Category: Business Daily

Family Bank has set June 23 as its listing date on the Nairobi Securities Exchange (NSE) after receiving the Capital Market Authority’s (CMA) approval.

The mid-sized lender will be listing 1.66 billion shares currently owned by 6,345 shareholders by way of introduction, indicating it will not be raising additional capital during the process.

Listing by introduction will provide liquidity for existing shareholders and bring onboard other investors who would otherwise not invest in the stock which has been trading over-the-counter (OTC) market since 2006.

Standard Investment Bank has been appointed as the lead transaction advisor, with PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) as the reporting accountants and Mboya Wangong’u and Waiyaki Advocates as legal advisors.

‘Family Bank has received formal approval from the CMA to list on the NSE by way of introduction,’ said the bank’s Managing Director Nancy Njau.

‘With the approval, the bank will list on the NSE on June 23, further reaffirming its commitment to deliver sustainable growth and marks the next step in the bank’s growth trajectory and long-term value creation journey,’ she added.

The bank’s listing will be the second this year following Kenya Pipeline Company’s initial public offering in March. Its listing will push the number of listed banks to 12, thus enhancing the sector’s influence on the bourse.

Analysts expect that the listing of the bank will also serve to reduce the ownership of the founder, Titus Muya and his associates, which remained above the 30 percent mark.

‘The founding family’s 31.9 percent shareholding is viewed unfavourably. The bank is actively working to further dilute the founding family’s shareholding to comply with regulatory expectations,’ reads a recent credit rating report issued by South African rating agency, GCR Ratings.

Last year the bank raised Sh8 billion through a private placement, which had targeted Sh6.1 billion, being oversubscribed by 31.4 percent.

Mr Muya sat out the capital raising resulting in his direct stake of 5.6 percent being diluted to 4.4 percent. Daykio Plantations, a real estate company owned by Mr Muya, saw its shareholding shrink to 9.53 percent from 12.1 percent.

The Estate of the late Rachael Njeri, associated also with the Muya family, had its stake drop to ten percent from 12.8 percent.

Persons associated with him such as Brian Muyah, Ann Muya, Mark Keriri and Sheila Kahaki Muya fell off the list of top ten meaning their stake of 2.6 percent shareholding each had fallen below 2.07 percent.

Mr Keriri, the vice-chairman of the bank, was disclosed to have a 2.01 percent stake.

Kenya Tea Development Agency Holding limited, the largest single shareholder, increased its stake to 18.9 percent having participated in the capital raising.

The cows bred for steak here are treated like royalty.

They are fed well. They are kept comfortable. Nobody shouts at them. No loud rock music. No banging doors. No unnecessary stress. In short, a life many cows can only dream of. And when the hour finally comes, they are not made aware that they are about to be slaughtered. It all happens with great dignity. Humanely, if there is a thing like that for cows.

I imagine the butchers pause afterwards, remove their caps and observe a minute of silence, and perhaps, of sorrow.

But man must eat. And man must eat cow.

So they engage in what is called conscientious butchering. The animal is carefully and skillfully skinned, cleaned and prepared. The beef is then aged under carefully controlled conditions, allowing connective tissue to break down naturally while excess moisture evaporates. This, I gather, is where tenderness is born.

And so when you visit The Local Grill at Nairobi’s Village Market, as I did last weekend, and stare at the menu with its parade of cuts and cooking styles, you find yourself thinking, these cows died a good, dignified death. Which somehow makes you feel less of a savage.

The ambience deserves mention. It has a matte finish and, my favourite feature, long, big windows overlooking the courtyard. I ordered a whisky. Lady ordered some cocktail or other and narrated how, at the age of eight, she was once chased by a cow in the village. She stumbled, fell, got up, cried, and kept running. And the cow kept charging. Great vengeful tale as you wait for steak.

You would think such an experience would turn someone into a vegetarian. Not her.

She later cut through the rump while I worked through the sirloin. The meat was excellent. Of course it is. It is, in the end, the most honest transaction in the city: a life taken seriously, a meal eaten the same way. You leave convinced that great steak is not made in a kitchen. It is made long before that.

Maybe you have wondered if you will ever meet someone from Olenguruone, way out on the edge of the Mau Forest. Maybe you haven’t. Maybe you know it only as the name of a road connecting Nairobi’s Kileleshwa and Lavington. Then you meet Carol Koech, the vice president for Africa at the Global Energy Alliance for People and Planet.

She grew up there.

‘I watched the forest recede,’ she recalls.

Decades later, Koech found herself in Lagos, Nigeria on an assignment for General Electric, helping Nigeria build power plants. She would go on to become Country President for Schneider Electric East Africa, the first Kenyan woman to lead a multinational energy company in the region. Yet even as she travelled across the continent, negotiated major energy deals and visited project sites under armed escort, one thought kept nagging at her.

“My mother was still living in the dark,” she says. “She had no electricity.”

There she was, helping build the infrastructure that powered economies, while back home, the woman who had raised her remained disconnected from it. Something about that gap – between the scale of the work she was doing and the village she had left behind – refused to let her settle.

So she began paying attention differently. Slowly, she started moving her career toward the people in the dark.

