Across the country, farmers are reading the sky the way their grandparents did. Vuli now. Then the dry months of kiangazi. Then masika, the long rains, in March. No farmer asks whether the season is fair. He asks a better question: what is this season for?
Founders have forgotten how to ask it. We borrowed our sense of time from elsewhere. Roadmaps. Hockey-stick charts. Five-year plans that climb in a straight line toward an exit.
John Mbiti, the Kenyan philosopher, argued half a century ago that many African traditions never lived in that kind of time at all. Time was not a road to a distant future. It was the lived present, what he called sasa, flowing steadily into zamani, the deep past. You did not chase time.
You stood inside it and attended to it. There is a founder’s lesson buried in that idea. The line is a lie we tell investors. The season is the truth we live.
This month Quickmart opened its shares to the public, ahead of a Nairobi Securities Exchange listing on November 12. Read its story as a line and you see a supermarket that grew to 72 stores and Sh50.4 billion in revenue. Read it as seasons and you see something truer.
John Kinuthia and his wife Zipporah started small in Nakuru in 2006. He died in 2016. Private capital arrived in 2019, a merger with Tumaini in 2020, and now a public offer. Start, survival, loss, rebuilding, transition. Each season asked a different thing of the people inside it.
Now walk the same aisles a decade back. In 2015 Nakumatt ran 65 stores across four countries. By 2017 it could not pay rent or wages. Its last branches were sold in 2019. Its failure was not that it broke. Every enterprise breaks. Its failure was that it tried to live in one season forever, scaling through a drought that demanded pruning.
Ecclesiastes put it more than two thousand years ago: a time to plant, and a time to pluck up that which is planted. The tragedy of most founders is not that they meet the wrong season. It is that they keep performing the last one.
Which brings us to the fourth season, the break. It is the one many founders never walk out of, and almost never because of the break itself. They die of stuckness.
Stillness and stuckness look alike from a distance. They are opposites. Stillness is chosen. It is the farmer resting the land so it can bear again. Stuckness is imposed by fear. It is the founder standing in the ruins of last year, waiting for the world to rewind. Stillness is presence. Stuckness is absence wearing a founder’s suit.
Albert Einstein wrote to his son in 1930 that life is like riding a bicycle: to keep your balance, you must keep moving. Founders take that to mean speed. It means presence. You can pedal slowly. You cannot stop pedalling and expect to stay upright.
Naivas tells the founder’s version. Peter Mukuha Kago started it in Rongai in 1990 and died in 2010.
Three years later his family was in court, divided over a proposal to sell control to a foreign retailer. It was the kind of break that ends family businesses. Instead the company kept moving. It walked into the spaces Nakumatt left behind, brought in new partners in 2020, and last October opened its 110th store. The break was real. So was the walking.
Every dimension of a founder’s life has to keep moving with the season.
The mind has to accept which season it is in, instead of insisting on the one it prefers. The heart has to grieve what the last season took, or the grief will make tomorrow’s decisions.
Strategy has to change its posture: plant in one season, prune in the next. The circle around you has to be renewed, because the people who carried you through the planting may not be the people who can carry you through the drought.
And the spirit has to hold the one question that survives every season: why did I begin, and is that reason still alive? The founder who can answer that does not need the season to be kind. Only to be faced.
Walk present. Walk slowly if you must. Rest when the land asks it. But do not stand still in the ruins and call it waiting. The season is not yours to choose. The walking is.