hot topic with most of my sales training cohorts.
“Hi [Name], I’m reaching out because of X. I can help you achieve Y. Can we lock 15 minutes on [day/time] or on later date/time]?”
(Pro tip) Your prospect will almost always choose the later date/time (delayed commitment)
That’s it. Direct. Clear.
Uncomfortable if you’re not used to it.
Effective if you are.
Comfort is expensive.
Clarity closes.

THE COMPTON CAPITALIST (Andre Romele Young)
Iteration Is Not Sexy
A kid in Compton is making beats.
Unknown. Underpaid. Learning.
That kid becomes Dr. Dre.
Not overnight.
N.W.A. Death Row. Aftermath.
Working with 2Pac, Eminem, 50 Cent, Kendrick Lamar.
Each step refining the last.
Only Three Individual albums in thirty years.
Not because he couldn’t produce more.
Because he understood something most people don’t.
More is not better.
Better is better.
Then he pivots. Headphones. Beats.
2014, Apple Inc. buys it for $3 billion.
People call it luck. People call it timing.
I call it genius.
It’s none of those things in isolation. It’s iteration. Over time.
Talk about success becoming Chronic.

Even Legends Must Move
For years, power had a sound.
Engine. Precision. Control.
Aston Martin.
James Bond.
Now the world is shifting. Electric vehicles. New manufacturers.
New definitions of premium.
The question is no longer whether Bond goes electric.
It’s who builds the car.
And if that answer changes, then power has already moved.
If Bond can evolve…
What makes you think you don’t have to?

Same Voice. Different Frequency
There was a time Africa had one dominant sound.
Rooted. Powerful. Commanding.
Angélique Kidjo carried that.
Now the sound is faster.
Global. Digital.
Ayra Starr is the embodiment of that shift.
Old vs new.
That’s the narrative we like.
It’s also lazy.
The real story is collaboration.
The moment the old voice doesn’t resist the new one.
The moment the new voice respects the old one.
That’s when evolution happens.
Not replacement. Expansion.
Same forest. Different frequency.

The Thread

From the school field to the ring. From Mumias to the SEC.
From Compton to a $3 billion deal.
From your WhatsApp to missed opportunities.
Same pattern.
Some people learn early that rules can be bent and never recover from that lesson.
Some people learn where the line is and never cross it.
Some people wait. Some people move. Some people almost finish.

Some people close.

The basics are not boring. They are everything. Ignore them and life exposes you.
Respect them and results follow you.
Madina didn’t skip them.
Kiarie didn’t skip them.
Dre didn’t skip them.
The Elephant is slipping. And the table doesn’t negotiate.

Same Forest. Different Monkeys.

If this one landed close to home… good. It means you’re still paying attention.
Most people aren’t.
They’re scrolling, reacting… but not responding to their own lives.
So before you disappear—pause. Not for stories. For a decision.
Stop hiding behind “I’ll get to it.” Silence is not a strategy.
Unread messages don’t change outcomes.
Avoided conversations don’t fix themselves.
Delayed action becomes regret.
If this touched you—pull a seat. Welcome to the conversation.
Subscribe. Share. Tag a buddy.

Before you go:

Send one message that actually asks for something.
Finish one thing you’ve been “almost” doing.
Revisit the rules you made optional.

Because life checks. And when it does… no blue ticks.
Only results.

Same Forest. Different Monkeys.

Mubarikiwe. Jah Bless.

Go with song.

Lets start with truth.
Not opinion, not theory, not comfort—facts.
The numbers are not subtle, and they are not hiding.
In Kenya today, adolescents and young adults aged 15–24 account for roughly 40–45% of new HIV infections.
Within that same bracket, young women are nearly three times more likely to acquire HIV than their male peers.
Move slightly older into the 25–40 age group and you are still looking at another 35–40% of new infections.
That is not a fringe. That is the core. The working population.
The dating population. The decision-making population.
This is not somewhere else.
This is here.

And once you see that, something changes permanently. You lose the ability to say you didn’t know.
The conversation moves from ignorance to awareness, and then quietly into responsibility.
Because the uncomfortable truth is not that people suddenly changed.
It is that systems lagged.
Same country. Same streets. Same exposure.
Different awareness. Different outcome.

But the story does not end with risk. It turns with access.
Because for the first time in a long time, the individual is not empty-handed.
PrEP exists—daily medication taken before exposure, reducing the risk of HIV from sex by up to 99% when used consistently.
PEP exists—emergency medication taken after exposure, but only within a strict 72-hour window, followed by a 28-day course.
Same science, but timing becomes everything.
One is preparation. The other is reaction.
Between the two sits a decision that cannot be outsourced.

Access is no longer theoretical. Kenya now has over 900 public and private facilities offering these services. A month of PrEP costs roughly KSh 1400–2500 in private settings, with delivery fees around KSh 149. PEP ranges between KSh 900-1500.
The system is no longer locked.
It is searchable. Reachable. Immediate.
You can literally Google it and find a pathway within minutes.

So the equation has changed. Access exists. Affordability exists. Distribution exists. Which leaves one thing—decision.
Because after 72 hours, the window closes.
Completely.
Now bring it back home.

Because nowhere is “same system, different outcome” clearer than in the donkey story.

Kenya is currently the extraction point in a global supply chain. From a population of 1.8 million donkeys in 2009, the number has dropped to less than 500,000 today. That is not decline. That is liquidation. Between 2016 and 2019, four licensed slaughterhouses wiped out roughly 15% of the national herd supplying an external market. When the ban came in 2020, and later the African Union imposed a 15-year ban, the trade did not stop. It moved underground. Theft. Night raids. Bush slaughterhouses. Smuggling routes.

And this is where the story turns.

Because in Kenya, a donkey is not livestock. It is infrastructure. Water. Transport. Livelihood.
When one donkey disappears, a household can lose up to 73% of its income. Now layer the biology.
A gestation period of 11 to 14 months. One foal every two to three years.
Slow reproduction. Fast slaughter.

Same donkey.

China sees supply for a luxury wellness product. Australia sees a pest problem with overpopulation. Kenya loses a lifeline.

Same world. Different outcome.
Now add time.

Alessandro Nesta, World Cup winner in 2006, was asked about his son. His son has never seen Italy play in a World Cup. Not once.
That single sentence collapses two decades of history. Legacy does not transfer automatically.
Yesterday’s success does not guarantee today’s presence.
Same country. Same badge.
Same history. Different outcome.

Then something shifts. From individual to collective.

Fifty-two years. That is how long the Democratic Republic of Congo waited to return to the World Cup.
The last time they played, the country was called Zaire.
Entire generations have lived without seeing it.
On April 1, 2026, in the 100th minute, the goal came.
But the real story was not the goal.
It was the streets. The release. The sound of something returning.
“Toleki. Biso nyonso.” (We are going. All of us.)

That is not qualification. That is resurrection.
But emotion alone does not build systems.

That’s where people like Sitoyo Lopokoyit come in.

Not as celebrities. But as builders. System thinkers.
People who understand that transformation does not happen through motivation.
It happens through structure. Through systems that outlive individuals.
Through platforms that allow others to move, grow, and build.
(Don’t ask my headmaster.)
Sitoyo’s old headmaster called him “an average student who works hard.”
Turns out… that’s more than enough.

Because the real story is not the scale you see today.
It is what came before it.
Approximately KSh 50 billion in failed transactions.
That is where it started. Most people would panic.
Blame users. Blame behaviour. Blame the system.
Then move on.

He didn’t. He studied it.
Failure became data. Data became product.
M-Shwari. Fuliza.
And the rest, as they say, is the message that lands quietly on your phone:

“Dear Fundi, Did you know you qualify for a KSh XXXXXX limit. on Fuliza”

That is not luck. That is design.
That is the difference between noise and impact.
Noise talks. Systems sustain.
And that is where the final layer lands.
Same system. Same country. Same exposure.
Different outcomes.

In sport, the greats don’t just endure.
They move.
Cristiano Ronaldo left Manchester United at his peak and stepped into Real Madrid — a different system, a different expectation, a different scale.
The result?
Goals multiplied. Records followed. Champions League nights became routine.
LeBron James did the same.
Cleveland to Miami. Miami back to Cleveland. Then Los Angeles.
Same league. Same rules.
Different outcomes.
Not because the game changed.
Because the environment did. Because the decision did.

LeBron moved teams and changed outcomes.
Sitoyo redesigned systems and changed access.
DRC returned and changed belief.
So the system is no longer the question.
You are.
Because resurrection is not an event. It is a decision.
Every sinner has a future.
But only if they are willing to build it.
Same Forest Different Monkeys.

If this one hit home, don’t keep it to yourself. Pull up a seat. Bring your people.
Tag the one guy still blaming the system.
Forward it to that partner who knows… but hasn’t moved.

And if you’ve got your own version of this story (and want to see where it goes)
Add your two lines.
Get three comments. We’ll build the rest together.
Because the forest is not short of monkeys. Just short of those willing to move.

Same Forest. Different Monkeys.

Till the next episode
Mubarikiwe, Jah Bless
Go with praise

Easter has its own language.
Not the church version. Not the sermons. The real one.
The one that moves through WhatsApp groups, Facebook timelines, office banter and nyuma ya tent conversations.
That meme you’ve already seen this week.
Bottles lined up like soldiers.
Someone captions it, “He is risen… so are we.”

You laugh. You forward. Someone says “hii weekend hatuhesabu.”
It feels harmless. It feels normal. It feels like culture.
But Easter is not interested in what feels normal.
It is interested in what is true.
And the truth is, most of what we call normal… many of us did not choose.

Start with something small. Innocent even.
Gripe water. (aptly named)
Every Kenyan home (in the last century) had a version of that story.
Mtoto analia. Mzazi amechoka.
A few drops. Silence. Relief.
No one asks too many questions because the result is immediate.
But buried inside some of those early solutions was alcohol.
Small amounts, controlled, functional. It worked.
That’s all that mattered.
But solutions have a way of travelling.
From medicine to habit. From controlled use to normal use.
From something we administer… to something we participate in.
No one stands up and announces the shift.
It just happens. Slowly. Quietly.
Until one day, you are not asking why anymore.
You are swimming with the sharks.

To combat malaria in India, British soldiers mixed bitter quinine with sugar and lime. The addition of gin transformed a medicinal necessity into the “sundowner.”

It’s a classic bait-and-switch: What begins as medicine in one century becomes a lifestyle in the next. Packaged better. Marketed louder. Sold smarter.

What was once a solution for survival is now an identity for the weekend. The “refreshment” we defend loudly is often just a habit we inherited quietly.
We think we are choosing the drink, but often,
we are just following the script of the system.

But systems hate interruptions.
In my opinion, the uncomfortable truth about the Kenyan narrative isn’t that we drink more—it’s that we drink fully.
Intensity over frequency.
The “release” becomes the ritual. And that is where the meme stops being funny, because what looks like culture starts looking like a cage.

Then you move from the pattern to people.
The Lion of Muthurwa
this time, the Lion does not just move;
he changes forests.
Victor Wanyama.
From Nairobi to the world.
Four countries. Six clubs. Over 400 professional appearances.
UEFA Champions League nights.
Captain of Kenya.
Not stories. Not hype. Data.
Now place that next to the system we just described.
The weekend partying. The release culture. The inherited patterns.
Wanyama did not come from a different Kenya. He came from this one.
But somewhere along the line, choice interrupted the pattern.

Not every story ends where it begins.
Same country. Same streets.
Same exposure. Different outcome.

That is the uncomfortable truth, because it removes the excuse.
Wanyama did not come from a different Kenya. He came from this one. And somewhere along the line, choice interrupted pattern.
That is what makes him dangerous. Not the tackles. Not the goals.
The interruption.
Because once one person proves it can be done, the system loses its power to explain everything.
And that is why the Lion of Muthurwa matters. Not because he escaped, but because he returned with proof. That even inside the system, movement is possible.
He was never just noise. He was always carrying something bigger.
Kenya’s hope.

Godspeed, Big Vic.

Wanyama does not fix the system. He breaks the excuse.
Because now you’ve seen both sides.
The pattern… And the interruption.
Same country. Same streets. Same exposure.
Different outcome.
So the question is no longer what is happening around you.
The question is what you are choosing inside it.
Because at some point… you stop observing the system.
You become part of it.

Every saint has a past.

👉 Continue to Part 2: Every Sinner Has a Future — The Resurrection
Because the story doesn’t end here… it turns.

It started the way most Nairobi stories do.
Trying to beat the Friday jam with a genius move.
Grab a boda boda.
Brilliance or 1,000 ways to die?
Quietly, then suddenly.
Another nduthi cuts across without warning. Not recklessly — confidently.
The kind of confidence that comes from doing something a thousand times and never paying for it.
Metal catches metal.
Not enough for an ambulance. Not enough for a headline.
Just enough for a small crowd, a few opinions, and that signature Nairobi shrug — hii traffic — before everyone moves on with their evening.
My life choices flashed by. Was attendance to this event that necessary.
Will Arsenal win the league,
Will Kenya Harlequins make the playoffs…..
Life choices can come and haunt you.
Lakini mungu yuko.
Our unending trust in a Higher Power carries the day again,
and Kanairo moves on.

I say this not as someone standing on a hill. I say this as someone who has been in that story.
Nineteen years old. Riding shotgun, edging the Pilot on.
Pick-up full of young folk leaving The VUU — carnivore for the younger readers — headed at breakneck speed to catch morning breakfast from the grandfather of Chips Mwitu.
Munyiri’s fish & chips, Moi Avenue.

Full of that particular arrogance that masquerades as skill at that age.
A mistake. Vehicle flipped round the Mbagathi Way roundabout.
Tipped on two wheels — luckily we had a guy called Tunji on board.
Built like a tank, he shifted all his 120kgs to the tipping side and the pick-up fell back on four wheels.
Small enough to recover from.
Big enough to stay with you.
Those moments don’t announce themselves as turning points.
They arrive ordinary. They leave ordinary.
But they stay.

Now take that same story. Same human error. Same outcome. Different stage
Enter Eldrick Tiger Woods.

A fender bender. A moment.
The kind of thing that happens in parking lots and estate roads across the world every single day or not.
Except this one involves the most recognisable name in the history of golf, and suddenly the story is no longer about the car.
It is about the man. The pattern. The history.
Was it the people around him. The friends who said nothing.
The staff who looked away.
The inner circle that chose comfort over confrontation. Because here is the truth we don’t like to say out loud: most public failures are not individual.
They are environmental. Someone saw something. Someone knew something. Someone chose silence.
And silence is never neutral. Silence is participation dressed in comfort.
The real question is always who was there and what they chose to do.

They say every saint has a past. And every sinner a future.
But how many times will you tempt fate?

And yet. While we are busy arguing about one man, one car, one mistake — something else is happening. Quietly. Consistently. Without seeking permission or applause.

Africans are moving.

Somewhere in the United States, a list was released. Names. Positions. Colleges. Countries of origin. To most people scrolling through timelines, it was another sports update. Something to pass. But if you paused — really paused — you would see what it actually was.
Eleven Africans.
Ten Nigerians. One Kenyan.
Standing inside one of the most brutally competitive sporting systems ever constructed.
Not as development projects. Not as diversity initiatives. As competitors.
Measured. Tested. Selected.
The NFL does not do charity.
It builds pathways because it found something worth developing — young men from across the African continent who could absorb new languages of movement, new systems of discipline, and come out the other side good enough.

One name stays with me. Joshua Weru.
Defensive End.
Kenya. Rugby background. Arizona State.
On paper, just a line.
But I have been close enough to this story to know what that line represents. It is not one man’s effort.
It is the accumulation of everyone who refused to walk away.