Today, Koech leads the Africa operations of an alliance founded during COP26 by the Rockefeller Foundation, the IKEA Foundation and the Bezos Earth Fund, with a mandate to end energy poverty across the continent. Through an initiative called Point One, she is also urging corporations to commit 0.1 percent of their revenue to development work. Not charity, she insists, development.

“I belong to the corporate world,” she says. “I’ve been there for years. But now I’m on this side, and I can see exactly how corporates can plug in.”

Olenguruone, it turns out, was never just where she came from. It was always where she was going.

Isn’t it ironic that you work your way up to a nice office like this, with a great skyline of the city, but then barely notice it?

I know. My day is usually so busy, I have no time to appreciate this view. I’m rarely still – if I’m not on calls, I’m on a plane somewhere. When I came here for the first time, I remember thinking, ‘this would be a good place to think.’ Ha! People look at this and think it must be a privilege – a corner office on the ninth floor. But I have very little attachment to things like this. I’m much more mission-driven. I could just as easily work from that house over there, as long as I’m doing work that feels meaningful.

But surely, it must feel good.

[Shrugs] I feel like I’ve gone through the phases of getting attached to stuff and privilege. Those things don’t excite me anymore.

When was the turnaround?

I have no idea. But I think, over the years, once you realise these things are within reach, they stop being the things that define you or give meaning to your life.

What’s the meaning to your life?

The work I do is really what makes me want to wake up. The job is quite demanding, but just the thought that it’s going to make a difference in someone’s life makes me want to do it more and more. For me, energy poverty is personal.

I would travel to Nigeria, with front and back escorts taking me to remote project sites, and I’d think about her. There I was, sitting in big rooms and negotiating big contracts, yet my mother was still in the dark.

That was when I started shifting my career toward solving it. This role feels like the culmination of that path.

Anything interesting happened in your childhood?

No, but my name should be interesting to you. People don’t realise it’s a Kenyan name – it almost always passes for a German one. In Germany, Carol is also a man’s name, so every time I show up somewhere outside Kenya, people are expecting a German man. Koech is Koch in Germany.

I’ve spent most of my career in a male-dominated industry, so when I arrive for an energy conversation, and people see the name, they make assumptions about my gender. Almost 90 percent of the time, people ask me how to pronounce it.

So, a normal childhood…

[Laughs] [Laughs] I grew up in Olenguruone, on the edge of the Mau Forest. Life revolved around school and chores. By the time I was 10, I could milk cows, carry milk to the dairy, and fetch water from the river. That’s how we grew up – multitasking, solving problems, working hard.

What stayed with me was how often that hard work went to waste. Acres of cabbage planted, no market. Milk tasted of cabbage. The milk truck couldn’t reach us when the roads were bad, and when the milk spoiled in transit, it came back the next day. You could do everything right and still earn nothing.

If we’d had reliable energy and cold storage nearby, much of that wouldn’t have happened. I saw firsthand how one missing piece of infrastructure could undo months of hard work.

What would you very quickly want to forget about your childhood?

What would I want to forget? Honestly, nothing. I enjoyed growing up where I did. In fact, I’m very proud of where I come from and where I am today. When I look at the journey, it’s been a very long path.

Would you describe it as a success?

[Pause] I think it’s just…I don’t know what you define as success. I would say I’m happy.

How come you people – business leaders, industry captains – are always so hesitant to claim success? Is it humility or the finality of success?

[Pause] Look, success is different for me. I’ve made a significant career shift. I was a CEO in the corporate world, and now I work in development. To many people, it looked like career suicide. But even when I was leading Schneider Electric and living in Dubai, I kept thinking about that woman in the village.

So, you are solving the world’s problems. What personal problems are you solving?

I don’t know. Maybe I’m trying to solve the poverty I grew up around. I don’t want to call it a disadvantage, but I grew up in a place with very low levels of development and came to realise that people’s lives can change dramatically when a few key things are put in place. Perhaps that’s what I’m solving for. I’ve never really thought about the question that way, so I’d probably need more time to answer it properly.

What are some of the preconceptions about the development world you are shedding off?

I assumed people in the development world weren’t as busy as those in corporate, and that there was less clarity and less innovation. Coming into this space has completely challenged that. The work is demanding, and there’s significant innovation here – not always product innovation, but innovation around solving real-life problems and building partnerships.

The other big shift is how the development world approaches problems from a much broader perspective. In corporate, you’re focused on a specific business objective. Here, you’re forced to think about systems and the bigger picture.

When do you stop to smell the flowers?

I used to do a lot more hiking when I had the time. These days, I have a fairly serious morning routine. Sleep is non-negotiable – in bed by 10pm, up by 5:30am. Before I leave the house, I’ve taken care of my physical, mental and spiritual well-being. I journal, meditate, pray and spend time in silence.

Over the years, I’ve learned the importance of being present – of allowing my mind to become quiet instead of constantly racing ahead. I sit with my thoughts, observe them, acknowledge them and let them pass. That practice has helped me stay calm even in difficult situations. When crises come, I don’t panic easily because I’ve learned how to anchor myself.

Care to share these personal challenges, if that’s okay?

I’ve had to care for both my father and my mother-in-law through cancer. My father’s journey lasted three and a half years before he died. I then cared for my mother-in-law for two years, and she died in my house.

