Category: Business Daily

The National Land Commission (NLC) has opened a fresh court battle to block payment of more than Sh1 billion to a private developer for a parcel of land reserved for the construction of a hospital for the National Police Service (NPS) in Nairobi’s Embakasi area.

In a suit filed at the Environment and Land Court in Nairobi, the NLC wants Carlisle Development Company Limited stripped of ownership of a 28-acre parcel of land which it says belongs to the public and was allocated to the police in the 1990s and therefore unavailable for private allocation.

The commission has also raised concerns that Carlisle has limited recoverable assets, warning that taxpayers could permanently lose the money if the compensation is paid out and the title is later found to have been unlawfully acquired.

The case marks a new turn for a long-running dispute linked to compensation for land acquired for the Nairobi-Mombasa Standard Gauge Railway, with NLC now directly attacking the developer’s title after suffering setbacks before the Land Acquisition Tribunal and the courts.

The commission has sued Carlisle and joined the Kenya Railways Corporation, the National Police Service and the Attorney-General as interested parties.

Court documents show NLC is seeking cancellation of Carlisle’s title and a declaration that a compensation award of Sh1 billion issued in favour of the company is unenforceable because it was allegedly obtained through fraud and misrepresentation.

According to NLC, the disputed property was originally reserved for the NPS and had been earmarked for construction of a police hospital.

‘The suit property belonged to the second Interested Party and had been set aside for construction of the National Police Service Hospital whose designs were complete. Therefore, the suit property was public land and was not available for alienation to private entities,’ NLC states in its pleadings.

The commission argues that Carlisle’s claim is based on a letter of allotment dated August 27, 1998, whose conditions were never fulfilled within the required period. ‘The plaintiff states that the defendant did not make payment within the prescribed period and only produced a receipt dated December 19, 2014, approximately 16 years after the offer,’ he narrates.

It further claims that by the time the payment was allegedly made, the allotment had already expired and the land was no longer available for allocation.

According to the suit, Carlisle later obtained a title and proceeded to subdivide the land into 136 plots despite the property allegedly being reserved for public use.

The commission says the developer subsequently sought compensation after the government compulsorily acquired the land for the SGR project.

NLC acknowledges that compensation awards amounting to Sh1.654 billion were approved in May 2016 in respect of three parcels, including the disputed property, and that the Ministry of Interior later requested release of the funds to the NPS.

NLC warns that there is an imminent risk of losing public money if the award is enforced. The suit is pending hearing and determination.

However, the commission says Carlisle later moved to the Land Acquisition Tribunal and secured a judgment on February 7, 2025, awarding it Sh712.38 million in compensation and Sh18.75 million in general damages.

With interest accruing from the date of acquisition, NLC says the award has now risen to approximately Sh1 billion.

The commission argues that the tribunal was not told crucial facts concerning the land’s history.

Among the issues allegedly concealed were that the allotment had lapsed, the National Police Service had already been compensated for the property, and the land had been reserved for public purposes.

‘The Plaintiff states that the Defendant’s claim constitutes a fictitious and fraudulent claim against public funds,’ the suit says.

‘There exists a real and imminent risk that public funds amounting to over Sh1 billion will be lost irrecoverably if the defendant is paid,’ it says.

The commission further argues that Carlisle is a ‘briefcase company’ and may be unable to refund the money if the payment is later found to have been made unlawfully.

There is a small town in Laikipia where, this past week, residents stood at the gates of an air base holding placards. The United States, in partnership with the Kenyan government, intends to build a bio-isolation facility there at Nanyuki, a place to quarantine American citizens exposed to Ebola while working across the border in the Democratic Republic of Congo.

Washington has committed around $13.5 million toward Kenya’s preparedness. President William Ruto has defended the plan as one of 24 facilities, insisting it will serve Kenyans too. “We know what we are doing,” he said. “People should relax.”