And it is not just him. Behind each of those eleven names is a family living a version of the same story.
A mother who prayed in the specific way that only mothers pray — not loudly, not with an audience, but consistently and structurally, the way a foundation holds a building.

A father who second-guessed himself and kept going anyway.
Friends who stayed when staying was inconvenient.
And a young man on the edge of something that has no map.
This is not an American story. It simply happens to be located in America.
This is an African pattern — of patience, of accumulation, of showing up without guarantees until the door either opens,
or you build a new one.

And while those eleven are stepping forward in Ashburn, Virginia, millions of others are doing something equally powerful. Less visible. Rarely celebrated.

School fees arrive whether or not there was a good month. Medical bills get sorted even when the exchange rate bites. Rent in Nairobi is paid from a salary earned in Manchester, Minneapolis, or Melbourne.
Wave after wave.
Kesi baadaye — not as resignation, but as philosophy.
Handle today. Send what you can.
The diaspora engine does not make the front page.
It makes the country function.

And back home, the pipeline is shifting. Benni McCarthy is not waiting for talent to announce itself.
He is looking for it.
Deliberately.
Moving through diaspora networks, identifying players with Kenyan roots who may never have considered representing the flag. Linton Maina at FC Köln in the Bundesliga. Tyler Onyango from the Everton academy, now at Stockport County. Zech Obiero — son of former Kenyan international Henry Obiero — committed to the Harambee Stars. Silko Thomas at Leicester City. Brooklyn Kabongolo in the Scottish Premiership. That is not potential. That is pipeline. Already built. Already producing.

Because that is what good pipeline management looks like. You do not wait for the right prospect to walk through your door.
You go and find what you missed, reorganise what you have, and refuse to let old relationships decay.
A pipeline is not about the deal you are closing today. It is about the relationships you developed two years ago.
Pipelines behave like roads — if you stop moving on them, you do not simply pause. You get overtaken.
Old prospects do not disappear.
They either convert or they become obstacles.

Which brings us back. To the nduthi. To Tiger.

We are more comfortable analysing failure than sitting with success. One man makes a mistake — a pattern of mistakes, if we are honest — and we discuss it for days.
But eleven Africans walk into the NFL system and we scroll past it in seconds.
Why?
Because failure gives us something to judge. Success asks something from us. Reflection.
And reflection is dangerous because it cannot be directed outward.
It has to turn inward. What have you been building?
What pipeline have you neglected?
What conversation have you been postponing because the return is not immediate enough?

Narrative beats truth. Every time. Without contest. A story lands well on a timeline and it becomes fact before anyone checks the source. A WhatsApp screenshot circulates and an opinion forms before the second paragraph.
But truth is patient.
It does not compete with narrative in the short run.
It simply waits. And eventually — it shows up.
Congratulations Kenya Mens 7s on your qualification.
Sisi ndio….Shujaa…

Somewhere else, in a different kind of arena, Michael B. Jordan stands on a stage. Lights. NAACP Image Awards. Recognition.
But look past the acceptance. Look at who came with him.
His mother. Not in the background. Not obscured.
There. Visible. Sharing the light.
Because across the world, the same shift is happening that has always been happening but is only now being acknowledged.
Mothers are sometimes the invisible architects of what the world calls success.
Women who carried more than biology. Who invested before investment was cool. Who showed up in the years that don’t have photographs.

Behind every one of those eleven names on that NFL list is a mother who lived that story.
Different countries. Different languages. Different circumstances.
But the same particular kind of hope — the kind that does not require an audience, that exists in the quiet dark of early mornings and the specific silence of waiting. Success has many fathers.
Many people will step forward when the door opens.
Let them. The truth does not need defending.
It is already written in the years that nobody documented.

Mambo ni matatu (three things only)

Responsibility is rarely individual. It is environmental. Who surrounds you matters. Who speaks matters. Who stays silent when speaking is uncomfortable matters. Comfort is what allows the nduthi moment to happen again.

Momentum does not announce itself.
The Africans entering the NFL system did not arrive this week.
They have been showing up for years.
Do not confuse visibility with arrival.
The work was already done.

Narrative will always try to replace truth. But truth has a particular stubbornness. Given enough time, it surfaces.
Same Forest. Different Monkeys.

If this one stirred something in you, don’t scroll past it—carry it forward. Share it with the one still sitting on the fence, tag the partner who needs the nudge, and remind your circle that this journey is bigger than survival—it’s about stepping into the arena and playing full out.
Around here we don’t hide behind safe answers; we speak straight, we show up, and we build together.
If you’ve been watching quietly, this is your moment—step in, take your place, and belong.
Subscribe 😉

The Benediction.

For the eleven.
For every family that held its breath across time zones, currencies and competing demands on their hope.
For the mothers who carried more than we will ever fully see — who invested in years that have no receipts, no applause, no record.
For the fathers who doubted themselves quietly and showed up anyway.
For the coaches who pushed when the result was invisible.
For the friends who held the line when holding it cost something.

There is a famous Kenyan Christian spiritual — Parapanda inalia — the trumpet blows, announcing the entry of the conquering soldiers.
This time a different Joshua, with a Kenyan flag on his shoulder and wrist, is blowing that trumpet at the Washington Commanders practice facility on March 30.
Blowing it for the entrance of eleven Africans.
Because no longer shall we be fed scraps.
We have a seat at the table.

May the walls keep falling.
May they be ready.
Because we are.

Mubarikiwe. Jah Bless.

Same Forest. Different Musicians.
Go with song

Somewhere in the new millennium,
around the time Kenya said Tosha
things started moving differently.
New ministers, new money, new businesses, new energy.
The telco wars had just begun to twist behavior in ways we didn’t fully understand at the time.
Peculiar habits became bae,
Many started started wearing green like it was ideology,
others defending per-second billing like it was a political position,
calling themselves “The Better Option” with chest.

There was optimism in the air. A feeling that something had shifted. History requires perspective, but in that moment, it felt like the country had taken a step forward.

Credit became accessible. Especially for cars.
And for many of us, that’s where the real decision-making began.
I was right in that dangerous middle
where you can almost afford the life you want,
but not quite.
Not struggling. Not comfortable.
Just close enough to make decisions that can quietly define the next ten years of your life.

So the question wasn’t just about buying a car.
It was about what kind of life I was choosing.

The Choice of Compromise

Do I take a chill pill—pace myself, build slowly, play the long game?
Or do I go all in—burn fuel, take risks, chase life properly with everything that comes with it?
Marriage, responsibility, work pressure, sherehe, the full Nairobi starter pack.

Like many young professionals at the time, I was looking for a car. But not just a car. A statement.
Because at that age, the car is never transport.
It is arrival. It is validation.
It is proof—mostly to yourself—that you are on the right track.

There were two obvious choices.
If money was not a problem, you went Subaru.
Clean lines. Aggressive stance. Fast.
The kind of car that doesn’t ask questions and says “kesi baadaye”
But money was a problem.
Not a big one. Not a small one.
Just enough of a problem to introduce something far more dangerous than lack: Compromise.

So I bought a Mitsubishi.

The Mitsubishi was not a bad car. In fact, it was a very good car. Reliable. Respectable. Practical. It did exactly what it was supposed to do. And that is precisely what made it dangerous.
Because the Mitsubishi sits in a very specific place in life (at the time).
Not first choice.
Not last choice.
Somewhere in the middle. Second. Third. Fourth.
Fighting quietly between
doing the right thing (Toyota)
and doing things right (Subaru).

The kind of decision you make when you are thinking long-term, managing risk, balancing ambition with reality. And if we’re honest, many of you reading this have made a Mitsubishi decision.

• With jobs: You didn’t take the dream role; you took the stable one.

• With business: You didn’t go all in; you adjusted the model to fit what looked sensible.

• With relationships: You didn’t choose the chaos; you chose the one that made sense on paper.

At the time, it felt wise. But somewhere between your mid-thirties and mid-forties, something shifts. You stop asking, “Did I make the right decision?” and start asking, “Did I make the only decision I could maintain?”

The Flight to Nowhere and our Flying Sikh

This past week, a story quietly made the rounds.
An Air India flight took off, burned fuel, followed procedure, did everything it was supposed to do—and landed back where it started.
No destination reached. No crisis. No catastrophe.
Just movement without progress.
A clean execution of a journey that went nowhere.
At least The Kenyan Flying Sikh won the rally.

And that is where it becomes uncomfortable.

Because if you strip away the aviation language, what you are left with is something many of us understand very well.
Activity that looks like progress.
Motion that feels like achievement.
The dashboards are green. The reports are clean.
The meetings are happening.
But the destination?
Still pending.

That is the Mitsubishi decision at scale.

Because once you commit to that middle path, you don’t crash.
You don’t fail loudly.
You don’t even look like you are struggling.
You simply move.
Consistently. Respectably. Safely.
In circles. And the world will even applaud you for it because from the outside, everything looks like it’s working.
Until time passes. And you start asking yourself the question nobody wants to ask out loud: Is this a journey, or just a well-managed loop?

The Market of “Potential”

The pitch deck. You’ve seen it. Big numbers.
Africa rising. Slides full of potential. Charts that go up and to the right.
And technically, none of it is wrong.
”Lakini vitu kwa ground ni different” (the ground says something else)

But potential is not realized value. The same way an individual makes a Mitsubishi decision, so do businesses.
We don’t go all in. We “see how it goes.” We build models that can survive instead of models that can dominate.
We celebrate entry instead of scale. We become very good at operating within limits we quietly accepted at the beginning.

It looks like stability. But it’s actually a flight that took off, flew beautifully, and landed exactly where it started.

The Third Choice: Readiness Over Planning

Now here is where it gets interesting. Because life is rarely a binary choice between the Subaru (Risk) and the Mitsubishi (Safety). Sometimes,
there is a Third Choice.
The one nobody planned for. The one that shows up when systems break and decisions are forced.
Th Independent reports:
”Leonard Prescott, a 16-year-old goalkeeper for Bayern Munich, is set to make his senior debut at the age of 16.
Prescott’s calm demeanor and technical skills have earned him praise, and he is seen as a promising talent for the club. His debut could mark him as the youngest goalkeeper to play in the Champions League, potentially breaking records for Bayern Munich and Germany. (yes he’s german)

Think of Stephen Donald at the 2011 Rugby World Cup.
He wasn’t the first-choice fly-half.
Or the second. Or the third.
He was literally on holiday when he got the call because the “planned” systems had failed.
He didn’t come in to “manage” the game; he came in to take it.
He kicked the decisive penalty and delivered the cup.

This is the bridge we often miss. We spend our lives choosing between “Safe” and “Risky,” but the universe often demands “Ready.” When the system breaks, it doesn’t matter if you drive a Mitsubishi or a Subaru.
What matters is whether you are standing there with your boots on when the moment arrives.

Then the Thunder Struck

Nairobi didn’t whisper this weekend.
It announced itself.
Just like the floods.

On 21st March 2026 at Nyayo Stadium, Nairobi City Thunder faced Ghana Revenue Authority. They didn’t just play; they controlled. An 84–69 victory.

This wasn’t a “Mitsubishi” performance—it wasn’t about just showing up or managing a respectable loss.
It was an execution of momentum.
If only the headlines would read

“Taxman Knocked. Nairobi Answered — Not Today.”

When you zoom out, the pattern becomes clearer.
Shujaa (Kenya Mens 7s rugby) delivered moments in Montivideo.
The Lionesses (Kenya Women 7s) fight through transition.
And now basketball steps forward.
These aren’t people making “safe” decisions.
They are people who realized that the “middle path” of just being “competitive” is no longer enough.

Same Forest. Different Monkeys.

Some of us chose the Mitsubishi.
Safe. Balanced. Sustainable.
Some chose the Subaru.
Fast. Risky. Unapologetic.

But every once in a while, a moment comes that ignores both. A moment that doesn’t care about your careful planning or your calculated compromise. A moment that asks a much simpler question:
Are you ready?

Because in the end, the question was never the car. It was never the job. It was always this:
When your moment comes, will you manage it?
Or will you take it?

Reflection for the week: * In your career choices, your team selection —
Are you choosing “safe” over “true”?

• In your business—are you building for survival or for dominance?

• In your life—what decision are you postponing because it is uncomfortable

“Because sometimes… the real win is not the scoreboard. It’s the moment you stop negotiating with fear —and start playing your own game.”

If this one hit home, don’t keep it to yourself.

Pull up a chair. Bring your people.
Tag the one guy still playing it safe.
Forward it to that partner who’s been hesitating.
Share it with the team that needs a reminder that this thing is bigger than survival.

This is the arena. This is where we talk straight. No filters. No safe answers.
Because everything about this life is a fight.

Welcome to the journey.
Same Forest. Different Monkeys.
If you’ve been reading quietly every week… it might be time.

Subscribe. Join the journey. Don’t just pass through — belong.

Mubarikiwe. Jah Bless.
Go with song

How my week began.

Trying to decompress after last Sunday’s article, I was certain I would make it to my pal’s funeral on Monday.
Then I read the advisory.

Influenza (flu) is a viral respiratory infection (that spreads easily through droplets and contact). Most affected individuals recover well with supportive care.

I thought to myself what a contradictory statement.

It talks about droplets, close contact and contaminated surfaces.
Yet most people recover well with supportive care.

How do I get supportive care without touching?

Anyway, oblivious to the warning I called a buddy who was going to the funeral. Given the floods in the country, he had a Noah.

Quite apt.

Destination. Idaho, Nyeri County.

As I opened the door to the dark roomy interior I saw several bloodshot eyes, probably straight from the “kesha” (night vigil) held at the “Cathedral” ((Google Maps calls it 213 after the old Long Beach California area code)).

But I digress.

As I stepped into the Ark my chest exploded.
I coughed like an exhausted borehole, spraying the droplets through the car’s hold.
Immediately the grumbling began.
“How can you?”
A voice shouted from the back.
“Corona!”
“You don’t even have a mask.”
And suddenly the Ark was no longer two by two.
I was politely but firmly removed from the voyage.

Which is how I ended up watching my friend’s final journey the way many of us now attend life’s moments when we cannot physically be present — through WhatsApp messages and the occasional YouTube clip.

And that is where I first saw the buzzard.

Perched quietly in a nearby tree at the graveside.

Watching.

In many African traditions, birds at burials are messengers marking transition.
Not omens of death,
but witnesses to change,
signifying one generation stepping away for another
The buzzard seemed unbothered by the ceremony.
It simply watched.
And as the messages continued arriving on my phone, my mind wandered somewhere else entirely.

Sport.

Because if there is any theatre where endings are understood with brutal clarity, it is sport.

The Last Dance

Football fans around the world recently received news that felt almost impossible to imagine.
Germany would end its seventy-year partnership with Adidas after the FIFA World Cup 2026.
For generations the German national team and Adidas felt inseparable.
The three stripes were stitched into some of football’s greatest moments
(The Miracle of Bern in 1954, Beckenbauer lifting the trophy in 1974, the reunified Germany conquering the world in 1990, and Rio in 2014).

Players came and went. Coaches retired. Fans grew older.
But Adidas remained.
Until now.
Germany will walk onto the pitch in 2027 wearing Nike.
Not betrayal. Just the end of a remarkable partnership.
Sport has a name for moments like this.

The Last Dance.

Chicago of yore understood that phrase better than anyone.