Experiences like that change you. They make you see life very differently. The things you consider important shift. When you’re caring for someone who is dying, and there’s nothing you can do to stop it, it takes you to a different level of emotional pain. It stretches your emotional threshold in ways you can’t fully understand until you’ve lived through it.

I have a terrible question. What do you remember about your dad’s final moment?

A year after my father died, I was on a flight from Lagos to Nairobi, watching a film about cancer. By the end of it, my grief surfaced. I wrote him a long letter and cried through the entire flight. When I landed, I felt as though I had finally grieved.

My father had throat cancer. After it returned, he could no longer eat and needed a stent. I remember him talking about how much he missed potatoes. I took a photograph of him in his hospital bed that day. It was the last picture I ever took of him. He died the following day. We were very close, and I had been part of his recovery from alcoholism for many years before he died.

How did his death change you?

I see life from a very pragmatic perspective now. Pain is a season – you adjust, adapt, and eventually it passes. But every death takes a piece of you with it. After my mother-in-law died, I felt something in my capacity for empathy had changed.

I could see someone going through pain and think, you’ll be okay, rather than feeling overwhelmed by their suffering. Caring for her was especially difficult because it coincided with my promotion to CEO. She was diagnosed in 2020 and spent much of that period in my care.

What people don’t always realise is that caregiving isn’t only about the patient – it’s also about managing everyone around them. There were mornings when relatives would arrive in a Probox unannounced, [laughs] just as I was preparing for leadership meetings. It was a lot to carry at once.

What does your husband find so frustrating about you?

[Laughs] He’d probably say I’m untameable. Once I’ve decided to go after something, I just can’t stop. My husband has been incredibly supportive of my career throughout. He worked in banking and now manages various interests – real estate, farming. These days he’s also the more present parent, since our youngest son is only 12.

If there’s one thing he probably finds difficult about me, it’s that once I’ve decided to pursue something, I don’t know how to stop. When I commit to something, I feel compelled to see it through to the end.

What’s your first identity?

I’m all those things – mother, wife, CEO – but first and foremost, I see myself as a person with a purpose. Raising my children is a very important part of my life, but I also know that parenting is a season. I can already see the empty nest on the horizon.

My mother devoted herself completely to raising us, and honestly, I’m not even a quarter of the parent she was. Sometimes I feel I haven’t been a very good student of hers. But at the same time, I also feel that I’m more than that. I’m more than the biological responsibilities I’ve been given.

What do you really suck at?

I struggle with small talk.

As I’ve gotten older, I’ve found it harder to maintain certain friendships because I’m not very good at conversations that revolve around other people. I genuinely can’t retain gossip; my brain just doesn’t seem to have space for it. Because of that, maintaining certain friendships can be difficult, especially friendships that were built around convenience rather than shared purpose.

The news of the Court of Appeal judgment hit the retirement benefits sector like a thunderbolt. A three-judge bench delivered a ruling that threatened to upend the entire legal framework under which the National Social Security Fund (NSSF) operates, threatening to drag the industry back to the old regime where monthly contributions were pegged at a measly Sh200.

It was a staggering, out-of-the-blue development. What the judges ruled on was a low-stakes, almost-forgotten application for a stay of execution filed by the NSSF way back in October 2022.

This application had languished in the background for years, even as the core disputes surrounding the fund’s restructuring were litigated all the way up to the Supreme Court. Yet, from this legal relic, the court conjured up a ruling that ignited immediate panic.

Chaos and confusion quickly rippled through the markets. The NSSF Board was forced to purchase expensive, full-page newspaper advertisements to assure employers and workers that contribution rates remained unchanged.

The Central Organisation of Trade Unions (Cotu) followed suit with its own full-page spread, offering a matching interpretation of the verdict. Days later, Cotu was back in the press with yet another full-page broadside, this time castigating the Agricultural Employers Association after the lobby issued a circular advising its members to immediately revert to the old Sh200 rate.

To truly understand what is at stake here, one must look beyond the immediate news cycle and examine the hard numbers.

According to recent data from the Retirement Benefits Authority (RBA), the NSSF has been collecting billions of shillings from workers since the enhanced rates took effect. As of December 2025, the fund’s net assets stood at a massive Sh623.4 billion.

In the half-year ending December 2025 alone, member contributions reached Sh43.3 billion, closely matching the Sh44 billion collected in the corresponding period in 2024. In the 2024/2025 financial year; the fund paid 17 percent in returns to members.

This phenomenal asset growth is entirely due to the implementation of the NSSF Act, which introduced a graduated scale where lower and upper pensionable salary limits were raised.

Uprooting this framework now would have been an exercise in economic recklessness.

How, for instance, do you deal with retirees who have already exited the system in the last three years and therefore received their payouts under the enhanced tier system? Do you ask them to return the money?

What happens to the thousands of members who opted out of Tier I contributions to join private schemes under the tier 2 arrangement?

Furthermore, the NSSF has already declared and distributed billions in interest to member accounts based on these enhanced collections over the last three years. Reversing this would be an administrative nightmare.

But the ultimate conundrum lies in the investment profile the fund has adopted since its financial muscles grew.

Currently, over 50 percent of the NSSF’s portfolio is locked up in government paper and quoted equities.

Over the last three years, the fund has aggressively diversified into long-term national infrastructure.

