WHOSE HUSBAND IS THIS? The Millennials Hit Back
Agal Koko's Love Letter, Peabo's Magic Carpet and the Boring Power of Consistency. Same Forest Different Monkeys.
Last week a Luo man caused trouble.
Not Pawa trouble.
Not financial trouble.
The kind of trouble that begins when women start forwarding screenshots into WhatsApp groups and ends with innocent husbands being subjected to performance reviews Mid Quarter.
His name is Agal Koko.
Agal Koko woud Professor.
To celebrate twenty-nine years of marriage, he wrote a public tribute to his wife B. Anyone who has spent enough time around Luos knows they have many gifts. Storytelling. Confidence.
The ability to turn a simple greeting into a keynote address.
A Luo man can answer a yes-or-no question and take you through family history, three proverbs, a funeral in Alego and a brief detour into national politics before arriving at the answer.
So when Agal started writing, most people expected the usual eloquence.
What they did not expect was the reaction.
Women smiled. Men became uncomfortable.
I kept wondering…….when will he stop……
By the end of the post, Facebook had reached the only conclusion that mattered.
Whose husband is this?
The joke is that everybody focused on the words. The real story was the years.
Twenty-nine years.
School fees. Rent. Hospital visits. Family drama.
Good seasons. Bad seasons. Ordinary Tuesdays nobody ever posts about.
The difficult part is not writing a beautiful paragraph.
The difficult part is still being there when the anniversary arrives. That is the part nobody photographs.
The world celebrates milestones.
It rarely celebrates maintenance.
A marriage. A business. A reputation. A dream.
None built in one dramatic moment, but in thousands of small decisions repeated long after the excitement has faded.
It was not really about love.
It was about showing up
Again. And again. And again.
The Millennial Who Refused To Take A Beating
For the better part of two decades, Millennials have been everybody’s favourite punching bag.
According to the internet, they killed newspapers, golf, napkins,
marriage, home ownership, loyalty,
and Kapuka.
Boomers think they complain too much. Gen X think they overthink everything. Gen Z think they are old.
The middle child.
The one who got the hand-me-downs.
Caught between the aloofness of one generation and the chaos of the other.
They were told to study hard, get degrees, find jobs, buy homes and patiently wait their turn. Then they graduated into recessions, expensive housing and shrinking opportunities. When they asked questions, labelled entitled. When they challenged old systems, labelled difficult. Yet many of them kept showing up. Not by winning arguments on social media, but by surviving long enough to inherit responsibility.
Which is why Abelardo de la Espriella caught my attention.
El Tigre. The Tiger.
A Colombian criminal defence attorney with expensive suits and a habit of refusing to stay in the box people built for him. On May 31, 2026, he upended every pre-election poll to finish first with 43.7% of the vote. Country heads to a runoff on June 21.
El Tigre is the frontrunner.
What interests me is not his politics. It is what he represents. A generation that got tired of waiting for permission.
The funny thing about persistence is that people call it stubbornness right up until it works.
The Spreadsheet Problem
There is a line often attributed to Peter Drucker: “What gets measured gets managed.” The trouble is we started believing the opposite — that if something cannot be measured, it probably does not matter. I have sat in enough boardrooms across East Africa to know how this plays out.
Someone presents the numbers.
The numbers look clean.
Then you walk outside and reality does not match the spreadsheet. Because the spreadsheet measured what happened.
Nobody built a column for why.
Rory Sutherland, Vice-Chairman of Ogilvy, has a habit of making clever people uncomfortable.
His point is simple: human beings are not spreadsheets.
There is no formula for loyalty.
No dashboard for sacrifice.
No KPI for forgiveness.
Nobody has calculated the value of choosing the same person for twenty-nine years when life keeps giving you reasons not to.
Data documents what happened yesterday.
It struggles with what people hope will happen tomorrow, but
sometimes that future arrives on a flying carpet.
A Whole New World
There is a reason some songs survive long after the charts have forgotten them. They stop being songs.
They become time machines.
For many of us, the opening notes of A Whole New World transport us immediately. November 1992. Disney’s Aladdin.