By 1998, everyone inside the Bulls organisation knew the dynasty was ending (Jordan, Pippen and Phil Jackson would not remain together).
And yet something strange happens when great teams realise the curtain is about to fall.
They produce one last masterpiece.
Jordan’s final shot in Utah sealed another championship.
Years later Kobe Bryant offered a similar farewell — sixty points in what was meant to be a ceremonial final game.
A reminder that legends rarely whisper their exit.
They take a bow

.Kenyan rugby has its own rhythm.
Edward “The Mille” Rombo stepped his way onto the world stage wearing a Kenya Watembezi jersey.
Years later Collins Injera rewrote the record books, becoming the all-time leading try scorer in the World Rugby Sevens Series (with 279 tries).
Collo stopped sprinting and started walking.
Patrick Odongo inherited the Jets.
Different generation.
Same jersey.

No one owns the shirt forever.

You wear it for a while.
Then you pass it backward.
Same Forest. Different Monkeys.

Management Transition (This is a rugby story)

Dave Rennie Appointed as New Zealand “All Blacks” Head Coach
The same rule applies to leadership.
Dave Rennie knows something about moments when the coach’s notepad moves to another hand. Rennie built a formidable reputation in Super Rugby, coaching the Chiefs to back-to-back titles in 2012 and 2013 (and later leading Glasgow Warriors and the Australian Wallabies).
Which gives context to Scott “Razor” Robertson.(Wembe for the Aoteroans)
Before the All Blacks, Robertson turned the Canterbury Crusaders into a dynasty, winning seven consecutive Super Rugby titles between 2017 and 2023.
No “significant” Test wins
Systems evolve. Boards lose patience. New philosophies appear.
Sometimes the transition is graceful. Sometimes it arrives abruptly.

But it always arrives.

One system’s frustration becomes another system’s opportunity.
Razor Robertson performed his last windmill.

Jamie Joseph shapes the next structure.

Leadership, like sport, never truly stops.

It simply changes players.

Morals vs the Deal
Transitions also reveal something uncomfortable about human nature.
Principles sound powerful in speeches.
Mission statements are written with conviction.
But the true test of values arrives when the deal appears.
Money has a remarkable way of reshaping moral clarity.
The AI industry has been living through this exact tension.
In 2025 Anthropic publicly declined a U.S. Department of Defense contract tied to advanced AI systems, citing ethical concerns about deploying frontier models in military environments.
Months later the same contract quietly moved elsewhere.
OpenAI agreed to the deal.
No long blog posts.
No public hand-wringing.
Just a press release and a signature.
The language of safety remained.

The money arrived anyway.

Most of you know the script.
Natasha needs to go to college overseas, Jayden is going to Spain for soccer camp, The mortgage repayments start choking, Our “family” Toyota WingRoad has suddenly become too small, I’ve missed the chama trip to Jo’burg for three years, We can finally take “guka” (grandpa) to India for his double hip replacement,
and “Shosh” (grandma) needs a full-time caregiver.

Principles are strongest until the deal becomes real.

Samba Fight Club

Sometimes the tension explodes completely.
Brazilian football has produced its share of beautiful chaos.
One example came during the 2026 Campeonato Mineiro final between Cruzeiro and Atlético Mineiro, where a mass confrontation erupted (after a controversial challenge).
Players from both benches joined the melee.
The referee issued 23 red cards before restoring order.

The beautiful game occasionally reveals the animal beneath the jersey.

Civilization is a thin layer.

Scratch it hard enough and the villager reappears.

Same Forest. Different Monkeys.

When Politics Enters the Stadium

Sport does not exist in a vacuum. History regularly storms onto the field.

The 1980 Moscow Olympics were boycotted by over 60 countries (led by the United States), and the 1984 Los Angeles Olympics were boycotted by the Soviet Union and 14 Eastern Bloc nations.
South Africa was banned from international sport during the apartheid era.
Russia remains banned from multiple global competitions following the invasion of Ukraine.
Now the War in West Asia is beginning to bend sporting calendars again.
The Bahrain and Saudi Arabian Formula One Grand Prix were cancelled (due to security concerns).
Sport often reflects the world more honestly than we would like.
And through all of it the silent observers remain.
Fans. Commentators.
And sometimes a lone bird in a tree.

Watching.

Rebirth

Yet endings rarely mean emptiness.
The World Economic Forum’s Future of Jobs Report projects a net gain of 78 million jobs globally by 2030 (despite automation eliminating many existing roles).
Old systems fade; new ecosystems emerge.

Open TikTok on any evening in Nairobi and you will see young entrepreneurs selling clothes, cosmetics and gadgets live to thousands of viewers.

(Across Africa, TikTok reports more than 150 million monthly users, with live commerce becoming one of the fastest-growing micro-entrepreneur ecosystems.)

No expensive shop space. No traditional career ladder.
Just creativity and connection.

Even World football reveals the pattern.
For nearly two decades, football revolved around Lionel Messi and Cristiano Ronaldo.
But the clock never pauses. Now another name rises.

Kylian Mbappé.

And behind him a new generation.

Lamine Yamal
Jude Bellingham
Estêvão Willian
Florian Wirtz
Nico Paz

The Next Episode.

The Whisper of Legacy

Some departures are not really departures.
Arsène Wenger spent over two decades shaping Arsenal.
The peak was the 2003-04 season: Thirty-eight matches (twenty-six wins, twelve draws, zero defeats)
The Invincibles.
Wenger stepped aside, yet his presence is still felt.
I can only imagine him on Mikel Arteta’s shoulder,
whispering calm advice:
Kaza Bro.
Hold your nerve.
Eight (8) games: five home, three away.

That’s how legacy works:
The people who built the home leave,
but their fingerprints remain.

The Warm Down

The flu kept me from Idaho (Ihururu), so I sat at my desk, watching endings on YouTube (Jordan’s final shot and Kobe’s farewell).
Meanwhile, WhatsApp buzzed with new businesses, teams, and beginnings.
Between those screens, I realized something about our strange forest:
Every week, someone takes their final bow,
And someone else steps onto the stage.

The rest of us sit quietly,
watching,
learning,
trying to understand the rhythm before pressing Send.

Same Forest. Different Monkeys.

For my mohine

If you’re not living on the edge,
you’re taking up too much space.
You showed us how to live bila fear.
Now we step to the sidelines
and let the next generation carry the fire.

Rest easy, G.
Off is off.

Mubarikiwe. Jah Bless.

🎵 Go with Song

If reflections like this resonate with you — about sport, leadership and the strange rhythm of change — subscribe to SalesFundike and join the conversation.

The breakup negotiations had reached the kitchen.
By that point I had already secured the television, the home theatre… and the usual boys’ toys — the PS1, the old mobile speakers, foreign rugby shirts, plaques from visiting teams, and a Bob Marley poster drawn in pencil that had followed me through several houses.
Those assets had been locked down early. Everything else was now negotiable.
Until we got to the kitchen.

Breakups begin politely.
People use words like fairness.

Then someone reaches for the sufurias.

The fridge was never really part of the negotiations. It was one of those massive Kelvinator relics from the 1980s. The kind of fridge that eventually migrates to the garage because it simply refuses to die.

Whenever that fridge switched on, the house lights blinked briefly, as if KPLC needed a moment to reconsider its life choices.

Nobody was moving that thing.
Which meant the real war moved to the smaller items.

The sufurias. The plates. The glasses. The mwikos (cooking spoons).

My carefully assembled collection of Tupperware utensils — the only real investment I had made in the kitchen.
Anyone who has ever tried to split clothes understands the problem immediately. You cannot divide them like furniture.
Which means the battlefield shifts somewhere else.
In our case, the battlefield became kitchenware.

At that stage of life I had a couple of years as a sales rep under my belt, but:
The furniture in the house had arrived the African way, through donations from parents and relatives who believed young people deserved a head start.
Which meant very little of it actually belonged to either of us.
But the kitchen…
The kitchen was where daily survival happened.
Now I should confess something important here.
I was working out every day. Which meant food was not optional.

Food was fuel.

She understood this perfectly.
And like all experienced negotiators, she went straight for the jugular.
She claimed the two-burner gas cooker and the gas cylinder.
It was a brilliant tactical decision.
She was almost certain that within a month I would be starving and would return, humbled, hungry, and ready to renegotiate the entire relationship.

And that’s how I ended up with the microwave.

For the next two years that microwave became the centerpiece of my culinary survival strategy.
Everything passed through it with the thoroughness of an Olympic dietician’s meal plan:
Protein: Matumbo. Omena. Nyama wet fry. Tong’ mang’eny (many eggs)
Hydration: Tea. Coffee. Supu ya mifupa (bone broth)
Carbo loading: Chapos. Pilau Njeri. Githeri chips mwitu
Cruciferous Veggies: Sukuma (kale). Makofisi (cabbage). African Nightshade (Managu)
Pre game: Mukimo gi rech (mukimo with fish soup)

The microwave had no sense of boundaries. Whatever had been heated the night before left its ghost behind.
Morning coffee sometimes carried faint hints of yesterday’s mukimo.
Pilau Njeri reheated in the evening occasionally carried traces of lunchtime tea.
If culinary fusion had a laboratory, that microwave was it.
Slowly, unintentionally, I began to build depth. At the time I thought I was simply surviving. Only later did I realise something important about breakups.
Depth rarely comes from comfort.
Depth comes from the moments when comfort disappears and you are forced to rebuild with whatever tools remain on the table.
And once you start looking at the world through that lens, you begin to notice something interesting.
Breakups are everywhere.
Even in places where we pretend everything is stable

Every March arrives with the same unmistakable energy.
If you think sports fans repeat their greatest victories too often, you have clearly never observed how societies commemorate milestones.

England will remind you about the 1966 World Cup.
Springbok supporters will remind you that they have four Rugby World Cups.
Arsenal fans will gently — and sometimes not so gently — remind you about forty-nine unbeaten games and the EPL in the last century.

But none of them have the institutional stamina of International Women’s Month.

It arrives every March like winter in Game of Thrones.
The messages appear everywhere.
Television. Corporate emails. WhatsApp groups.
Conference stages. Social media timelines.
Louder than CNN. Louder than Al Jazeera. Louder than Firstpost or Xinhua.
In perfect chorus:
Happy International Women’s Month.
One hundred and fifteen years of caring, giving, nurturing…
and continuously reminding the rest of us mere mortals that they did.
History supports the argument. Because some victories deserve to be remembered.
Especially the ones that forced systems to change.
Make your peace.
Early.
Happy International Women’s Month!!!
Same Forest. Different Matriarchs

But back to the breakups, and when they hit close.
Like a family disagreement.
The global sportswear industry offers a famous example.
Adolf and Rudolf Dassler once ran a shoe factory together in Germany.
Then the relationship collapsed. The brothers separated.

Adolf founded Adidas.
Rudolf founded Puma.

One had Usain Bolt. Rihanna. Neymar Jr. Lewis Hamilton.
The other Leo Messi. Samuel L. Jackson. Lamine Yamal. Bad Bunny.

One family breakup ended up creating two global brands that would compete for decades.
Competition drove innovation. Athlete sponsorship exploded.
Entire marketing strategies were invented.
Depth emerging from separation once again

I would later experience a different kind of breakup in my professional life.
Sales is one of the few professions where success as an individual contributor can become the biggest obstacle to becoming a leader.
You build your reputation by closing deals.
You become the person who solves problems personally.
You carry the targets.
You win the awards.
Then one day someone taps you on the shoulder.
Congratulations. You are now a Unit Manager.
Except management is not a promotion.
It is a breakup.
You break up with being the hero. Now your job is to build other heroes.
The insurance industry understood this decades ago. Which is why the Life Insurance Management Research Association (LIMRA) developed a training program with a very appropriate name.
Crossroads.
The program was designed to help new sales managers transition from individual performers into team leaders.
Recruiting. Coaching. Performance management. Planning. Building culture.
The lesson was simple. Your success no longer belonged to you.
It belonged to the people you helped succeed.
And once you experience that transition, you begin to see organisations differently. Which raises an interesting question.
Most of us have experienced some version of this moment.

The Founder’s syndrome.

Many small businesses explode and the success requires more heads.
More people who can do.
The founder’s voice is somehow muted in the noise of the new disciples.
The founder is forced to turn and face the orchestra.
And let the music play.
With you as the conductor and not the lead violin.
Many businesses struggle to break the founder hold.
Many founders struggle with separation anxiety.
Can they really do it the way I did?
A breakup that forced us to rebuild.
A partnership that ended and unexpectedly opened new doors.
A Series B funder that changed the rules.
If you have experienced something like that, it might actually be worth sharing.
Talk to us and lets start a conversation around it, because those stories,
The real ones, are usually far more interesting than the theories.
Same Forest Different Monkeys.

Unfortunately, organizations themselves are not always eager to embrace those conversations.
Anyone who has spent time around boards, committees, or chamas knows how silence is often mistaken for harmony.
A respected corporate leader shared this article on Linkedin.

Agendas circulate. Minutes are approved. Reports are presented politely.
And then comes the final agenda item.

Any Other Business. AOB.

This is where uncomfortable truths occasionally try to surface.
But it is also where many ideas quietly die. (The board secretary instructed that AOB’s be submitted 2 weeks before the meeting)
People hesitate. No one wants to appear disruptive. And so organisations continue moving forward, sometimes politely ignoring the very conversations that could make them stronger.
Depth requires friction.
Without friction, systems stagnate.
Sporting competitions sometimes demonstrate this better than boardrooms ever will.
Same Forest. Different Arena.

For more than two decades Italy occupied an uncomfortable position in European rugby. They joined the Six Nations Championship in 2000.
The defeats came quick and fast.
And often.
Pundits questioned their presence. Fans suggested replacing them with Georgia.
Yet Italy stayed. Year after year. Scrum after scrum. Season after season.
Learning. Improving. Absorbing pressure.
Then eventually the scoreboard told a different story.
For the first time in Six Nations history, Italy beat England.
Somewhere in the background the English anthem probably still echoed.
Swing Low, Sweet Chariot.
Except this time when the chariot swung low,
It came up, but with an Italian carrying it home.
The victory did not happen overnight. It was the result of two decades of staying in the competition long enough to build depth.
Persistence doing its quiet work.

Forza Italia!!

Which brings us back to the broader lesson history occasionally forces humanity to confront.
Conflict and separation have shaped the world in ways comfort never could.
Few speeches captured that reality more clearly than one delivered in 1963 by Ethiopian Emperor Haile Selassie at the United Nations.
Speaking against racism and injustice, Selassie I warned that peace would remain fragile until humanity learned to treat every nation and every person with equal dignity.
Bob Marley later turned those words into one of the most powerful songs ever written.

War.

Until the philosophy which holds one race superior and another inferior is finally discredited and abandoned…
There will be war.

The Conquering Lion of the Tribe of Judah understood something life eventually teaches all of us.
Depth is rarely comfortable. Sometimes it is built in kitchens during breakups. Sometimes in boardrooms. Sometimes on rugby fields.
And sometimes across the long arc of history itself.
Comfort preserves the present.
Breakups create the depth required for the future.
Depth is rarely comfortable. Depth definitely beats starving.
And sometimes depth simply begins with a microwave

If reflections like this resonate with you — about business, sport, life, and the strange ways Africa and the world evolve — you are welcome to stay in the conversation.

Should you choose to leave,
Go with song.

Mubarikiwe. Jah Bless.

Same Forest Different Riddim.

Russia has long been called the holy land of chess.
Botvinnik. Karpov. Kasparov.
Infrastructure. State-backed academies. Generational dominance.

So when Kenyan prodigies show up there and win 11–2, that’s not just sport.
That’s narrative disruption.
In February 2026, at the Intellect Academy Cup in Novokuznetsk, Kuzbass, a small delegation from Kenya walked into the cold and walked out with an 11–2 victory over the host team.
Green and white winter coats.
Scarves pulled up to the chin.
DOMODEDOVO glowing in the background of arrival photos like a geopolitical subtitle.
Names matter.
Captain Floyd Wesonga.
Dylan Wema.
Amini Muhani.
Jadarudo Achieng.
Ryan Mutinda.