It is a major local investor in the Rironi-Mau-Summit road project, the anchor investor in the Talanta Stadium bond, a key financier of the Bomas project note programme, and was a cornerstone investor in the recently concluded Kenya Pipeline Company (KPC) initial public offering.

Forcing the NSSF to revert to the old rates would trigger an immediate liquidity crisis and disrupt these mega-projects.The deeper you dig into this ruling, the stranger it gets.

NSSF and Cotu have both accused the Court of Appeal of something almost without precedent: ruling on an application that was not actually before it.

They have maintained that what was argued before the judges on January 23, 2025 was a joinder application by the Kenya Export Floriculture, Horticulture and Allied Workers Union – a union seeking to be added as an interested party.

The October 2022 stay application, which the court purported to rule on, had long since ceased to be a live issue. NSSF has formally asked the court to recall its decision, describing the mix-up as a “monumental error.”

Cotu, in characteristically blunt language, suggested the ruling “seems to have been intended to cause confusion.”

If the facts are as NSSF and Cotu describe them, then this was not a thunderbolt from a clear sky. It was a thunderbolt from a court that may have been looking at the wrong map.

The Kenya Revenue Authority (KRA) has declared an industrial park owned by power producer Kenya Electricity Generating Company (KenGen) in Naivasha a customs-controlled area, unlocking tax breaks for businesses setting up shop within the facility.

The KenGen Green Energy Park, which is situated within the Olkaria geothermal field, was designated a customs-controlled area on June 5, 2026.

Firms in customs-controlled areas enjoy tax breaks extended to businesses in Special Economic Zones (SEZs), such as not being required to register for value-added tax (VAT). The supply of goods or taxable services to an SEZ is also zero-rated.

Additionally, the firms operating from these bases enjoy a reduced corporate tax rate of 10 percent in the first 10 years of operations. They are also exempted from all duties and taxes payable under the Income Tax Act and the East African Community Customs Management Act.

Five investors, including steel fabricator Synergetic Development Group, Konza Technopolis, Kaishan Group and electric vehicles assembler, AquilaStar, have already signed deals to set base in the facility.

The Green Energy Park was declared a SEZ last year and is an integral part of KenGen’s revenue diversification push.

Additionally, it is also key in Kenya’s quest to attract foreign investors and create jobs.

‘The gazettement of the KenGen Green Energy Park as a customs-controlled area is the operational key that turns our vision into reality. The designation under Kenya Gazette Notice No.8412 unlocks the full SEZ investment framework at Olkaria, cementing the park as Africa’s foremost geothermal-powered industrial hub,’ Peter Njenga, Chief Executive at KenGen, said on Wednesday.

Other benefits extended to businesses in customs-controlled areas include work permit facilitation for a defined number of foreign workers and protection and repatriation of profits.

The incentives and benefits woo the investors by lowering the costs they incur to set up and run the businesses, with the ultimate goal being attracting more investors to increase our exports and also create jobs.

The Green Energy Park sits on an estimated 845 acres and is one of the over 25 SEZs gazetted in Kenya. Others are Dongo Kundu SEZ, Naivasha Special Economic Zone, Konza Technopolis and Mombasa Industrial Park.

There are also private SEZs in the country, and these include Tatu City SEZ, Two Rivers International Finance and Innovation Centre SEZ, Northlands SEZ and the East Africa Free Zone SEZ.

SEZs have emerged as a strong selling point that Kenya is using to attract investors and boost efforts to create jobs and address the unemployment crisis.

KenGen is betting on the green park as a major plank of its diversification strategy as the company seeks to remain on the profitability path.

The State-owned electricity producer’s net profit for the half-year to December 2025 dipped to Sh4.22 billion from Sh5.29 billion a year earlier despite increased electricity sales to Kenya Power.

KenGen attributed the 25.3 percent dip in net profit to a higher tax bill and an increase in reimbursable costs like fuel and water.

A breaking story appears on your social media feed. Someone has shared a screenshot, a video clip, or a dramatic headline. Before forwarding it, you pause to check the source. You look for a familiar logo, a known broadcaster’s watermark, or a recognised byline. You ask, almost instinctively: who is saying this?

The pause, brief but deliberate, is not hesitation. It is judgment. And in Kenya’s rapidly shifting media landscape, it may be the most important behaviour a news consumer exercises.

Because while social media has transformed how we get and use news, it has not changed the question every news consumer eventually asks: Can I trust this?

The Media Council of Kenya’s State of the Media 2025 Survey is clear. Social media is now the primary source of information for Kenyans at 39 percent, ahead of television at 31 percent, radio at 21 percent, and newspapers at just 13 percent-a figure that stood at 29 percent as recently as 2022.

Despite this shift, when Kenyans were asked which media outlet they trust most, the overwhelming majority named a traditional broadcast group. Meanwhile, the most visited news websites are platforms built on brand recognition cultivated through conventional media.

Kenyans have changed where they consume news, but they have not changed who they trust.

This behaviour is not a passive habit. It is a rational response to a deeply unreliable information environment.

Anyone can post news online, claim to be a source, or produce content that looks and sounds authoritative. In response, audiences have developed a self-regulation instinct. They are seeking attribution from recognisable sources and interrogating what lands in their feed before sharing it further.

The 2025 survey confirms this vigilance is widespread. The spread of false and misleading information is cited by 28 percent of Kenyans as their single biggest media concern today, tied with inadequate coverage of key issues.

