Gichohu

Yesterday, Thika reminded us that sometimes success comes with its own traffic jam. Thousands of students gathered at Mount Kenya University for graduation. And, as graduation ceremonies tend to do, they brought along an entire ecosystem. Parents. Siblings. Friends. Relatives. Photographers. Flower sellers. Food vendors. Drivers. And probably a few people who had no idea where the university was until yesterday morning. The result was predictable. Traffic. And not the ordinary kind where you complain about someone overtaking you. This was the kind where the vehicle stops moving and you begin questioning some of your life decisions. Some people left home early enough and still found themselves trapped in the gridlock. Others arrived too late and missed the ceremony entirely. Some graduates made it to the graduation but their families did not. Others managed the ceremony but never made it to the celebrations afterwards. It was, in its own peculiar way, a perfect metaphor for life. You ca...

A few Saturdays ago, we were racing against time on one of our construction projects. The client had set the completion date. The painters were finishing the last walls. Electricians were chasing wires through ceilings. The plumbers insisted they only needed "another hour," a unit of time that, in construction, bears very little relationship to sixty actual minutes. Every trade believed they were waiting for someone else. The tilers were waiting for the painters. The painters were waiting for the electricians. The electricians were waiting for a delivery. And somewhere in the middle of it all, I was waiting for a phone call. It was an important call. The kind that could determine whether the next phase of the project would move smoothly or become an exercise in creative problem-solving. I kept glancing at my phone every few minutes. Every vibration made me hopeful. Every notification that turned out to be a promotional text message felt strangely personal. Morning became afte...

There was a season in my life when I worked as a management consultant in Nairobi. I would not pretend that I was the finest consultant the city had ever produced, but I was competent enough to earn a place in boardrooms with people who had spent decades building successful businesses. It was an interesting profession. On many occasions I found myself standing before executives who knew their industries infinitely better than I did. They understood their customers, their markets, their competitors and the daily realities of running their organisations. I was the outsider. Yet they had invited me to teach them. That always amused me. The longer I stayed in consulting, the more I realised that our value rarely came from knowing more than our clients. It came from seeing familiar problems through unfamiliar eyes. Consultants read. A lot. We devoured books, journals and case studies because we had the luxury of studying while our clients had the burden of running businesses. We spoke confi...

There is something deeply therapeutic about driving home after a long week. This past weekend, I found myself making the familiar journey from Chuka to Kitengela. It is a drive I have done many times, yet it never quite feels the same. Perhaps it is because roads, much like life, are never experienced in exactly the same way twice. Leaving Chuka, the road is modest. Two-way traffic. You learn patience almost immediately. Lorries climb the hills without apology, buses appear around blind corners with remarkable confidence, and everyone seems convinced that the person in front of them is the reason they will arrive late. It is not a road for hurried people. A little later, at Makutano, everything changes. The highway opens up. The journey becomes smoother, faster and more predictable. Before long, the Thika Superhighway takes over. Multiple lanes. Flyovers. Order. Progress suddenly feels effortless. Then comes the Expressway, gliding quietly above the city from Museum Hill towards Mlolon...

It was during my gap year and the early university years leading up to graduation that I often find myself thinking about my first job at Outward Bound Mountain School in Loitokitok. For a young high school graduate, it was an exciting chapter. I was surrounded by Mount Kilimanjaro, endless adventure, and people who seemed capable of hiking up mountains before breakfast and discussing life over a cup of tea before lunch. It was a wonderful place to begin adulthood. Looking back, I remember many things about those years. The training. The expeditions. The morning runs. The cold dip in the mornings. The breathtaking scenery. But strangely enough, those are not the memories that have stayed with me the longest. The memories that refuse to fade belong to one man. His name was Chris, though most of us simply called him CK. He was our Courses Coordinator, and in many ways, the reason I found myself at Outward Bound in the first place. He, together with KK recruited me, but his kindness did n...

There is a statement often attributed to the former leadership of Nokia that has stayed with me for years: "We didn't do anything wrong, but somehow, we lost." Whether those were the exact words spoken or a simplified version that has taken on a life of its own, the sentiment captures one of the harshest realities of life. Around the early 2000s, Nokia was the undisputed king of mobile phones. If you owned a mobile phone, chances were it had a Nokia logo on it. Their phones were reliable. The batteries seemed to last forever. Some models were so durable that people joked they could survive being dropped from a building, used to hammer in a nail, and still have enough charge to make a call afterwards. Life was good. Then the world changed. The smartphone arrived. Companies like Apple and Google reimagined what a phone could be. It was no longer just a device for making calls or sending text messages. It became a camera, a map, a music player, an office, a television, and e...

A few mornings ago, I stood at the edge of my farm just after sunrise. The farm was beginning to wake up. The cows were already impatiently reminding Eric, my farm hand,  that breakfast was several minutes overdue. A flock of guinea fowl was holding what sounded suspiciously like a political rally, each convinced it deserved to be heard first. Somewhere in the distance, one of the sheep announced itself with all the confidence of an animal that had accomplished absolutely nothing yet that morning. The farm was alive. As I stood there, it struck me that farming is perhaps the greatest lesson in hope anyone can ever receive. Every season begins with an act of faith. A farmer plants a tiny seed into the ground knowing full well that, for days or even weeks, absolutely nothing will happen above the surface. Imagine explaining that to someone unfamiliar with farming. "I've invested money in seed." "Wonderful. Where is the crop?" "It's underground." ...