A magic carpet. A princess. A street hustler pretending to be a prince.
Performed by Peabo Bryson and Regina Belle, it became the first and only Disney song to win Grammy Song of the Year. It dethroned Whitney Houston’s I Will Always Love You after fourteen weeks at Number One.
The song was never really about a flying carpet. It was about possibility.
Aladdin did not offer Princess Jasmine a strategic plan.
He offered her something more dangerous.
A different way of seeing the world.
Every generation inherits a map that stops working halfway through the journey.
Its no more about whether they can preserve the old map.
It is whether they have the courage to explore a new one.
Who’s Your Mama?
As the NBA Finals unfold, most attention is on Victor Wembanyama.
The Alien.
At over seven feet tall, with the agility of a guard and the wingspan of a small aircraft, he looks less like a basketball player and more like a software update. When people watch Wemby they ask the obvious questions. How tall? How many points? How many rings? The more interesting question is the one nobody asks.
Who raised him?
By the time we discover elite performers, somebody else has already spent years building them. The spotlight always arrives late.
Then Jalen Brunson. Long before Madison Square Garden was chanting his name, there was Rick Brunson teaching habits, standards and expectations. Confidence is often borrowed before it is owned. Somebody believes in you before you learn to believe in yourself.
And then Mike Brown. Hired by the New York Knicks in July 2025 with a career most people would politely describe as complicated.
Fired twice by Cleveland.
Fired after one season in Los Angeles.
Questioned.
Doubted.
Written off.
He kept showing up. He kept adjusting. When asked how he survived so many endings to reach the 2026 NBA Finals, his answer was three words.
“Me. I adjust.” (I think he’s Kenyan)
Which brings me to Aymen Onyango.
Many Kenyans know his father, Lucas “Lukaka” Onyango — a winger who wore the Kenya Sevens jersey for years, part of the Shujaa and Mean Machine pipeline that put Kenyan rugby on the map. Lucas has spoken publicly about his son’s football journey — the training, the sacrifices, the daily commitment to a dream most people around them could not yet see. Before any scout wrote Aymen’s name in a notebook, there was a father who already believed. #GodspeedAymen
We celebrate stars because they are visible. We celebrate trophies because they are measurable. But behind almost every success story sits a mother, a father, a coach — someone whose greatest contribution will never appear in any statistics column. The athlete gets the headline. The family gets the journey.
Who’s your mama? Who’s your papa? Who’s your coach?
Twenty-nine years after he started a conversation with a beautiful woman,
Agal Koko still chooses Beryl.
In Colombia, a generation told to wait their turn is on the verge of taking power.
Rory Sutherland keeps reminding clever rooms that spreadsheets cannot measure everything that matters.
Peabo Bryson left behind a song that still tells whole generations the horizon is not the end.
And Mike Brown, written off more times than most coaches get hired, is on the biggest stage in basketball because he refused to stop adjusting.
Different stories. Different countries. Different generations. Different outcomes.
Yet somehow they all arrive at the same place.
Consistency. Showing up.
Again. And again. And again.
Show me the person who stayed.
Show me the parent who sacrificed.
Show me the coach who kept teaching after being fired.
Show me the spouse who kept choosing the same person.
Because beneath every headline is usually a decade nobody saw.
The magic carpet was never really magic. The championship was never won in June. The marriage was never built on the wedding day.
The visible moment is usually just the receipt.
The real work happened earlier. Much earlier.
The forest changes. The monkeys change. The generations change.
But the rules rarely do.
Plant. Water. Wait. Repeat.
And eventually something beautiful grows.
As for Agal Koko and B… see you at your 30th.
If you hear noise at the gate, tie up the dogs.
J’okuyo has landed. With Karatina Juogi. Wadwaro donjo!!
Same Forest. Different Monkeys.
Mubarikiwe, Jah Bless.
Go with song
See you next Sunday.
#SalesFundiKe #SameForestDifferentMonkeys
What a beautiful article. I really enjoyed reading this, it felt like being transported through so many different timelines; all arriving to the same thing. Thank you.