For communicators, this creates both a warning and an opportunity. Audiences are not simply watching who publishes first. They are watching who publishes correctly.

The verification instinct is now under a more sophisticated threat than simple misinformation.

The survey reveals that while 59 percent of Kenyans are aware artificial intelligence is being used in media production, 63 percent cannot identify AI-generated content when they encounter one.

Audiences have historically judged credibility by recognising a journalist’s voice, a broadcaster’s identity, or a publication’s tone. AI can now replicate all of these with no editorial standards and no accountability attached.

The scale of exposure amplifies the risk. Nearly half of Kenya is now online, and 91 percent access digital media through mobile phones. In this environment, fabricated content can reach millions of people within hours.

Speed and emotion drive sharing, and here’s where misinformation is most dangerous. In this context, a communicator’s established reputation for accuracy is no longer a professional virtue. It is the only reliable filter many audiences have left.

Public debate often assumes that trust in the media is declining. The data points in a different direction.

Over 79 percent of Kenyans now express some or a lot of trust in the media, up from 74.5 percent in the previous survey. The proportion who believe media coverage of government is unfair has dropped from 73.6 percent to 46 percent, a significant credibility recovery in a calendar year.

Growing awareness of misinformation appears to be making audiences more deliberate about who they trust, and more loyal to the sources consistently earning it.

But let’s look at what is driving this recovery. Content relevance leads at 45 percent, timeliness follows at 33 percent, and credibility and reputation come in at 29 percent. These are the operating expectations of digital audiences as much as they are traditional journalism values.

The message is direct: credibility cannot be inherited from a broadcast or print legacy. Credibility must be demonstrated where audiences now live on the same social platforms they use daily. This means sourcing captions, correcting mistakes publicly, and choosing accuracy over engagement in every headline.

Kenya’s manufacturing and ICT sectors are set to bear the brunt of the US-Israel war with Iran, even as the economy is seen growing at a softer pace this year on uncertainties.

The Central Bank of Kenya (CBK) has cut its economic growth forecast for 2026 by 0.4 percentage points to 4.9 percent, down from 5.3 percent previously on the implications of the war.

‘The growth of the economy is projected at 4.9 percent in 2026 compared to our previous projection of 5.3 percent, and this downward revision mainly reflects the continued uncertainty and implications of the conflict in the Middle East on the performance of some of the key sectors,’ CBK Governor Kamau Thugge said.

The ICT sector is expected to grow by a slower rate of 5.4 percent from 6.7 percent previously. Growth in the real estate sector is projected to fall by a similar margin to 5.2 percent, down from a forecast of 6.4 percent.

The manufacturing sector is also expected to take a major hit with the CBK downgrading its growth projection to 1.9 percent, down from 3 percent.

The Iran war will compound headwinds for the manufacturing sector, which is already in decline, with growth having slowed to two percent in 2025 from three percent previously, while its share of the economy has declined since 2023 to 7.1 percent.

The war has resulted in high energy prices, which make up significant inputs for industry, while disruptions in supply chains are expected to impact the export and import of essential goods and services.

Other key sectors expected to see softer growth from CBK’s previous forecast in April include transport and storage, which is seen expanding by 3.6 percent from 4.3 percent, and wholesale and retail trade, whose expansion is now seen at a flat four percent from 4.6 percent previously.

The sectors of agriculture, construction and education are also expected to slow down marginally in the face of uncertainty.

The CBK, however, expects growth in the construction sector to be anchored on a resurgence in projects including affordable housing as the State ramps up work on cheap homes ahead of the August 2027 General Election.

The payment of pending bills to road contractors and projects based on public-private-partnerships is expected to further support resilience in construction.

Only the accommodation and food services sector is seen growing faster at 12.2 percent from eight percent previously, supported by improved tourist arrivals at the start of 2026.

The sectors of mining and quarrying and finance and insurance have had their growth projections held steady at nine and 6.4 percent respectively in the latest forecast.

CBK expects improved credit uptake across key sectors of the economy to offset part of the uncertainties emanating from the Middle East war.

The Kenyan economy grew at a slow rate of 4.6 percent last year from 4.7 percent in 2024 on lower-than-expected output from the agriculture sector, which represents one-fifth of gross domestic product.

Having studied entrepreneurship at Strathmore Business School in Kenya and later at Babson College and Stanford University in the US, Eric Muli was bubbling with ideas.

One day, he went to a phone shop in Nairobi and asked if he could buy a device in instalments. The attendant told him that such an arrangement could only be done with a bank.

That was when it hit him.

‘Of course, banks are not looking at my 23-year-old self to give a Sh15,000 loan to buy a phone,’ the 34-year-old recalled in an interview with the BDLife.

‘The concept started with us trying to allow people to access essential items. You know, a phone is essential,’ he said.

That aha moment birthed what came to be known as Lipa Later, a buy-now-pay later service that enabled a person to pay a deposit, buy an asset, then settle the balance over time.

Mr Muli founded Lipa Later in 2017. To facilitate its take-off, he secured financing from venture capitalists in the US. ‘One thing that the US taught me is that anything is possible,’ he said. ‘You can start something from nothing, go look for the resources…and get it done.’

He managed to make Lipa Later a giant firm.