Not battalions. Not ballistic missiles. Youngsters.
Kenya did not send an ICBM.
Kenya sent Gen Alpha.

And in a world fractured by propaganda and counter-propaganda — or as one WhatsApp philosopher typed it, “prokopanda” — perception matters.
The group lit up.
“Isn’t there a war in Russia? Why send kids there?” “Or is the war narrative itself exaggerated?” The debate stopped being about chess.
It became about information. Global conflict does not move in straight lines.
Sanctions ripple. Energy markets shake. Food prices respond. Currencies wobble.
The probability of spillover is never zero.
And Africa, as history keeps reminding us, is usually the grass.
Ndovu wawili wakipigana, nyasi huumia.
When two elephants fight, the grass suffers.
But what if the grass learns to trade while the elephants are distracted?
Kenya during the US–Somalia war taught us something uncomfortable and powerful.
Where there is conflict, there is logistics.
Where there is logistics, there is demand.
Where there is supply, there is opportunity.
Entire villages sprouted “natural spring water.”
Kenyans became water suppliers.
One Mitsubishi Canter became a fleet of Mitsubishi Fuso FX — the one with the air brakes and that frrr frrr chhh chhh sound.
Transport networks expanded. Entrepreneurs learned to move fast.
The grass bent, but it also adapted.
Probability is not destiny. It is environment.
Same Forest. Different Hydraulics.

The Elephant at the Top of the Tree

My dear elephant is doing splits.
Arsenali.
As of March 1, 2026, Arsenal sit top of the Premier League with 61 points from 28 matches. Two points ahead. Still alive in everything.
Finalists in the Carabao Cup. Round of 16 in the Champions League.
FA Cup progressing.
February confidence is always loud.
But March is where fingernails are tested.
History remembers.
Newcastle ’96. Liverpool’s infamous slip.
Arsenal seasons where February felt like destiny and May felt like therapy.
Being number one is not stability. It is exposure.
The elephant at the top of the tree is magnificent — but heavy.
And gravity is patient.
The table tightens in March. Fixtures harden. Injuries matter.
Psychology shifts. Three points feel heavier. Goal difference matters more.
One red card changes a season’s mood.
Form is temporary.
Structure is permanent.
I truly hope our elephant is Muslim or Catholic. We need to fast and pray for 30 days. That the bough will not break.
That our #SSS stars — Saka, Saliba and Stina — will lift the sides.
Because March exposes.
That is why some teams panic and others mature.
And while everyone analysed Arsenal’s turbulence, systems elsewhere were tightening.

Australia quietly entered the rugby chat.

Brumbies and Waratahs sitting 1 and 2 after Round 3.
Reds not far behind.
Matilda waltzing.
I got an interesting comment last week. From an erstwhile rugby gentleman no less.

Robert Anthony Reeves — retired Brigadier, former President of the RFU (2013–14), Director of Sport at Bristol, founder of the Foundation for Leadership through Sport. Churchill Fellow. Honorary doctorates. Student rugby advocate. A custodian of English Core Values. A supporter of Kenya rugby. Bristol University the alma mater of a very famous Tall Kenyan, has long been a pillar of Safari 7s.
Brig. Rtd. represents structure. Pathways. Institutional discipline.
While noise dominated analysis, systems matured quietly.
Then enters Dr. Finn Russell.
And here’s SalesFundi’s ode to Scottish rugby.

There’ll Be Dancing in the Streets of Hawick (Thogoto, Kiambu County) Tonight

(Thogoto — the Kikuyu tongue’s playful rendering of “Scotland,” where early Presbyterian settlers pitched their tents in Kiambu.)

If England beat New Zealand with posture,
Scotland dismantled England with poetry.
At Scotland’s 31–20 Calcutta Cup masterclass at Murrayfield, this wasn’t just a win.
It was a memory reclaimed.
You could almost hear the late Bill McLaren:
“Ohhh, and Russell slips through — like a demented ferret up a drainpipe!”
England arrived structured. Disciplined. Pilates-aligned.
But Scotland?
Scotland arrived with mist, mischief — and a fly-half who now answers to Doctor.
Finn Russell didn’t manage territory.
He performed surgery.
He anaesthetised the English pack. He excised territorial ambition.
He turned the high ball into an oral examination.
And somewhere in the rugby establishment — perhaps even in Brigadier Bob Reeves’ study — one imagines a reflective pause.
Reeves’ era emphasised discipline.
Structure. Core Values. But rugby has always been two conversations:

England play in straight lines. Scotland play in crescents.
One wins with posture. The other wins with imagination.
And imagination — on certain afternoons — is undefeated.
You sensed the old guard stirring.
Gavin Hastings shifting in his seat.
John Jeffrey — the Great White Shark — tasting blood in the North Sea waters.
This wasn’t smash-and-grab. This was controlled chaos. This wasn’t theatre.
This was Caledonian jazz.
Reminds me of Alliance Boys rugby greats of yore with funny names to boot
Tunji, Johnny Mo’, Kinoti, Bwaab, Jacky, Ruckus, AB, Benji.
Thogoto piety.
Alliance discipline.
Scottish mischief.
And if McLaren were still with us, you’d hear his relative who’s probably a DJ in Kikuyu town shout:
Ikibamba sana, piga nduruuu!
“There’ll be dancing in the streets of Thogoto tonight!”
Raise a glass of fine single malt.
Slàinte mhath. (Slangevar in Kenyanese) 🥃

The EPL and the Mathematics of Collapse

March is when belief meets arithmetic.
Supporters talk destiny. Analysts talk probability. Strength of schedule.
Injury lists. European congestion. Home vs away splits.
Arsenal at the top is not romance.
It is a stress test.
Can the squad rotate? Can Arteta manage egos? Can momentum survive fatigue? March exposes thin squads. April punishes emotional teams.
May crowns structure.
The table does not reward noise. It rewards sustainability.
Same Forest Different leagues.

The Sales Table Doesn’t Care About Your Optimism

Kama kawaida. Sales. Numbers.
If your close rate is 20%, that means 80% rejection.
That’s arithmetic.
Call 100 prospects. Maybe 20 convert. Eighty say no.
If your pipeline cannot emotionally withstand 80 no’s, you will not survive Q1.
Revenue respects ratios.
Kenya has roughly 14,600 licensed insurance agents.
Millions of policies exist, yes — but annual new business is a fraction of that stock.
Divide agents by active policies and the ratio is sobering.
Divide new policies by agents and the average shrinks further.
The sales table does not care about your optimism.
It cares about activity, conversion and follow-up discipline.
Just like gravity exposes elephants.
Structure wins. Volume matters. Consistency matters.
Noise does not close deals.
Behaviour does.

The Odds You Already Beat

Zoom out.

The probability of closing a deal may be 3 in 10.
The probability of winning the EPL narrows in March.
But the probability of you being born?

One fertilisation among hundreds of millions of swimmers.
One.
Statistically, you are a miracle wrapped in normal clothing.
You won a tournament before you could say mama.
And now you’re intimidated by Q1?
Focus.

The Sound at 4:20

There is a song that builds slowly.
No fireworks. No climax. Just tension.
For four minutes and twenty seconds it holds back.
Then the drums land. Not chaos.
The Awakening.
March is 4:20.
The drum is not the surprise. The surprise is whether you prepared for it.
Geopolitics is tightening. The EPL table is tightening. Revenue targets are tightening.
The elephants are circling. The grass is watching.
You can argue in WhatsApp groups. You can celebrate February headlines.
Or you can calculate five moves ahead.
Like our Gen Alphas in snow. Like teams that mature quietly.
Like the salesperson who understands ratios.
Probability is structural. Improbability is possible. You are proof.

When the branch creaks.
When the table tightens.
When the pipeline thins.

Do not panic. Structure yourself. The elephants will fight. The grass will bend.
And when the drums land
Move.
Go with rhythm.
Mubarikiwe. Jah Bless.
Same Forest. Different Musicians.

When religions align something special happens.
This year, Lent and Ramadan will both begun on February 18. The last time they started on the same day was in 1943, over 80 years ago.
While the traditions are different, both seasons center around the same values of fasting, reflection, discipline, and strengthening faith.

As a teen I used to think hunger was a personality trait.
In our neighborhood it was a test of the Olfactory senses. (process of detecting gaseous odourants)
Ramadhan evenings were my Olympics. Not because I was Muslim.
Because I was seventeen.
Appetite like a horse. Metabolism of a hyena.
Mathe’s pilau njeri and mafoga (cabbage) would quietly disappear from my radar during that season.
Not out of disrespect. Out of strategy.
You don’t waste capacity before a major fixture.
Fueled purely by filial obligation, I would snack lightly at home — just enough to maintain appearances — then migrate across the fence for the pre-game warm-up.
Mumzee next door had been cooking up a storm since late afternoon.
Mahamri. Mkate wa sinia. Pilau origino.
The air itself felt seasoned.
Those days, we switched from one AM signal to another to catch the exact minute for Iftar. Alternatively listen to the closest Muezzin in his evening call to prayer.
No apps. No website. Just static and patience.
You learned rhythm through waiting.
At approximately 6:50 pm something would shift inside me.
Voices.
Not spiritual.
Gastric.
Mahamri calling. The sufuria lids lifting in slow motion in my imagination.
The discipline of the day collapsing into aroma.
In the beginning, I would pretend I had forgotten something.
A notebook. A rugby boot. THE Maxell XLII / XLII-S (High Bias/Type II Casette):
The premium, high-performance standard for home recording in the 1980s, lauded for its ability to handle high frequencies and high-fidelity, (apologies my mind wanders)
After a few days, I stopped pretending.
Hunger has a way of simplifying integrity.
Strip away doctrine and Lent and Ramadhan are built on the same architecture:
Restraint before reward.
Discipline before feast.
System before appetite.

Ramadhan asks Muslims to fast dawn to sunset for roughly thirty days. Lent calls Christians into forty days of restraint, prayer and almsgiving.

Different rituals.
Same system.

Hunger starts the journey. Systems sustain it.
And thats how Abdallah Mkatakona was born.
Around the same time, together with other dues my age, I felt that same sensation stepping into global sport.
17 and 136 days old. Kenya Under 19 / Kenya Schools Combined. The Roebucks.
Rosslyn Park 7s — 100 years of history.
Melrose 7s — birthplace of the short game.
Exposure

.Then Watembezi Pacesetters Singapore 7s. 1991. (This is not an IOD story)
We ran onto that pitch thinking talent was enough.
It wasn’t.
The speed was authentic.
Warm-ups were not choreographed.
Recovery was self governed.
Video analysis happened 6 months later.
Nutrition was an ideal.
Game plans were not precise. They were built on hunger not structure.
Gwara (Scratch) was the Holy grail.
Talent had brought us there.
Structure decided who stayed.
That was my first lesson in making the cut.
Train. Prepare. Perform. Monitor. Iterate.
Wash. Clean. Rinse. Repeat.
What happens on Tour remains on Tour.

Fast forward to Karen Country Club.

The 2026 Magical Kenya Open concluded today, February 22, at the Karen Country Club. It was a historic but weather-affected finale that saw South Africa’s Casey Jarvis clinch his maiden DP World Tour title with a record-breaking score of 25-under par.

Twenty-five under.

Precision over four days.

Out of the 12 Kenyan professionals and 6 amateurs who teed off, Njoroge Kibugu was the only Kenyan to make the cut. He carried the nation’s hopes into the weekend with a dramatic eagle on the 18th hole on Friday to secure his spot.

Final Standing: Kibugu finished the tournament at 6-under par overall. Well Done!

The Comeback: After a difficult Saturday (where he slipped to 1-under), he showed incredible resilience today, sinking five birdies in his final round to move back up the leaderboard.
Significance: His performance snapped a two-year “cut drought” for Kenyan golfers at this event.
Other Local Results (Missed Cut) The competition was exceptionally stiff this year, with the cut set at a demanding 4-under par.
Edwin Mudanyi: -2 (Missed cut by 2 shots)
John Lejirma (Amateur): -2 (Missed cut by 2 shots)
Jastas Madoya: Level par
Yardages. Putts. Inches.
Kibugu did not win.
He survived.
Making the cut means you earn Saturday. It means your mechanics held. It means appetite did not force reckless swings.
That is Lent discipline.
That is Ramadhan rhythm.
That is Singapore shock at Twenty-One.
Now zoom out.
The Kenya Open began in 1967 as a local tournament.
Over decades it aligned with the Challenge Tour, Sunshine Tour affiliations, and eventually elevation to DP World Tour status in 2019.
Prize purses increased. Broadcast matured. International field deepened.
The event evolved.
Now rugby.
Safari 7s in 1996. Invitational. Electric. Chaotic.
A kenya team was picked and went on to Tour Scotland in preparation for the World Cup qualifier later that year.
Then Kenya entered the IRB Sevens World Series in 1999.
Core team status meant repeated exposure.
New Zealand. Fiji. South Africa. England.
Not once.
Kama kawaida. (Furniture)
Academies formed. Conditioning improved. Video review became culture. Governance aligned tournament growth with player development.
Ugali was struck off the menu.
Tournament and player matured together.
By the time HSBC SVNS became global broadcast theatre, Kenyan players were already living that standard.
Exposure plus system.
In golf, the event globalised faster than the pipeline scaled.
This is not condemnation. It is governance math.
Exposure without structure produces occasional brilliance.
Exposure with structure produces consistency.
Lets bring it home to sales.
In sales, hunger and networks open doors.
Structure closes quarters.
One big deal is an eagle on 18. It saves Friday.
But professionals survive the fiscal year and the 4 days because their system holds.
Their Swings kept net positive.
The balance sheets made Par from the rough.
Prospect. Qualify. Follow up. Track. Refine. Close. Review.
Then repeat.
CRM hygiene. Territory mapping. Coaching loops.
Performance dashboards. Quarterly recalibration.
Train. Prepare. Perform. Monitor. Iterate.
Wash. Clean. Rinse. Repeat.
Faith seasons teach it. Golf exposes it. Rugby institutionalised it.
Sales rewards it.

And then this

Recently the Green Giant continued to keep us green with envy on their ingenuity.
They launched a new product better known by its street name
Kula Fare Bila shame.
The “Kula fare Bila Shame product knows how to align your weakness to your weakness.
Marriage counselors be on alert, plus Men of all ages from Mubabas to GenZs.

There’s going to be an activation....maybe not so big but Your nearest and dearest, your mothers, sisters, wives, daughters, girlfriends (not in any particular order) and the entire woman folk will hear about this and will ask you the dreaded question....have you downloaded it.... (mulika mwizi loading)
I need to meet with their product dev guys to understand the target market.
Anyone fancy a guess?
Innovation is neutral. Discipline determines outcome.
Shiriki Pay in my view may not the solve the real problem.
Lack of trust is.
Because if your household does not have governance, if your marriage does not have clarity, if your budget does not have structure, technology amplifies appetite.
Same principle.
Hunger starts the journey. Systems sustain it.
Whether it’s fasting. Whether it’s golf. Whether it’s rugby.
Whether it’s sales. Whether it’s fintech.
The pattern is structural.
I think back to Ramadhan static on AM radio.
You don’t eat at 6:47 because you feel like it.
You wait.
I think of Singapore at 21.
Exposure without preparation is humiliation.
I think of Kibugu recalibrating after Saturday.
Making the cut matters.
Hunger is loud. Systems are quiet. Talent travels.
Structure survives.
And somewhere at 6:50 pm tonight, someone will still be waiting for the clock to turn before they knock on Mumzee’s door.
Train. Prepare. Perform. Monitor. Iterate.
Wash. Clean. Rinse. Repeat.

