In case you’re new to this column, let me warn you: I don’t do polite. I nitpick, I rant, and I gnash my teeth about the absurdities of corporate governance, farming in Laikipia, and now, drumroll please, the circus that is trying to find a decent software developer in Kenya.
Let me tell you a story. It starts, as all good Kenyan business horror stories do, with a referral in 2018 BC (Before Covid). I needed a developer to create a platform for a client service that I provide. Nothing fancy, just a clean, functional system that wouldn’t dissolve like the increasingly potholed Limuru Road after a massive rainstorm.
A friend, bless her, she meant well, connected me to a developer who, in the retelling of his own CV, had practically built the internet. He’d worked on a platform for one of Kenya’s largest banking groups, he said, with the casual confidence of a man who knows you’re too polite to ask for references. He even showed me the work he’d done for said bank.
Anyway, I bit. He started the job, then promptly disappeared mid-process. Luckily, or so I thought, the actual work was being done by one of his junior developers who “inherited” the contract and therefore continued the work. I thought I had dodged a bullet. Spoiler alert: I had not.
Junior Dev finished the platform. We launched. A year later, the platform had several kinks that needed fixing.
But Junior Dev had disappeared. When he finally reappeared as the Artist Formerly Known As Junior Dev, it was like a scene from a bad Nollywood movie: in beach shorts, barefoot, clutching a bottle of wine that had personally wronged someone, looking exactly like he’d crawled out of the beach bar cave he claimed to have ‘SGR-d’ from that morning.
Since his triumphant, shoeless return, he has continued to “work” for me, and I use that word with the same generosity that a Nairobi County office posts on its walls: “You are entering a corruption-free zone.” Every task now requires a full diplomatic summit. I must cajole him. I must beg. I must, apparently, stroke an ego that has produced remarkably little to justify its own maintenance.
I asked, repeatedly, in writing, with the patience of a woman raising a toddler and a grown man simultaneously, for a simple maintenance contract. Something formal. Something with dates and deliverables and consequences. I am still waiting. I suspect I will be waiting when my grandchildren are old enough to inherit this platform, and this grievance, along with it.
So, reasonably, I did what any exhausted Kenyan business owner does when the informal economy of favours and friends-of-friends fails her: I went to LinkedIn last week. I posted a request for help, worded with the precision of a UN resolution: I wanted recommendations for development firms, but only from people who had actually, genuinely, verifiably been happy clients. Not agencies. Not “connect with me to discuss.” Not cousins of the firm’s marketing intern. Just happy clients.
Within hours, my DM inbox looked like the Museum Hill exit of Nairobi Expressway at 5pm on a Friday. Jammed, chaotic, and full of people who had clearly not read a single word I wrote. Developers. Agencies. Friends of developers and agencies. And it wasn’t just a local affair, the self-recommendations came in from as far as India and Dubai, which tells you two things.
One, that LinkedIn’s algorithm has the reading comprehension of a goat. And two, that somewhere out there, a very determined man in Bangalore saw a post that explicitly said “do not respond if you are the provider of this service” and thought, yes, this is my moment.
I did not know LinkedIn could serve your own plea for help back to the very people you were pleading to be protected from, but here we are. Apparently, the platform’s idea of “relevant audience” is “anyone who can smell a client from three continents away.” Every single one of them selling, not one of them referring. I asked for testimony and received a trade fair, with international delegates.
So I remain here, tethered by a fraying thread to a LinkedIn inbox full of pitches from full-stack, half-stack, and no-stack people that I never asked to pitch me, wondering if the actual disruptive Kenyan startup idea is simply this: a platform that verifies whether a client was, in fact, happy.
Anyway, I’m still sifting through my inbox. I’ll provide an update when I’m done with all of that. Just a warning: it’s increasingly looking like a Vision 2030 article.