‘At some point, we had hired over 200 permanent staff. I think we had close to almost 1,000 agents that we were working with. We had issued about $100 million (Sh12.9 billion) worth of credit at our peak. We served close to one million customers. [Despite] the challenges that we had in the very beginning, it was widely accepted. We also had markets in Rwanda, Uganda, Nigeria as well. So, the business grew very well,’ said Mr Muli, who was the CEO.

Lipa Later would enter deals with companies like Hotpoint, a home appliances company, assuring buyers of swift purchases.

The business model

Mr Muli admitted that the Lipa Later model was an iteration of the old hire purchase system: customers paid a deposit, took the item immediately, and settled the balance in instalments.

‘The difference was that we did not own our stock. We didn’t have any stock. But the concept was essentially hire purchase,’ he said.

He believes the firm pioneered the reimagined hire purchase model of owning phones and other assets in Kenya.

‘We were the pioneers of this space,’ he said. ‘Now I see around town that the concept of lipa later, lipa mdogo mdogo [is widespread].’

And whereas the old model was a slow, paper-based affair negotiated between a buyer and a shop, Lipa Later digitised the entire chain, paid retailers upfront, and collected from customers over time.

‘We were also empowering the retailer,’ said Mr Muli. ‘We were working with very small ones. For those small businesses, we would increase their revenue by like 30 percent on a monthly basis.’

Venture capitalists kept pumping in money, with Lipa Later getting more than 10 rounds of capital injection.

Then came Covid-19 that realigned the business world in ways not seen before. Mr Muli said they managed to raise more money from US investors and digitised their ecosystem.

In 2021, Lipa Later acquired SkyGarden, an e-commerce platform.

‘We wanted to reach more customers,’ Mr Muli explained on the acquisition rationale. ‘They had a good customer base, and we felt that if we acquired them, we would be able to sell online easier.’

SkyGarden, also previously backed by venture capitalists, had reached a point where it couldn’t raise more money.

Unexpected downfall

It was going well for Lipa Later until it wasn’t. Its fall was unexpected, but when it happened, it put them in the category of Kenyan start-ups that began with promise but crashed hard. That list has firms like Bonto, Antara Health, among others.

‘We did our best. We built a very big company,’ said Mr Muli.

By 2024, the income sources were drying up as it faced an uphill task securing more funds. In March 2025, Lipa Later was placed under administration, and Mr Muli has no say in what is happening with it.

What led to Lipa Later’s fall?

The entrepreneur said problems came from many corners. For one, the firm’s model required enormous amounts of capital as they had to pay retailers immediately while waiting for customers to pay back gradually.

As the Covid-19 cast a shadow on Kenya’s economy, repayment became an issue.

‘You find that you are lending Sh1 million, but coming back as Sh100,000 instead of Sh3 million,’ said Mr Muli. ‘That was the origin of a lot of the challenges that we experienced.’

Some ‘pay later’ lending companies today employ technology set up in such a way that if you don’t pay for a phone, you can’t use it. Could Lipa Later have taken it up? Mr Muli was not sure.

‘I don’t believe punishing borrowers is the solution to enhancing credit in a market. I don’t believe that is necessarily the best way to do it,’ he said.

‘It is useful; yes. We did not have some of those mechanisms that I think now have been commoditised. When we were at our peak, the phone companies were trying to figure it out. We didn’t have that luxury. So, I can see now it has helped people, but I don’t think it solves [the non-repayment issues] completely,’ added Mr Muli.

But perhaps the biggest issue that befell Lipa Later was the financing model. For one, the money the investors had put in was repaid in US dollars, which meant immediate losses when the shilling depreciated.

‘When you borrow money in dollars when the rate is Sh100, and you repay it at Sh170, that’s a 70 percent loss on your money,’ said Mr Muli, who made it to the Business Daily’s ‘Top 40 under 40’ list in 2015, which celebrates Kenya’s most outstanding men under the age of 40.

Moreover, Mr Muli believes the investors barely understood the Lipa Later business model.

‘Their needs and ours were not aligned,’ he noted. ‘They put pressure on the organisation to do things that were not necessarily the best thing for the business.’

Such misalignments, he said, have plagued various start-ups in Kenya.

‘The challenges came where they couldn’t raise more money. The money dried out. You know the post-effects of Covid. Money dries out and the business model needs to change drastically,’ said Mr Muli.

Firms like Copia, which also relied heavily on venture funding, did not last long post-Covid. It is also under administration.

Other mistakes

As for the collapse of Lipa Later, Mr Muli also pointed to his own inexperience. Starting a business of Lipa Later’s complexity at 23, he said, meant there were things he could not see at the time.

‘Now, looking at things in hindsight, you see a lot of other mistakes, ways you could have done things better. Maybe you could have caught something earlier. Those are things you can only see looking backwards,’ he said.

Asked what he observed about Kenyans’ borrowing habits through Lipa Later, he singled out a trend he found peculiar: people would pay the 10 percent deposit to buy an item, resell the same item at half the market price, then dodge Lipa Later, refusing to pay the amount owed.

‘Kenyans are also very entrepreneurial,’ he says, adding that the credit reference bureaus were also not as sophisticated as they are today.

However, there were positives.