🎵 Same Forest. Different Musicians
I thought I’d add a new section……… for connection 😉
Add it to your playlist. Your GenZ might think you’re cool.
Tell me what you think. (or which song the article reminds you of))

Bobby Caldwell … 1978
Tupac Shakur … 1998
Ahmed Ololade (Asake) … 202_

Evolution. Not competition.

Ask someone older. Ask someone younger.
Go with Rythm.
Mubarikiwe.
Jah Bless.

This week I’ve been distracted.
The energy that goes into a 7s weekend I forgot is immense.
This is the kind of article that says, I am happy with a draw.
No adrenaline rush while writing, no silence. Just an unmistakable hum of generators in the background and the screaming noise of the fans in the stands.
As I write this, I’m torn.
Do I watch the Kenya Lionesses take on Spain from the stand, or from our small operations base under the Nyayo Stadium belly?
For the last four weeks I’ve been volunteering at HSBC SVNS 2.
A small way to give back to a game that has given me everything — networks, travel, perspective, scars, friendships, discipline.
The Lionesses needed this game. A test. A measuring stick. A signal.
The showing?
Solid. Gritty. Promising.
Behind them, the Village thundered into life at 9am.
Saints.
Sinners.
And everything in between.

The Walkabout: Nairobi West & The Beer Belt

Earlier this week, I played truant.
Left the stadium bubble. Strolled to the roundabout. Walked memory lane.
Nairobi West via Madaraka Estate.
Not the Google Maps version. The 90s version.
Flint-black tarmac.
Bars that smelled of old Guinness and new dreams.
Characters who aged but never retired.
Shops that doubled as pharmacies, laboratories, nyama choma joints and confession booths.
We used to call ourselves the “Young Turks.”
Firebrands without portfolios. Full of ideas. Zero cash.
Maximum confidence.
I started at Madaraka Estate shops. Club Kutwa. Our pre-game headquarters.
They had a dish called Kutwa Bite.
It required five of us contributing mchango to afford a plate for three.
That was The Struggle Economics.
Then I crossed Langata Road into what we used to call The Beer Belt.
From Lazinos to Haridge.
From Jeans & Johns to Plan B.
Bars that have seen marriages begin, end, and renegotiate.
Dreams made. Near misses sealed. Deals struck over Tusker foam.
The Beer Belt should be declared a World Heritage site.
For ambition. For foolishness. For resilience.
I stopped at Mini Pub. One of the few survivors.
That’s where we bumped into him.

Real Ugaliman.

Not a politician. Not a celebrity. Just a man whose name sounds like a rugby chant now with an American twang. A man who flew back home from the USA to make his home tournament memorable.
He looked around.
“Look at this,” he said. “This place used to be packed every weekend. DJs. Food fights. Six-packs disappearing faster than halftime oranges.”
Pause.
“The party didn’t die. It relocated.”
He pointed toward Nyayo. “It’s in the stadium now.” And he was right.
Rugby turned the Stadium into a place of hope, family and laugher.
HSBC SVNS 2 Nairobi
The Sherehe Sevens

Fan Village: Where Culture Relocates

If you haven’t walked through the HSBC SVNS Fan Village, you’ve missed something.
Food stalls smoking early. Tusker branding humming. The Singleton pop-up glowing.
DJ sets following the matches.
Khaligraph headlining Saturday. Vijana Barubaru lighting up Sunday.
Tickets KES 300 early bird. KES 500 advance. 2500 VIP.
Chants of Tumeibiwa following the SOLD OUT announcement.
M-Pesa and TikoHub working overtime.
This isn’t just rugby. It’s culture consolidation.
The diaspora flew in. Flags unpacked. Shtundz & Angie O asking….
“Where are our tickets?” “Are you at the Village?” “Where’s the afterparty?”
The energy didn’t die.
It relocated.
From the Beer Belt. To the Belly of the Beast. The Village.
Sherehe Central.

The Unlikely Dividend: Funding Sherehe
Now let me confess something. I received a strange payment this week. One of those payments that makes you call your bank.
“Excuse me, is this meant for me?”
Am I being set up? I read through every message I sent out. Alas.
Kumbe…KenGen dividend.
Right before Valentine’s.
Right before Sevens weekend.
The Universe is playing Ferre Gola’s 100kg in the background.
I hadn’t even checked the share price first. Just knew something had landed.
KenGen shares had been playing midfield.
Not explosive. But reliable. Dividend darling behaviour.
That’s Kenya’s psychology.
We like payout. We hold for income.
Predictability beats speculation for many retail investors.
And yes — that dividend converted into:
Food at the Village. A round of drinks with old teammates. A night on the town.
Presence.
Money isn’t just capital gains. Sometimes it’s attendance fuel.
Proof-of-life revenue.

Selling to Gatekeepers: Permission to Attend

Let’s talk truth. No one attends the Sevens without first negotiating at home.
“Can I go to the 7s?” That question is not casual. It’s a sales pitch.
Gatekeepers include:
• The spouse watching the budget.
• The girlfriend demanding quality time.
• The husband evaluating logistics.
• The kids expecting Saturday attention.

You don’t sell at the stadium gate. You sell at home. Timing matters.
“It’s once this season.” Value proposition matters.
“I’ll take the kids.”
Risk reduction matters.
“I’ll be back by dinner.” Reciprocity matters. “You choose brunch next week.”
Sales mechanics in domestic format.
And here’s the trick:
If you come back happier, lighter, more present — suddenly the gatekeeper becomes advocate next season.
That’s how you get the family to buy into a weekend plan.

Performance: Why We Keep Watching Rugby
Culture gets you there. Performance keeps you.
The Lionesses showed promise.
Spatial awareness. Defensive resets. Composure under pressure.
The men?
Flashes of Kenyan flair. Breakdown intensity. Support lines opening space.
The killer punch for the home fans? Sadly missing.
We live to fight another day.
Tariffs took the Trophy.
Kesho pia ni siku. (we live to fight another day)
But this weekend was for the fans. The system under the spectacle.
Player 13.
The Kenyan supporter.
“Mama Milka” the warm up tune. The whole stadium becomes choir.
For six hours:
Strangers hug. Voices crack.
Nobody cares about politics or payroll.
That is not entertainment. That is belonging.
#KenyaCornerIsHome

The Coronation: From Princess to Queen

February 6, 1952.
Queen Elizabeth became Queen while in Kenya.
Crowned by circumstance.
Now fast forward. February 15th 2026
Those of us who could not stay on our feet long enough.
There’s another coronation happening here.

MDCCCXXIV.

Most think it’s just a club.
But 1824 is the year Scotland’s first licensed distillery opened.
Whisky legalised. Contraband turned craft. A perfect metaphor.
Music pounding like war drums. Nairobi’s gladiators wear tights.
We don’t go to conquer anymore.
We go to reconnect. To laugh. To feast with our eyes.

To ask:

“Who remarried?” “Who’s still paying school fees?”
“Whose knees survived the dance floor?”
Even Eshiring’ang’a the great, the indestructible Luhya warrior, found his weakness.
Every gladiator has kryptonite.
But today’s gladiators don’t spill blood.
They spill stories with eternal heartbreak round the corner.
The Queen had run away from the tired history of whispered dreams from latter day generals in Nairobi West. Escaped to Langata Shopping Centre for a while.
But destiny came calling. She moved back to Nairobi West. Home of her fathers.
Next to some Tanks that became a railway station.
Here she blossoms.
And today we congregate to crown her. That’s the coronation. Not of kings.
Of presence.

26,000 People = Identity

When 26,000 odd fans show up,
That’s not attendance. That’s affirmation.
Diaspora flights booked last minute.
Tickets sold out. (truly)
Fans without tickets told to stay away.
Village packed.
That’s not nostalgia. That’s relocation of energy.
Nairobi West is no longer the Beer Belt.
It’s the Belly of the Beast. The Village became the Arena.
Real Ugaliman was right.
The party found a new country.
Nyayo Stadium

Desiderata (Remixed for the Sevens)

Go placidly amid the noise and bass lines.
Observe what matters: The roar.
Not the comment section.
Speak your truth quietly and clearly. Listen to others without interruption.
If you compare your mbogi (crew) to another’s,
You may become vain or bitter.
There will always be better costumes. And some ridiculous ones.
Enjoy your attendance . Your presence. Your small contributions.
Exercise caution in sport and life.
The world has trickery and tenders.
But let that not blind you to virtue.
Many strive for honour. Everywhere life is full of heroes.
Be yourself. Especially now.
Because presence is your answer.

Thank You from the team that sold you tickets

To the 25,000 odd who showed up.
You didn’t attend. You activated. You believed.
You brought rugby memories. Diaspora longing. Family negotiations.
KenGen dividends. Old jerseys. New flags.
You are not the audience.
You are Player 13.
MAFANS.

And the sun went down on one of Nairobi’s most iconic events

NB.
If you clicked here from WhatsApp or LinkedIn and saw a signup prompt:
Scroll.
This Substack is free. No paywall. And guess what?
There is free audio for every weekly article.
One story every Sunday. Sometimes a midweek nudge.
No noise. Just perspective.
See you next week.
Mubarikiwe (Jah Bless)

Image courtesy: Marine & Fidel

I came across today’s People Daily headline and it stopped me mid-scroll:
“Why Many Are Leaving Church — but Not Their Faith.”
Page 8.

It didn’t come as a shock. It was almost polite. But it hit hard.

Last week, we were writing about eulogies being written while people are still alive. Then came that uncomfortable online video moment where mourners were not allowed to speak at a funeral. And now this headline appears on a Sunday morning, as if to quietly confirm something many already feel but rarely articulate.

Faith didn’t leave the building.
People did.
What changed is not belief — it’s where belief found rhythm.
For many Gen X, millennials, and early Gen Zs, faith didn’t disappear.

It was remixed.

It moved from pews to rugby stands, from cathedrals to bars at midnight, to the songs chanted by inebriated crowds stumbling home — half confession, half prayer — asking for journey mercies without realising that’s exactly what they were doing.

What many call secularisation is often just relocation.

The sanctuary shifted.
The cadence changed.
The liturgy loosened.

But the impulse — to belong, to believe, to be forgiven, to be held
remained stubbornly intact.

The School Chapel That Hard-Coded Faith & The Hymns Never Left

Even when people left pews, the hymns stayed.

As a rabble (Form 1), first term opened with promise:
“Morning Has Broken.”
Another day to survive without being summoned to the Prefects’ Common Room.

Second term — now seasoned, already knowing how to create strategic illnesses that guaranteed extra helpings under the guise of “special diet” — and also rugby term:
“Bread of Heaven.”
Still sung with chest, not throat.

Fourth Form / Sixth Form, third term:
“Lord, Dismiss Us With Thy Blessing.”
“I can’t wait to finish” mixed with “what will my results be,” and that sobering final line reminding us not all of us would be back:
“Those returning, those returning, make more faithful than before.”

Those melodies didn’t disappear. They resurfaced in chants, anthems, stadium songs, and drunken harmonies on Ngong Road at 2 a.m.

Listen closely to a crowd leaving a bar after midnight. The call-and-response. The repetition. The shared rhythm. Strip away the alcohol and you’re left with something deeply liturgical.
Uninyunyizie Maji (sprinkle me with water)

Faith didn’t vanish.
It found new acoustics.
The architecture mattered. The silence mattered. The order mattered.
Anglicanism carried the weight of empire and structure — processions, timing, hierarchy.
Catholicism drilled repetition — showing up again and again, whether you felt like it or not.
Islam taught discipline and rhythm — prayer as non-negotiable habit rather than mood.
Adventism taught restraint — boundaries, fasting, withdrawal from noise.

These weren’t just religious habits.
They were operating systems.
Then came the local breakaways.

Dini ya Msambwa.
Akorino — the Holy Ghost churches.
African Independent Churches that didn’t ask for permission.

These were not theological tantrums. They were acts of cultural self-respect. Faith insisting on wearing local clothes, speaking local tongues, and answering local questions.
Somewhere between Kangemi, Kawangware, and City Stadium, you’d see a procession that felt both chaotic and deeply organised — robes flowing, bells ringing, singing rising — what Nairobi folklore jokingly called
Orchestra Twende Mbio. (The Orchestra that runs fast)

Faith didn’t leave.
It learned new choreography.

Why Denominations Trained Us for Life

What we rarely admit is that denominations trained us long before we ever entered offices or boardrooms.
They shaped how we approach authority, time, leadership, conflict, and work. Why some of us obsess over process. Why others resist hierarchy. Why some believe discipline equals freedom, while others experience it as constraint.
So when people say, “We left church,” what they often mean is simpler:

We graduated with the values.
We changed the classroom.

The Legion of Maria

Among African Initiated Churches, Legio Maria stands apart — not because it was loud, but because it was brave.
It may be the only movement bold enough to break away from Roman Catholicism while retaining Latin liturgy, hierarchy, sacramental discipline, and ritual seriousness — and still assert an African theological imagination.

Founded in the early 1960s by Simeo Melkio Ondeto, revered by followers as the Black Messiah, alongside the mystic Mama Maria, Legio Maria did something radical.

They said:
Africa does not need a translated Christ.
Africa can encounter Christ as itself.
They kept the Mass structure, saints, fasting, processions — even a Pope. But sermons moved fluidly between Latin and Dholuo.
With millions of adherents, Legio Maria became proof that people don’t reject faith — they reject erasure.

Women, Purple, and Being Seen

There’s a detail many miss.
Legio Maria saw women.
In a patriarchal religious landscape where silence was often spiritualised, colour became calling. A woman in purple carried authority — not loud, not performative, but recognised.

Purple symbolised maturity, repentance, humility, and quiet leadership.
People don’t leave buildings when sermons fail.
They leave when they are no longer seen.

What Dashboards Don’t Tell You

Somewhere between hymn verses, my Kenyan brain did what it always does.
It went to work.
I sit in rooms with executives uneasy — not because business is collapsing, but because signals no longer align. Dashboards are green. Numbers look impressive. Yet something feels hollow.
Campaigns “perform” but nothing moves.
Followers grow
Revenue doesn’t.

If you want to know whether influence is real, check quietly (my own experience):
Who forwards your content privately. Who references it weeks later without tagging you. Who screenshots and asks, “Can we talk?” How often silence follows your post.

Influence rarely announces itself. The guys in the corner office sometimes are trained not to perform approval.
Attendance dropped before belief did.
Dashboards delay reality.
10,000 impressions doesn’t mean ten thousand people cared.
6 new subscribers may mean six decision-makers.

Faith metrics work the same way.

Rugby, Absence, and Relocation

International rugby is back — properly back.
Six Nations, Round One:
France 36 – Ireland 14
Italy 18 – Scotland 15
England 48 – Wales 7
Old systems. Old rivalries. Some maintaining, others declining.
Structure, depth, muscle memory.
Then the shorter version.
HSBC SVNS Perth:
Men: South Africa beat Fiji 21–19
Women: New Zealand beat Australia 29–7
HSBC SVNS Singapore:
Men: Fiji beat France
Women: New Zealand beat Australia 36–7
What stood out wasn’t just who won.
It was who was missing.
Kenya Corner — conspicuously absent.
Sometimes absence tells a deeper story than presence. People don’t stop caring. They stop recognising themselves.
The early warning sign isn’t noise.
It’s quiet relocation.