‘I would say that there are hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of Kenyans who could be very good borrowers and good additions to the financial ecosystem. It’s just that they don’t have the infrastructure to get onto the platforms and build up a credit system that can be useful to their lives,’ he said.

When Lipa Later went into administration, it was placed under Joy Vipinchandra Bhatt of Moore JVB Consulting.

Not long after, at least three firms expressed interest in buying and refinancing the firm. They include Canada’s Engage Capital, which tabled a $24.5 million (Sh3.2 billion) offer, and London-based Advance Global Capital, which offered a $5 million (Sh647 million) loan facility.

So, how much did he lose with the fall of Lipa later?

‘The company was big,’ he answered. ‘At one point, we were close to a $100 million (Sh12.9 billion) business. Yes, it was worth about $100 million at some point. So, you can start calculating from there. It was a big company; a very big company. We definitely built something large.’

No shame

With Lipa Later going through the motions of administration, Mr Muli doesn’t want to feel ashamed of the fact that he failed there and has moved to another business.

‘I think part of the challenge that exists in our market that stops entrepreneurship is crucifying entrepreneurs. People are afraid of starting businesses because they don’t want to fail. But in the West, you find that those people who have failed are even heroes because they learn a lot,’ he said.

‘And I don’t believe that because I have had some kind of challenges with my hard work and ambition, now I should stop providing for my family. In fact, I should even work harder,’ he added.

He has since founded MRE Real Estate Limited, which describes itself as ‘a real estate investment and development company delivering retail and workspace solutions in Kenya’s fastest-growing areas’.

‘Started in 2025, MRE is a fast-growing real estate company with developments across Kenya and a growing portfolio estimated at about Sh5 billion,’ said a brief shared with this reporter.

When we queried Mr Muli to explain about the Sh5 billion, he said that some of the Lipa Later investors have also followed him to the new venture.

‘What we do is we buy land, build on it, and manage. We build commercial real estate on land that we purchase and then we essentially manage it. So, we are building a big portfolio of real estate. What we do is essentially strip malls, shopping centres, that’s where we started. We also do shared spaces and at the same time we are looking at other lines of real estate that we possibly get into,’ said Mr Muli, who now wears the hat of MRE’s managing director.

At the time of the interview, he said MRE had ‘just secured’ funding for a project in Machakos.

‘It is a big project that we want to be rolling out quite soon. That will be our first one that I think will be out of Nairobi. But, for the most part, we have been focused on Nairobi,’ he said.

Real estate, he observed, is an easy sell even to local financiers.

‘The banks understand hard assets. They understand traditional business. That’s their bread and butter,’ he said.

As for the previous investors backing his new venture, he said: ‘People were even more excited to support such a venture because it’s more long-term.’

‘A lot of the supporters and backers of my current venture are actually Lipa Later investors who have even invested more money into what we are doing,’ he added.

Asked what businesses he is idolising in his real estate venture, he mentioned Kenya’s Acorn Holdings and a US firm called Perform Properties.

The problem with real estate, he noted, is the entry barrier.

‘On the lower side, each of our projects is close to Sh400 or so million per project because we buy land, build, and manage. That’s where the challenge usually comes. But because I managed to learn a lot, building a business that size, I learnt how to structure finance, how to do partnerships and so on. That’s what led me to believe it’s possible to get these things done,’ he said.

‘I kind of sat down and I felt that I wanted to do something that has a lot more long-term impact; something that has longevity; something that you can kind of predict how things are going to go and you’re in control of,’ added Mr Muli.

His other business

The entrepreneurial spirit abounds in him because Alpha Force Security, a firm he started in 2011, is still running. The company has a workforce ‘north of 200’ as he put it and an independent management arm.

‘In our estate, we didn’t have guards. And that’s actually how we started,’ he said, adding that he has since quit being the CEO and that he only serves as the board chair whereas the day-to-day running is left to a dedicated team.

When asked about what sparked his entrepreneurial spirit, he went philosophical.

‘Sometimes they say whether it is nature or nurture. I think mine is both. I’ve always been passionate about creating things; starting things from nothing and building them into something. That has been a passion of mine from a very early age,’ he said. ‘I think there’s nothing more exciting than turning an idea into reality.’

The ratio of loan defaults to total lending in the banking sector shrunk to a two year low of 15.3 percent in May from 17.5 percent a year ago following write-offs of bad debt and a growth in credit as interest rates declined.

The Central Bank of Kenya (CBK) data indicates that the non-performing loans (NPLs) portfolio stood at Sh694.8 billion in May, down from Sh728.2 billion 12 months ago.

The decline in bad loans ratio follows disclosure of the huge write-offs made by banks last year with listed lenders writing off loans worth Sh75.06 billion last year.

Banks are required to write-off a bad loan if it is classified as non-performing for a year. Credit to the private sector grew by 9.3 percent in May being the fastest pace recorded in the last two years. Growth of the loan book by disbursing credit to households and businesses with strong ability to repay enables banks to improve the quality of their balance sheet.

‘The ratio of gross non-performing loans (NPLs) to gross loans stood at 15.3 percent in May 2026, down from 15.6 percent in February 2026, and 17.6 percent in August 2025,’ the Monetary Policy Committee, the rate-setting arm of the CBK, said in a statement.

CBK cited households, transport and communications, and mining and quarrying sectors as those that had recorded drops in NPLs.

The industry loan book grew to Sh4.54 trillion up from Sh4.15 trillion a year ago as the price of loans dropped following pressure on banks by CBK to reduce interest rates.

Average lending rates were 14.5 percent in May down from highs of 17.2 in November 2024.

‘Growth in commercial banks’ lending to the private sector improved to 9.3 percent in May 2026, compared to 7.1 percent in April 2026 and negative 2.9 percent in January 2025,’ said the MPC, adding; “Growth in credit to key sectors of the economy, particularly trade, building and construction, agriculture, and consumer durables remained strong, reflecting improved demand for credit in line with the decline in lending interest rates.’

Banks have also been aggressive to recover loans from borrowers including auctioning of collateral and going to court to recover from corporates that have defaulted on their loan obligations. Conclusion of long running court cases, including resolution of large corporate defaults in favour of banks, has also helped improve the lender’s loan book quality.

Some of the cases recently concluded include Equity Bank Kenya’s enforcement action against Transcentury Limited and its subsidiary East African Cables Limited.

Improvement of the loan book allows banks to carry less loan loss provisions which are marked as expenses on their profit and loss accounts. This means with an improved loan book the lenders are expected to cut back their provisions which will boost their profitability.

Banks have disclosed intentions to pressurise households and businesses to clear defaults in order to further improve the quality of their loan books.

‘For the quarter ending June 30, 2026, banks expect to intensify their credit recovery efforts in nine economic sectors,” says a CBK report.

The intensified recovery efforts are aimed at improving the overall quality of the asset portfolio,’ a survey on banks’ credit officers by the Central Bank of Kenya disclosed.

‘Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate’- Carl Jung, the Swiss founder of analytical psychology.

Ever find yourself upset with someone for no apparent reason? Where do those dark thoughts come from? Does having a mass of [no thinking required] facts and figures on tap thanks to AI, really help? Or, is there a need to work through problems, building a model for yourself, understanding the hidden structure? Can the approach to problem solving used in a university founded in 1209 help your business?

‘You have two minds. One is conscious. The other one is categorically unconscious. One is present, the other one is behind the curtain. One displays your ego, the other one represses the notions that violate or contradict your ego. One is light, the other one is dark,’ writes Rachel Mariotti.

Go beyond the obvious

Conscious mind is like the screen, or keyboard on your laptop, it’s what you see, on the surface. Unconscious mind is the programming language, the software, in the central processing unit that is hidden, but controlling just about everything. The power behind the throne.

At the risk of trivialising Jung’s thinking – he believed that we all have a ‘Shadow’ deep within our unconscious. That repressed, hidden, or darker part of one’s personality. Jung argued that ignoring these traits leads to projecting them onto others. Ultimately, he believed one has to confront one’s inner darkness to grow.

What is required is ‘learning how to learn’, often called double – loop learning, that awareness of recognising how a system really works.

For centuries, alchemists dreamed of turning lead into gold – not through magic, but by unlocking the hidden potential within metals themselves. Their approach was to try and understand the structure of matter.

Try building a model

One of the ways in business to solve a pressing problem is to try and build a model of how it works. Visualise it, map it out on paper. Use system thinking to define the inputs, the environment that the system operates in, the outputs, and feedback loops. Donella Meadow’s practical book Thinking in Systems has become a classic guide, readily available in paperback.

Helps to be able to compress complexity into a model. University of Cambridge in England, founded roughly 800 years ago ‘has produced an extraordinary number of thinkers who became powerful because beyond simply collecting tonnes of facts, they learned to build abstractions that captured the deep structure between webs of facts.’

Isaac Newton, Charles Darwin, John Maynard Keynes, Stephen Hawkings and Jane Goodall are but a few who took on the university’s approach to problem solving, with the need to understand the underlying structure.

‘And the great thinker Alan Turing, father of modern computing is a perfect example. During his time at King’s College, Cambridge, he conceived of what is now called the Turing machine, a universal mathematical model of computation that could imitate all possible calculating devices. And that’s an astonishing act of compression. You see the amazing thing is that he didn’t merely describe one machine. He abstracted the idea of computability itself. Cambridge’s own account calls it one of the most influential mathematical abstractions of the 20th century. But this is exactly the kind of thinking most people and most students never train. Most remain only at the level of being able to describe ideas in terms of examples, anecdotes or isolated instances. Yet a Cambridge style mind asks a different question. What is the minimal structure underneath all these cases? What’s the model here? What is the smallest set of rules that explains the biggest range of phenomena?’ says scholar Stephen Petro.

Cambridge’s culture, partially through the supervision system, in small group tutorials rewards the person who is proactive, in action, trying to derive, test, and rebuild things from the inside, rather than merely repeating what was said in the lecture.

But how can you apply this in your business?

Helps to rethink, reframe the business question or problem and highlight the specific step where you’re getting stuck. This will allow you with laser precision to identify the right approach you need to engage in, going forward. Your goal is not to be right on the first pass.

Instead, your goal is to build a mind that knows how to solve business problems proactively, before the help even arrives. And, that is much closer to how Cambridge actually trains people, not relying on passive notetaking. But instead, understanding the underlying structure of the problem and dynamics of the system.

Are our business problems just fate, or our lack of understanding? William Shakespeare in Julius Caesar put it best: “The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves’.