From Door Handles to Love Handles

China banned cars without visible door handles. India followed.
For over a decade, EV designers chased flush, hidden, pop-out handles — popularised by Tesla, copied everywhere. The logic was aerodynamics, aesthetics, marginal efficiency gains.
Then crashes happened.
In several incidents, power failure meant doors couldn’t open. First responders struggled. Seconds mattered.
China responded decisively.
From January 1, 2027, all passenger vehicles sold in China must have mechanical door releases — inside and outside. No reliance on electronics.
Why it matters: China sells over 25 million vehicles a year, including more than 7 million new-energy vehicles. Roughly 60% of top-selling EVs use hidden or flush handles.Millions of cars will now be redesigned back to visible handles.
Design chased beauty. Reality demanded grip.
That thought spiralled — as thoughts do — into love handles.
Those stubborn bits of flesh.
Immune to planks.
Resistant to Pilates.
Untouched by yoga.

Maybe love handles are back too. Just in time for Valentine’s.
Maybe some handles aren’t flaws.
They’re safety features.
Something to hold on to when life swerves.

Faith, Rugby, Marriage

Which brings us to National Marriage Week. (7-14th Feb look it up)
Quiet. Heavy. Necessary.
There’s a rumour — still being traced — of a local pastor willing to perform 48-hour weddings during the HSBC SVNS Nairobi 7s. If confirmed, we may need to secure him accommodation in Nairobi West — because BnBs will be full.
We also hear that the event may be graced by The Archbishop of Naxbury, a reformed Marine, currently a Kenya Exile, gracing the occasion.
A truly world event.
Faith. Rugby. Marriage.
All colliding — not in a cathedral, but in culture.
People didn’t leave faith.
They left buildings that stopped listening.
Faith adapted. Influence moved. Community regrouped.
And somewhere between hymns, hashtags, scrums, dashboards, love handles, and late-night songs
belief quietly survived.
Same forest.
Different monkeys.

What hymn still lives in you?
What life metric are you overvaluing?
Where did your faith actually go — if it ever left?

Tukutane Nyayo
#KenyaCornerIsHome

Over the last year, many of my generation have buried too many people too close to our age.
Agemates.
Friends.
Parents of children who sit in the same classrooms as our own kids.

It has a way of collapsing time.

Watching live or on YouTube, the sadness is permeating.
A friend sent me a tearjerker last week.
I watched it but heard different things, saw different things.
What’s been quietly changing, though, is not just who we are burying —
but how the children speak.

Once you get over the shock of seeing young people with nose rings, dreadlocks, cornrows. The occasional mohawk and other chicken-comb looking styles.
After judging their parents, remember yourself at that age,
Afro rowdy hair patted down to look presentable — we used water and the back of a hand-held mirror (there was a guy called Ray Parker but that’s a story for another day).
I don’t know what they use nowadays.
Anyway, the mane has been tamed temporarily.

Gen Z eulogies are different.
They are not polished. They are not ceremonial. They are not padded with polite lies.
They are honest. They speak of love — yes.
But they also speak of absence.
Of stubbornness. Of silence.
Of things that were never resolved but somehow forgiven anyway.

What’s striking is not what they say.
It’s what they edit out.
Anger is softened. Distance is rephrased. Harshness becomes “discipline.”
Emotional unavailability becomes “He tried in his own way.”
“She was weird” becomes “she had a connection to the spiritual world.”

One young speaker said it plainly, almost casually:
“He wasn’t perfect. But he showed up when he could.”

Not out of dishonesty — but out of survival.

The uncomfortable truth is this:
the eulogy is not written at death.
It is drafted quietly on ordinary Tuesdays, while everyone is still alive.

If your Gen Z were asked to speak one year after you were gone, what would they say
and what would they carefully avoid saying?

That question isn’t about guilt.
It’s about awareness.
And it sits with you.

Love Month Is Not a Month. It’s an Exam.

After writing that, I needed to breathe…. (it’s difficult to write about sadness)….
Let’s talk about February.
Imefika. (It has arrived.)

The love month has begun —
which in Kenyan terms means expectations have already outrun reality.

For some, love is flowers. For others, love is peace. For many, love is simply not being stressed.

And yet every year, we treat February like a performance review.

People don’t break up in February because they “discovered the truth.”
They break up because expectations were never aligned — and it finally showed.

We’ve become very good at diagnosing relationships with fancy language.
Commitment phobia. Separation anxiety. Childhood trauma.
Mummy issues.

One excuse that always sneaks in from that “contrarian” in the group:
“Their family has a history of mental issues.”
“That one is crazy.”

What some of my friends at a certain table call Boiro.

Boiro finds its way into the Kenyan dictionary as a representative term initially named after a famous African meat dish: boiled meat.
It’s a you guy my guy kinda statement.

Given the difficulty murima people have pronouncing certain sounds, “boiro” stuck.
Wekelea boiro! — the call to action that is music to every butcher’s dream.
Put on the boiled meat.

But Boiro evolved.
It became a utility word like Wueh.

Boiro is a very efficient word.
It can describe pain. (The pain is boiro.)
Enjoyment. (This place is boiro.)
Admiration. (That guy’s car is boiro.)
Ecstasy. ( She’s boiro.)

It covers everything.

But sometimes the truth is much simpler and much less dramatic:
you weren’t a fit.

Not every failed relationship is a psychological thriller.
Some are just a mismatch of timing, temperament, and emotional effort.

Could we have been setting ourselves up for rejection right from the start?
Did we give too eagerly or too scarcely?
Did we try to curate affection instead of checking capacity?

February exposes that — loudly.

The trick is not to survive love month.
It’s to stop over-curating affection and start being honest about what you can actually sustain.

That honesty would save people a lot of heartache, money,
and a lot of self-questioning using online therapists.

The Sales Story We Don’t Like Admitting

In one of the sales courses I teach, we have a section on the Staircase pitch.(not the elevator)
It has three parts.

First, ask the client to describe their current position — the as is.
Second, their desired position — the should be.
Third, what has stopped them from achieving their goal — the barrier question.

As the salesperson, you then aim to widen the gap between the current state and the desired state to the level that, when you drop the solution into that gap,
The client helplessly says YES to your ruse.

Is it ethical? Is it human?
While the jury is still out,
A cash register rings. A bank message comes in. An Mpesa alert buzzes.
Another sale. Another conquest. Another notch in your belt.

Natasha’s school trip to Diani is paid for.

I’ve watched deals die quietly not because the solution was weak,
but because nobody wanted to ask the one question that would make the room uncomfortable.

Sales doesn’t fail because people don’t work hard enough.
It fails because people avoid asking the uncomfortable question.

Comfort is not confirmation.

From the ashes rose the maternity ward

After death, life has a way of insisting on being noticed.

In the same season where memorial services are becoming more frequent, we are also watching elite athletes step away from competition to create life — and return stronger.

Kenyan long-distance star Beatrice Chebet — double Olympic and world champion in the 5,000m and 10,000m — has announced she will take a maternity break during the 2026 season as she prepares to welcome her first child.

Her agent shared that she called this “the most important race of my life,” and she is expected to return to peak form in 2027 with her sights firmly set on the Los Angeles 2028 Olympics.

And while Chebet focuses on motherhood, another Kenyan legend is taking the idea of life further in her community.

Faith Kipyegon, herself no stranger to greatness and comeback — having returned to the track after maternity before — has launched the groundbreaking of a maternity wing in her home area of Keringet, aimed at improving maternal care and reducing preventable deaths in her community.

This project — a partnership with Nike and local health partners — is designed to ensure that mothers and newborns have quality care close to home.
Maternity breaks in sport are often framed as interruptions.
They’re not. They are incubation.
They also come with quiet resistance — contracts that expire, timelines that punish pauses, systems that reward constant motion.

And yet, choosing to stop — intentionally — is an act of clarity.

Life does not move in straight lines.
It moves in cycles.
Death reminds us of endings.
Birth reminds us that continuity is stubborn.
Both belong in the same conversation.

Same Forest. Different Mothers.

Born From Muted Dreams

There’s a question many people are quietly asking as they watch Gen Z creatives, athletes, and entrepreneurs emerge with confidence:

Where did this come from?

The uncomfortable answer is that many of these talents were always present — just postponed.
Previous generations were not less gifted. They were more constrained.
Less exposure. Higher risk. Fewer safety nets.
More responsibility, earlier.
Dreams were muted not by lack of ability, but by timing.

Did radio and social media stars get birthed out of their parents’ talent?
Why didn’t their parents pursue those dreams?
Was it lack of exposure? Education?
Or was it just not their time?

Some children are not rebelling.
They are completing stories their parents could not afford to start.

This is not about blame. It’s about context.
Talent does not appear out of nowhere.
It transcends generations.

Mi Amor (My First Love) (sang to the tune of Diana Ross & Lionel Richie’s 80s hit Endless Love)

The HSBC Sevens tickets are sold out.
Nyayo will be full. The noise will be familiar.

Which means planning has already started.
Who you’re going with. How you’ll get there.
What you’ll wear.
What stories you’ll tell afterwards.

Sport has a way of pulling us back into community —
not because it’s perfect, but because it’s shared.

In a week that begins with death and ends with planning for joy,
That’s what matters.
Sherehe (celebration)
#KenyaCornerIsHome

Same forest.
Different monkeys.

Our story begins the way many of my hare-brained schemes do.
Hungry. Unplanned. Slightly philosophical.

As a developing Sunday ritual, I visit Akinyi’s kibanda for brunch.

Choice meats.
Matumbo. Nyama boil. Omena.
And my personal weakness — tong mang’eny (many eggs), with sides of managu and an unapologetic ugali saucer.

This is Akinyi’s spot. Plastic chairs. Wooden benches. A low corrugated plastic roof that guarantees 32-degree heat all day. Odongo Swagg and Jakadongo blaring from a small Chinese portable speaker. On the wall, painted as an afterthought:
“Hatuna Wi-Fi.”

We don’t have Wi-Fi.

Kinyi has a wicked sense of humour.

Everyone is sweating.
Why is the sweetest food always served at steam-room temperature?

As I scan for a seat, my eyes land on what might be one of the most effective Calls to Action (CTA) I’ve seen in a long time, scribbled in fading paint on the wall.

You’re at a bus stop. A nganya slows down.
The conductor isn’t selling poetry. He’s selling direction.

“TOWN! 50! TOWN! Finje TOWN! Ya kuenda!”

That’s a Call To Action.
If you want to go to town, get in now.
Miss it — the matatu moves.

Back to the kibanda.
On the wall:

CHAM GIMA MORI
(Eat what pleases you)
Next to it:
CHAM GIMA MITNI
(Eat what nices you — kula ile roho inataka)

No agency.
No brand consultant.
No strategy deck.

Just truth.

The Positioning Problem the Untrained Eye Misses

There is just one problem. I call Akinyi over.
“Jaber,” I say.
“The message is behind the customer. You only read it after eating.
Which means it doesn’t persuade. It only reassures.”
A powerful message.Badly positioned.
The lecture pauses.

Akinyi, Barbie, and the Slippers

Akinyi is a full-bodied African beauty from the lake.
Dark. Confident. Current. Plugged into what’s trending.

She’s wearing a very tight cotton blue dress — slightly used — with Barbie emblazoned across the chest.

Global brand dominance. No marketing budget.
Then I see them.

The slippers.

Those fluffy pati-pati ones. Pinkish. Velvety. Furry like an overfed house cat.
About 300 bob online — retail therapy sweet spot. Buy without guilt.

Bedroom slippers that were never meant to see dust, but Kenya has promoted them to everyday wear.
No grip. No ambition.
No business near mud, charcoal, or omena oil.
I don’t hate them. Hate is strong.
I abhor them.
And yet — they are everywhere.
Supermarkets. Sidewalks. Stalls.
That’s when it clicks.
You can’t unsee them.

Those slippers didn’t become popular because they are practical.
They became popular because we see them.
Everywhere.
Anyone who has sold FMCG or alcohol knows the rule. Bamzigi, the van salesman, lived by it:
Eye level is buy level.
Modern language just dressed it up:
Attention economics. Scroll-stop power. Thumb-zone optimisation.
TikTok didn’t invent persuasion.
It moved the shelf.
Old shelf:
Fridge → middle row → eye level
New shelf:
Phone → feed → first three seconds
TikTok works because:

• It puts products directly in the eye line

• Repetition creates visual ownership

• People buy before logic wakes up

Same psychology as slippers at a kibanda.

This is why:

• Beer brands fight for middle-shelf fridge space

• Supermarkets charge premiums for eye-level placement

• TikTok works

TikTok is not magic.
TikTok is eye-level marketing.
Your product appears where attention already is.
Akinyi’s CTA works.
It’s just facing the wrong direction.
And suddenly I realise — this isn’t a kibanda problem.
It’s a global one.

Same forest.
Different positioning.

The Diet Stories We Never Question

Cham Gima Mitni sounds obvious at a kibanda.
But controversial the moment you leave one.
We live in a world where normal food needs defending, while madness gets rebranded as discipline.
Let’s talk about diets. Not food.
Diets.

The Mermaid Diet

This one came from WhatsApp. Shared by a mermaid. An actual mermaid.
No disclaimers. No irony. Just confidence.
Eat Matumbo and innards.Dump fruit. Keep the avocado. Use animal fat only.
That’s it.
The comments were instant chaos. Gout sufferers revolted. Doctors typed essays. Someone said “H**L NO.”
But here’s the thing — it spread.
Not because it was correct.
Because it was visible and delivered with conviction.

The 60-Day Fast

Then there’s the other one.
The 60-day fast.
It always arrives wearing spiritual robes.
Someone casually says, “Yeah, I did a 60-day fast.”
Not six days. Not intermittent.
Sixty.
The room goes quiet. Respect is silently awarded.
We clap for suffering if it looks intentional enough.
We celebrate self-denial when it wears a halo.

I’m not discouraging anyone. Lakini sometimes…

Back at the kibanda, nobody is pretending.
You’re hungry — you eat.
You want eggs — order tong mang’eny.
You want more ugali — you shout.
No guilt narrative.
No redemption arc.

Just: kula ile roho inataka.

And somehow, that feels more radical than fasting for sixty days.

AFRICA TOP ELEVEN: PLAYER VALUE REPRICING TABLE (AFCON EFFECT)
AFCON is not just football.
AFCON is a balance-sheet event.

For one month:

• European clubs lose African players

• Wages are still paid

• Results wobble

• Revenue risk rises

But something else happens quietly.

Valuations change.

AFCON is a compressed, high-pressure market discovery platform.
The Silicon Valley of football. Where every player has a 90-minute reel as an elevator pitch.

Players move from:

• “Rotation option” → “Core asset” Imad, Oshimen

• “£30m maybe” → “£60m minimum” Pape Gueye (the Senegal lefty)

Budgets approved six months earlier suddenly look stupid.

Boards don’t hate AFCON because of football.
They hate it because new information enters the market late.

That is the most dangerous thing in business.
AFCON functions as a compressed, high-pressure market discovery platform.
In 30 days, information asymmetry collapses, performance risk is repriced, and asset valuations adjust in real time.

Africa XI – Valuation Impact Summary

• Total pre-AFCON valuation: ~€421m

• Total post-AFCON valuation: ~€588m

• Net paper value created in ~30 days: ≈ €167m

• Average uplift per player: ~40%

AFCON did not “entertain.”
It repriced assets.

Africa’s Youth Bulge and the Attention Economy

Africa is the youngest continent on earth. Median age: about 19.
In key markets — Kenya, Nigeria, Ghana, Ethiopia — Gen Z and young millennials dominate urban consumption now.
Bulge economies don’t behave like ageing ones.
They are:

• Visual

• Impulsive

• Experience-driven

This explains:

• Why TikTok beats television

• Why fluffy slippers become mainstream overnight

• Why Mermaid Diets travel faster than peer-reviewed nutrition

• Why AFCON commands billions of eyeballs without apology

African consumer behaviour is no longer niche.

It’s leading.

Cham Gima Mitni as Philosophy

Cham Gima Mitni is not laziness.
It is not indulgence.
It is not recklessness.
It is alignment.

Bulge economies don’t respond to discipline narratives.
They respond to visibility and resonance.
That’s the thread beneath:

• The kibanda wall

• The slippers

• The diets

• AFCON

• Rugby at Nyayo

Demography is destiny.
But visibility decides who gets paid.

The Warm-Down

AFCON reprices talent.
The EPL manages incentives.

But rugby? Rugby does not hide. Rugby shows up.

Fast. Violent. Joyful.
At eye level.

This Valentine’s weekend:

Cham gima mitni.
Eat what pleases you. Watch what excites you. Show up for what moves you.

🏉 HSBC Rugby 7s- Valentine’s Weekend 2026
📍 Nyayo Stadium
🎟️ https://tikohub.com/events/404/Landport

Bring your person.
Bring your kids.
Bring your appetite.

Same Forest.
Different Monkeys.

Battle of the Lions

My head says Morocco 1 – Senegal 0.

Host nation. Home advantage.
The kind of final decided by one moment, one mistake, one refereeing call that lives forever in WhatsApp voice notes.

The kind of match where history leans quietly toward the team playing at home, under familiar lights, on familiar ground.
MAROC 1 NIL
Chaos. Emotion. Tumeibiwa (they have stolen us)

But my heart says Senegal 2 – Morocco 1.

Tears of joy. Erasing memories of 2019.
A proper African night.
Drums. Flags. Teranga.
And maybe — just maybe — a fitting send-off for a man who has carried Senegal for more than a decade.

Is this Sadio Mané’s last dance at AFCON?

Sometimes football doesn’t ask us to analyse.
It asks us to feel.

And that tension — between logic and longing — is where this story begins.

Same Forest. Different Lions. (non-sports fans, stay with me)

As we go to press, I am also warming up.
Getting ready to join the boys at the local.

This final is bigger than football.

On one side, the Atlas Lions — named after the great Barbary lion that once ruled North Africa.
A symbol of power, endurance, royalty, and home advantage.
A lion shaped by mountains, history, and homeland.

On the other, the Lions of Teranga.

The lion — strength, courage, leadership.
Teranga — a Wolof word meaning hospitality, welcome, generosity, and respect.

Not politeness.
A code.

Together, Lions of Teranga describes a rare balance:

Fierce when required. Warm by default. Strong without cruelty.
Proud without arrogance.

Hospitality versus homeland. Warmth versus walls.
Teranga versus Atlas.

Same forest.
Different lions.

And as always, one quiet question hangs in the air:

Who benefits?

FIFA Weds TikTok — and Power Moves Quietly (Harusi tunayo?)

My people from the coast would ask, Harusi tunayo? (is there a wedding)
And while Africa debates head versus heart, something much quieter — and far more consequential — has already happened.

In January 2026, FIFA did not shout.
They did not posture.
They simply decided.

They named TikTok their first-ever Preferred Platform for the 2026 World Cup.
FIFA sometimes behaves like an African grandfather…

This was not a sponsorship.
It was a distribution decision.

FIFA understood something many institutions still resist:

If people don’t see you, you don’t exist.
Out of sight, out of mind, literally,
The nuptials unlocked:

• A dedicated World Cup 2026 TikTok hub

• Behind-the-scenes access for creators

• Controlled use of archival footage

• Monetisation pathways for broadcasters

• Anti-piracy protection for FIFA’s intellectual property

This was not a fling.

It was controlled openness.

Open enough to grow reach.
Controlled enough to protect value.

The Business Math (This Is the Part That Makes Theorists go Ouch)

TikTok shared a statistic that should end several boardroom debates:

Fans who consume sports content on TikTok are 42% more likely to tune into live matches.

That is not branding.
That is conversion.

The old model:

• Big broadcast deals

• One-way messaging

• Passive audiences

The new model:

• Daily micro-content

• Algorithmic discovery

• Creator amplification

• Multiple entry points into fandom

TikTok does not replace live sport.

It feeds it.

And FIFA — old, powerful, slow-moving “guka” (grandpa) FIFA
Saw it before many younger, louder organisations.

Same forest.
Different Platform.

Do Mothers Come Back Stronger After Childbirth? A Man’s View, With Data

Let me say this clearly. I write this as a pre-middle aged man.

Not a scientist. Not a feminism apologist. Not a motivational speaker.

Just a dude who has watched sport, leadership, and life long enough to recognise when we reduce complex truths into comfortable lies.

There is a statement that still makes rooms uncomfortable:

Some women come back stronger after childbirth.

People recoil quickly. It sounds romantic. It sounds dangerous.
It sounds like pressure. So let’s slow down.

And be honest.

Not all women come back stronger.
Not automatically. Not instantly. Not without support.

But the data refuses to go away.

The Statistic That Won’t Leave the Room

Across multiple longitudinal studies tracking elite female athletes — runners, footballers, rugby players, sprinters — researchers are seeing a consistent pattern:

Approximately 56% of elite female athletes who return after childbirth match or exceed their pre-pregnancy performance levels within two to three years, when recovery, support, and training environments are properly managed. That number unsettles people because it challenges something many of us grew up believing.

That childbirth only weakens.

The Women Who Force the Conversation

Faith Kipyegon did not return quietly after giving birth. She returned to dominate. Olympic gold. World titles. World records. Not sentiment.
Not inspiration posters.
Performance.

After becoming a mother, Shelly-Ann Fraser-Pryce produced one of the greatest late-career runs in sprinting history. In 2019, she won her fourth 100m world title in Doha in a world-leading 10.71 seconds, becoming the first mother in 24 years to claim a global 100m crown.

At the 2022 World Championships in Eugene, aged 35, she won her fifth 100m world title in a championship-record 10.67 seconds, becoming the oldest sprint world champion in history, and added silver medals in the 200m and 4x100m relay. She continued her podium streak at the 2023 World Championships in Budapest with bronze in the 100m and silver in the relay, before being named Laureus World Sports Award Sportswoman of the Year in recognition of her extraordinary post-childbirth dominance.

And Venus Williams?
Her post-partum return was defined by scrutiny.

More testing. More suspicion. More discomfort.

Not because she failed tests — but because she refused to disappear politely.
Reached four Grand Slam finals,Won one singles title.
With her 2020 title win, she became the first woman to win singles titles across four different decades.
Power structures become uneasy when women don’t shrink on schedule.

What Actually Changes (No Poetry Here)

The science is not mystical.

For some women, pregnancy and childbirth:

• Force smarter, more efficient training

• Improve body awareness

• Strengthen mental resilience

• Reset priorities

In plain language:

Motherhood does not create strength.
It reveals it — if the environment allows.

And that last part matters.

Because when women return unsupported, underpaid, rushed, or politely sidelined, performance drops.

Not because of biology.
Because of neglect.

Same forest.
Different outcomes.

The Lionesses — Seduction Before Support

If you were wondering where this was going, have you heard about

The Kenya Lionesses?
They are our ladies Rugby Team.
The best of the best in Kenya.

They are building toward something.

Something fast. Something physical.

Something Kenyan audiences have not fully experienced yet

Women’s sport does not need guilt.

It needs curiosity.

The sense that if you show up, you might witness something unexpected.

That is the seduction.

Not obligation.
Not stories.

Promise.

Where Belief Becomes Action

If you believe women deserve support before, after and while facing challenges,
Do not applaud
Do not like or share,

Come and watch. (Bring your pals, your mbogi, Sponsor some GenZs)

The Kenya Lionesses are building toward a show worth seeing.

👉 Buy tickets here:

Not because it is the right thing to do.

But because you might witness something you didn’t expect.

Kenyans do not change.

Only their position in the forest does.

Same forest.
Different Fanatics.

#KenyaCornerIsHome 🇰🇪

Kenya has entered that season again.

The season when:
• Otherwise reasonable parents start shouting at PDFs
• Fathers nod slowly and say, “Hii mambo si rahisi”
• Mothers forward 3-minute voice notes at midnight
• WhatsApp groups become constitutional conferences
• Headmasters and headmistresses test their nerves — and the Ministry of Education portal

It’s school selection season.
And this time, the madness is worse — because the system changed, but the panic didn’t.

So welcome to the IBEC — Independent Blog Examinations Council, where we assess Kenyan life the same way our children are now assessed.

Not with marks.
With competencies.

📘 EDUCATION

Liz, the Transition Madness, and Why Jayden Is Not Boarding

Meet Liz.

Liz is an acquaintance — actually a friend — whom I met while testing my knees at the Nairobi Arboretum. She’s also a believer. In between dodging sharp shrubs and the guys who hide in the bushes speaking in tongues, we stopped at the base of the steep climb that borders State House security residences.

Liz wasn’t keeping up. When we finally got to the top, I asked why she was struggling that day.
I shouldn’t have asked.

Liz’s son, Jayden, has been called to a national school.
So has Natasha, her neighbour Bobby’s first-born daughter.

The holy grail.
The call that makes aunties post Bible verses.

But Jayden and Tash have formed a party.

IYAM — I Yam Not Boarding.

Both want day school. Not because they’re lazy. Not because they’re foolish.

Because day school is attractive.

My antiquated view tells me
Day school offers:
• Corn rows, sista locks, blow-dried hair, Hoodies, saggy pants, controlled rebellion
• School skirts quietly shortened at the hem, Home-cooked food, Weekends
Boarding school, meanwhile, offers:
• A rudimentary diet of githeri and ugali — similar to police recruits, but without the meat. Surveillance, Seniors, Uniforms designed and fitted in school (yes, really)
• Fewer “who taught you this?” moments
• Getting good grades for campus (like it matters)

A quick word on CBC grading

Under CBC, performance is no longer a single exam moment. Learners are assessed continuously across competencies — communication, problem-solving, discipline, creativity, resilience — and graded using bands such as EE (Exceeding Expectations), ME (Meeting Expectations), AE (Approaching Expectations), and BE (Below Expectations).

In short: effort is observed, behaviour is tracked, and outcomes are contextualised.

Liz is looking at outcomes.
Jayden is optimising for lived experience.

And then enters Kajinga High School Mixed Day & Boarding — a school whose alumni have suddenly developed amnesia about their own teenage years, while living vicariously through Natasha (“Tash”), the neighbour’s daughter who “did things properly.”
Kajinga High is a truly Kenyan enterprise.
A halfway house whose hopes are pinned on the parent’s hope that someone will drop out of the national school and your child will get a place.
Maybe in second term. Maybe in Form 2 .By Form 3, hope has completely faded.

Kajinga High it is.

Reasonable fees. Reasonable conditions. And peace at home again. Classic Kenya.

Same forest.
Different monkeys.

🏉 SPORTS-

Angela Okutoyi Didn’t Sit the Exam — She Marked It

While parents were panicking, Angela Okutoyi was quietly submitting coursework.

She won:
• A professional W35 singles title
• A doubles title
• A brutal three-set final that tested fitness, belief, and composure

This wasn’t a fairy-tale story.
This was competency.

Angela Okutoyi also emerged as the 2023 African Games women’s singles champion, defeating Egypt’s Lamis Abdelaziz 6-4, 6-2 — becoming the first Kenyan woman to win the title in 46 years, since Jane Davies-Doxzon in 1978.

She also earned a scholarship worth KSh 6.5 million, boosting her 2028 Olympics pathway.

🎓 IBEC GRADING — SPORTS

• Technical Skill: Exceeding Expectations (EE)
• Mental Resilience: EE
• Competitive Readiness: EE
• Sustainability Signal: ME → EE trajectory

IBEC Comment:
“Candidate exceeded expectations and supervised the invigilator.”

⚽ FOOTBALL (AS EDUCATION POLICY)

Compare Man United and Chelsea and you’ll understand CBC instantly especially if you look at these 2 schools.

Both keep copying each other.
Both post reasonable results.
Both generate disproportionate noise.

Here at home its what we call the Bus Stop Derby — Riruta vs Kangemi.
Or the Pudding Derby, named after the Yorkshire and bread puddings students were served during World War II.
Nairobi School vs Lenana.

Same league. Different intake. Same syllabus. Same funding. Same discipline.

While eyes are fixed on mid-table drama, let’s pause to applaud schools that had over 400 candidates and still cracked the top 20 — Kabarak, Alliance (Boys & Girls), Maranda, and Kapsabet.

Outstanding performance under extreme pressure.

❤️ LOVE & RELATIONSHIPS

CBC Was Designed for This

Love is not one exam.
It’s continuous assessment.

• Communication AE (Approaching Expectations), Conflict creation EE (Exceeding Expectations), Money BE (Below Expectations) Time ME (Meeting Expectations)

🎓 IBEC GRADING — LOVE Breakdown

• Great stories, no consistency: AE
• Loyal but emotionally absent: ME
• Passionate but toxic: BE (Citizenship failed)
• Quiet, stable, shows up: EE (often ignored)

Comment: “Bright learner. Wastes time.”

💼 BUSINESS

Effort Is Not a Marking Scheme

In business:
• Strategy is the syllabus
• Execution is the exam
• Cashflow is the invigilator watching your face

🎓 IBEC GRADING — BUSINESS

• Systems + profit: EE
• Hustle + inconsistency: ME
• Potential, no discipline: AE
• Story-based planning: BE

💰 SALES (THE HIDDEN CURRICULUM)

Why Liz & Jayden Are a Sales Case Study

Liz is Marketing.
Jayden is Sales.

Marketing sells long-term brand equity.
Sales wants immediate customer satisfaction.

They’re fighting because they don’t agree on the scoreboard.

🎓 IBEC GRADING — SALES & MARKETING ALIGNMENT

• Shared KPIs: EE
• Loud arguments, same direction: ME
• Silent wars: AE
• Emotional blackmail: BE

IBEC Comment:
“Alignment beats persuasion.”

🏫 THE PRINCIPAL (WHO HASN’T REPLIED)

If the principal hasn’t answered your message yet, understand this:

(S)He’s managing:
• Parents, Politicians, Sponsors, Budgets, Alumni entitlement, Intake chaos

Here’s how one principal’s week likely looked — per the Chairman of the Laibon Society (Lenana school alumni), which is deeply and positively involved in supporting the school:

Monday, 5th Jan: New intake announced. Log into the education portal. Sieve qualified students. Pray the portal doesn’t go down.
Wednesday, 7th: Rest of the school reports. Controlled chaos. Everyone returns.
Friday, 9th: KCSE results released. Fresh drama. New parents. New expectations.

Through it all, the school posts a 95% transition rate.

(S)He’s making decisions while the nation debates the marking scheme.

🧠 SalesFundike’s conclusion

In CBC, you can’t cram character.
You create it.

Same forest.
Different intake.

🔔 Do something…..

If this sounded familiar, forward it to:
• A parent panicking
• A school WhatsApp group
• A Chelsea fan
• Someone blaming the system instead of alignment

Subscribe. Screenshot. Share.
IBEC will sit again.

Hey and guess what, If you’re a chama admin / WhatsApp group admin, please DM me.
I’ve got great deals for groups of 7 or 12 for the Biggest Sports show in East Africa.

👉 https://t.co/O8OFNvDJrP

Till the next espisode…
Jah Bless.

Image credit: Composite image created for editorial commentary using publicly available photography (Italy & Kenya).

Before South C.
Before Pipeline. Before Ruaka, Ruiru, Syokimau.

There was the Leaning Tower of Pisa.

A mistake in foundation design. Soft ground. Bad assumptions. But here is the difference.

Pisa leaned. It didn’t fall.

Because engineers were listened to.
Warnings were documented. Corrections were made. Reinforcement followed.

Now fast-forward to Kenya’s leaning towers of Pizza — buildings red-tagged, condemned, evacuated, sometimes ignored… until gravity finishes the conversation.

The tragedy is not that buildings fall.
The tragedy is that they warned us first.

KENYA’S LEANING TOWERS: THE WARNINGS WE WALK PAST

In Kenya, condemnation notices are not surprises.
They are paperwork. Engineers write reports. Inspectors file observations.
Clerks of works raise red flags.

Somewhere between soil tests, approvals, and occupation certificates, the truth gets buried under optimism, pressure, money, and
“cheza kama wewe” (play like you).

Same concrete.
Same soil.
Different mjuajis (Know it alls) signing off.

THE ENGINEER WHO KEPT SAYING “STOP” (an alumni story)

There’s this engineer dude, my pal, good school (To The Uttermost).
Sharp… kama Wembe. (razor)
Engineer Robert Nyamongo is our go-to guy for things mjengo (construction).

He’s our Built Environment specialist.

Above his qualifications, there’s his project list. His technical storytelling.
Top Drawer.
His ability to explain soil, load paths, shortcuts, and failure points in language non-engineers understand.

He warned us here:
In the last 5 years 87 buildings have collapsed in Kenya. Last week’s was No 88.

https://www.linkedin.com/posts/eng-robert-nyamongo-pmp-ciarb-miek-b341ab319_around-400-am-this-morning-a-15-storey-activity-7412754871046807552-Yo4s

More importantly — his warnings arrive before tragedy.

Kenya doesn’t lack engineers.
Kenya lacks the courage to listen to them.

A GLOBAL MIRROR: EVEN SINGAPORE STUMBLES

This is not a Kenyan problem alone.

In 2025, Singapore — a country Kenyans admire for efficiency and infrastructure — experienced multiple structural failures:

Kong Meng San Phor Kark See Monastery (Nov 26): partial roof collapse, Inspace Building, Bartley (Mar 11): 27-metre metal feature falls, Tanjong Katong Road (July): road sinkhole swallowed a vehicle, and many more.

The difference?

Investigations were immediate. Sites were closed. Rectifications followed.

Failure is universal.
Response is cultural.

PEOPLE WHO ARE ACTUALLY BUILDING

Not all building is arrogance.

Some of the most disciplined construction work today is happening quietly — in the Kadogo economy.

Small teams. Visible workmanship. Thin margins. No place to hide.

TikTok builders. Floor decorators. Fit-out specialists.

Customers watching every step. Mistakes corrected in real time.

Then there is Amos Kibaru.

I have never met him. I watched his TikTok thingy. I checked his LinkedIn. Impressive.

Something about his documentation, restraint, and narrative suggests a possible breakthrough model for safe, repeatable, Kadogo-scale construction.

Mega failures often come from arrogance.
Kadogo builders survive on their precision and personal integrity.

FUNDI’S LOVE STORY: FOUNDATIONS, INTENTIONS & “WHERE IS THIS GOING?”

(Disclaimer: I am not an expert. Read responsibly.)

Let’s talk about love the same way we talk about buildings.

Because both collapse for the same reason.

Foundations were never agreed on.

There is a question women ask that City men fear:

“Where is this going?”

Let’s be honest.When a dude says,

“I don’t know,”

he usually means it.

Not as manipulation. Si kwa ubaya.(Not for bad)
Not as strategy.

He genuinely hasn’t visualised past now.

MEN LIVE IN THE IMMEDIATE. BECAUSE WE’RE RUNNING OUT OF NIGHT.

(A retired bachelor’s tale)

Men don’t date on a five-year Gantt chart.

We date on:

• Tonight, …..This weekend

• The next laugh, …..The next kiss

• The available Fuliza limit…..

Our focus is short because the night is shorter.

We are not lying.
We are present-biased.
Kesi baadaye… (even courts had closed over Xmas)

THE TRIAL PERIOD NOBODY ADMITS EXISTS

Every app is honest.

Cancel anytime within 30 days.

Relationships pretend they’re not.

Some relationships are trials. Some are demos. Some are lessons.

Not every connection is meant to last.

Don’t force a demo unit to become a family home.

Same forest. Different monkeys. Another heartbreak.

THIS WEEK’S SPORTS PULLOUT: WORLD-CLASS EVENTS, EMPTY STORYLINES

Nairobi hosted the ITF W35 Women’s Tournament. It ended a few hours ago.

International players. Official tour calendar. Hotels quietly occupied.
Public awareness that could be boosted.

LATEST NAIROBI ITF RESULTS (W35 NAIROBI 2026)

• Angella Okutoyi (KEN) won the 2026 W35 Nairobi Singles Title, defeating Italy’s Martina Colmegna in the final in a three-set battle. She also clinched the doubles title in the same tournament. SportPesa Blog
  GO ANGIE !! GO KENYA!!

We need to host events like assets — not accidents.

For anyone out there interested — Fans, Ministry of Sports, Sports Fund, or any corporate that may want to invest in the future that is sport.

2026 Kenya Sports Highlights (with Economic Impact)

• Feb: Magical Kenya Open — DP World Tour (European PGA) Mar–Apr: Sunshine Tour Kenya Swing — Sunshine Tour (multiple events)
Economic impact: High-spend tourists, long stays, global broadcast exposure, premium hospitality

• Feb 14–15: HSBC SVNS 2 Nairobi — World Rugby SVNS 2
Economic impact: Short-stay tourism spike, beverage sales, transport demand, youth engagement, and international brand exposure.

• Mar: WRC Safari Rally Kenya — World Rally Championship Economic impact: Known

• Jun 7: Nairobi City Marathon Oct 25: Standard Chartered Nairobi Marathon —
Economic impact: Mass participation fees, city branding, transport usage, hospitality, citizen-led tourism

🏀 Basketball (International & Regional)👉 https://www.kbf.co.ke

🏐 Volleyball (International & Continental)👉 https://www.volleyballkenya.org

⚽ Football / Soccer (International Fixtures & CAF Pathway)👉

https://footballkenya.org

WHEN EXCO (FINANCE) ASKS FOR JUSTIFICATION- HSBC SVNS 2 NAIROBI

CREDIBLE ASSUMPTIONS (BASED ON OTHER SVNS STOPS) Target attendance: 15,000 fans

• 2 nights hotel stay

• 1–2 Uber rides per day

• Food, drinks, Kenya merch, ragged jeans, mtush jacket

WHAT 15,000 PEOPLE MEAN (KENYAN MATH)

• Hotels: KSh 240M

• Transport: KSh 45M

• Food & drink: KSh 90M

Informal economy: real, uncounted.

SAMPLE ADULT DRINKS (TEI) SALES REPORT By Bamzigi, the quintessential van salesman

Product: Kenya Cane Lemon & Ginger (trending according to GenZs)
Assumption: 30% of the 15,000 strong crowd drinks KC

Day 1 – SKU (Stock Keeping Unit) 1 carton =12 bottles

Opening Stock-

• 250ml: 30,000 cartons 1 Ka Quarter RRP: KSh 350 → 12 × 30,000 = KSh 126,000,000

• 750ml: 15,000 cartons 1 Mzinga RRP: KSh 850 → 12 × 15,000 = Do the math….

Total loaded: 45,000 cartons
Sales: 60,000 cartons over half a billion (I didnt believe it either)
Balance: 0 + 15,000 IOUs

Day 2 Loading….

• 70,000 cartons

Numbers don’t argue.

A FRIENDLY NOTE TO MAGICAL KENYA

This is not instruction. Just a suggestion.

What if sports were embedded (if it hasn’t already been) — quietly, deliberately — into the Magical Kenya narrative?

Want to partner with rugby?
DM me…

Or look for our Jaber or TO huko KRU.

I’ll stop selling here…..

SALES 101 – THE REFRESH- Where to find customers in 2026

Same Forest Different Monkeys Blog- Target: 1,000 subscribers by December
Current: 385 Deficit: 615

Audit my phone contacts.

• Phone contacts: 2,387

• 30% reach = 716 readers

• +385 subscribers

1,101 by December

(30% because for every 10 people I call, I close 3)

Generic Happy New Year messages will be done by next week.

Time for personalised messages.

Every new person you met over the holidays. Your hot leads. Your customers (in that order)
Schedule the message for specific times:

• In traffic

• At home with a hot cup of chai

• First drink

Everyone scrolls. Everyone skims.
Everyone reads messages with their name in them.

Example:

Hi Nyambura, hope you got home safe. Asante for the great time at the kesha. Barikiwa.

HNY.

No selling. No asking. They’ll save your number.

Wait 2 weeks.
Ask:

What are you doing on Valentine’s weekend?

If interested:
🎟 www.tikohub.com

Works like magic.
(Also be ready to pay for a few friends.)

THE END.

THE WARM DOWN

Buildings fall when foundations are ignored.
Sports fail when foundations are ignored.
Sales fail when foundations are ignored.
Love fails when foundations are ignored.

Same forest.
Different monkeys.

📩 https://salesresourceafrica.co.ke/contact-us/

I was staring at this old tablet — the battery blinking low, the screen grainy, the cursor mocking me — trying to write this story.

Three hours late already.

The fire was lit.

Not a blaze. Not even strong embers.

Just enough heat to keep the cold at bay.

Somewhere in the background, the dogs were already narrating their own story.

Same fire.

Same family.

Different monkeys.

Big R and the Fire: Leadership Before the Truth

Big R was by the fire — heavy boots, heavier thoughts.

He wasn’t lost in contemplation. He was practicing stillness.

That’s leadership after noise.

After performance.

After the year’s chaos.

Christmas in Elementaita makes leaders quiet.

Not empty.

Just calibrated.

This is where the story really begins.

THE DOGS

There are four dogs here.

Riggy — the rough go-getter — was born the year his erstwhile namesake was impeached.

The name stuck.

It fits.

Riggy doesn’t walk.

He moves with intent.

Always sniffing the perimeter, always alert, always acting like something important might happen any second.

Tina is Riggy's mum. She was born the year Tina Turner died.

Classy.

Black on her back.

Part deerhound, part spitz.

Old money energy.

She doesn’t rush for space.

Space comes to her.

Pepe carries deerhound and spitz too, but with a different temperament.

Less drama.

More curiosity.

The kind that checks everything twice but commits to nothing.

Then there’s Sadaam.

A pure-breed Elementaita Shepherd.

A distant relative of the Dagoretti Dodger, the Pumwani Pointer, and the legendary Kikopey Clencher —

a Kikopey Clencher’s defining trait being this:

if it grips a nyama choma bone in its jaws, it never lets go.

Hence the name.

In other parts of Kenya, Sadaam is called Mutina.

Or Bosco.

Same dog.

Different names.

Different cultures.

Same behaviour.

It feels like the United Nations of dogs here —

where old settler bloodlines, Kenyan professionals, Masai herders and working-class survival instincts meet on neutral ground.

Nobody asks where you’re from.

They just observe how you behave.

ELEMENTAITA

Elementaita itself feels like a meeting point.

Old mzungu settler families who never really left.

Kenyan professionals looking for a sanctuary.

And then the flamingoes.

The juvenile flamingoes that stop over on the lake to feed on algae so they can turn pink.

Lake Elementaita is a slay-king/queen’s heaven.

The flamingoes hatch in Lake Natron, in the Tanzanian Rift Valley.

They’re born white (odiero).

They then fly here, feed on algae, and their feathers slowly turn pink.

These are not mature flamingoes.

These are the Gen-Zs of flamingoes.

Rambunctious.

Rowdy.

Showy.

Flying in a straight line, six inches above the calm waters of the lake like an aerial display team that has just discovered attention.

Same lake.

Different birds.

Same forest.

Different monkeys.

And then you return to the fire.

Because that’s what Tuliza Cottage does.

It lets you go out — into dogs, into lake, into birds, into memory —

then pulls you back to embers, adult drinks, stories, laughter.

Christmas doesn’t really begin until the In Vino Veritas hour.

After the formal family meeting — financial talks, planning, chores assigned — people start partaking of alcohol and that’s when truth to the word is spoken.

In wine, the truth.

When the remaining Viceroy hits the bone marrow then the tongues loosen.

Even the bible-thumping brother who doesn’t drink has been mixing Viceroy with his “turungi” — the black tea boiled over the jiko where all that’s added is more tea leaves and water.

Pastor Karis (that’s what we call him) is a drunk.

He’s been mixing Viceroy with turungi — and suddenly the brother has started preaching.

I always wondered how he could become suddenly eloquent.

His eloquence — brewed by Van Ryn’s distillery in Stellenbosch, delivered by the local relative called Kwa-something on Enterprise Road Nairobi — is now part of the Christmas ritual.

And when Pastor Karis starts his Viceroy-inspired sermon, he tells us about the winners and losers in the Nairobi Stock Exchange.

Here’s what Passie's BD summary says:

Investor's cash at the NSE has risen by Sh972.7 billion this year, a 50% jump in market valuation — the best performance in over a decade.

Last month alone, the NSE lost over Sh201.8 billion in wealth

Major gainers were real estate, financials, and selected blue-chip counters, while several stocks lost value as investors rotated positions.

Pastor is an encyclopedia his photographic memory is what we call in sales “highly developed mnemonic retention”.

To the rest of humanity….the person who remembers everything.

That’s the Christmas bourse story.

Ups and downs.

Noise and profit.

Faith in markets much like faith in life.

EPL AT CHRISTMAS — THE TOP 10 (for the soccer die hards)

Because every family party gets distracted by football:

Here’s how the English Premier League top 10 stood as Christmas approached:

Arsenal — 42 pts

Manchester City — 40 pts

Aston Villa — 39 pts

Liverpool — 32 pts

Chelsea — 29 pts

Manchester United — 29 pts

Sunderland — 27 pts

Brentford — 26 pts

Crystal Palace — 26 pts

Fulham — 26 pts

NBC Sports

Arsenal reclaimed Top Spot with grit.

City keeps breathing down their neck.

Villa continue surprising.

And the rest are jockeying for Europe or survival.

Reuters

Same league.

Different monkeys.

My fellow Arsenal fans….kina Prof, Boozer & Radull

Our Elephant prepares to break the bow again 😞

As a Gooner faithful, I was incensed by this corrupted baby rhyme from our Man U frenemies:

Rock a my baby, on the tree top,

When March blows The Elephant will drop

And down will come Arteta, Bukhayo and all…

No wonder they're called Red Devils…Saitan, shindwe, Riswa….

ONE LINE ON RUGBY

Rugby gets a mention only because sevens is the sport that teaches exhaustion and choice — decisions under fatigue, trust in teammates — but the focus here is Laughter, Christmas, and the foundational truths of family and friends.

Save the date….Valentine’s weekend 2026

Sherehe

FAMILY AT 8 PM — WHEN THE TRUTH LANDS

By 8 pm — two hours later the family vibe isn’t about tasks anymore.

It’s about:

who speaks

who listens

who laughs

who tells stories

who holds the centre

There are five kids now circling the conversations:

The quiet thoughtful one

The leader

The peacemaker (the real leader)

The skeptic

The choleric troublemaker who always says no

Who's advice will work in 2026…..

The fire dims.

The drink warms.

The dogs settle into sleep.

Same forest.

Different monkeys.

And Christmas doesn’t end with announcements.

It ends with truth in laughter, stories that stitch the year, and quiet people who carry the weight without asking for applause.

This is last Sunday of the year.Perfect.

25 articles.

25 Sundays.

Not content.

Conversations.

Written between chicken lunches, road trips, bad Wi-Fi, adult drinks and belly laughter.

Some were light.

Some uncomfortable.

All honest.

Thank you for walking the forest with me this year.

For reading.

For disagreeing.

For staying.

The dogs settle into sleep.

The fire dies down.

Same forest.

Different monkeys.

Tuliza Cottage www.tulizahomestays.com