The High Court was less relaxed. It suspended construction twice in one week. Kenya has recorded no Ebola cases. Neighbouring Uganda has reported nine, with one death. The strain driving the outbreak has no approved vaccine. And so the country argues, loudly, about a facility for a disease that has not yet arrived.

Beneath the noise sits an old and uncomfortable question. Who carries the risk, and can the people running the system be trusted to protect those who depend on it? This is not distant news for founders. It is a mirror. Because every founder is, in some quiet way, the system that has built no isolation unit for itself. We pre-position nothing. We assume the body will hold.

We tell ourselves we know what we are doing, that we can push through, that people should relax, even as the court of our own physiology begins issuing its suspensions. Sleep first. Then appetite. Then patience. Then the slow erosion of the very judgment the business depends on.

The founder is the single point of failure in a system that refuses to admit it has one. There is a moment most founders will recognise.

The body begins to signal that it needs to stop. Not next quarter. Now. And the system, the deals mid flight, the payroll due Friday, the investor who wants a call, answers with a flat and total no.

There is no surge capacity. No deputy who can hold the line. No facility prepared in advance for the day the founder goes down. So the founder overrides the signal, performs optimism and keeps moving. Until the signal becomes a symptom.

I have watched what happens when a key person simply disappears from a system for a few days. In any company, when someone goes quiet, the questions begin. Where is he? Is he alright? The absence itself becomes information.

Now multiply that by the weight a founder carries, and you begin to see the real exposure. When a founder goes dark, it is not one desk that falls silent. It is an entire web that begins to ask the same frightened question. This is the part we rarely map honestly. So let us build the full view of who is actually in play when one founder’s health fails.

The employees, whose salaries and whose own families sit downstream of decisions only the founder makes. The customers, who bought a promise of reliability. The suppliers waiting on payment.

The wider community that quietly treats the successful founder as a private insurance fund, a source of black tax and last resort rescue.

And then, almost always uncounted, the one stakeholder the founder forgets to list at all. Every other party gets a line in the risk register. The founder’s own body and mind rarely do.

This is where the operating system many of us carry becomes a diagnostic rather than a slogan. Strategically, indispensability is not strength. It is fragility wearing a crown. A founder who cannot be absent for two weeks has not built a company.

He has built a life support machine that happens to employ people. The strategic work is unglamorous and urgent. A second in command who is genuinely trusted. Authority distributed before a crisis forces the question.

In mindset, the trap is subtler. Indispensability feels like meaning. If everything flows through me, then I matter. But that is a scarcity story dressed as pride, and it quietly guarantees that the moment you fall, everything you built falls with you.

Spiritually, there is a harder reckoning. We say we are building so that others may stand. Yet a system designed around a single irreplaceable person is not built for others at all. It is a monument to our own importance. Legacy is not what collapses when you rest. Legacy is what holds.

So the lesson the Laikipia argument offers founders is almost literal. You do not wait for the disease to arrive before you build the capacity to isolate and recover. You build it while the skies are still clear, because clarity rarely precedes the crisis.

Name the person who can run things for two weeks, then leave for two weeks and let them. Write down what only lives in your head. Take the break before the body schedules it for you, on terms you will not get to negotiate.

Taking care of yourself is not stepping away from the business. For the founder, it is the most serious risk management there is.

The body, like the public, does not believe the press statement. It keeps its own records. And one day, quietly, without asking permission, it presents the bill. The question was never who depends on you. It is whether anything you built can still stand on the day you finally rest.

For millions of Kenyans living at the edges of wildlife habitats, conflict with humans is a perennial threat, attributed to the loss of lives and millions of shillings in damages to infrastructure and agricultural resources.

While official statistics are scant and largely outdated, animal conservation groups estimate that between 200 and 400 Kenyans have lost their lives in encounters with rogue wildlife in the past decade. Many more have been injured or maimed, and the cost to livestock and farmland has been equally devastating.

Analysts point to climate change, with its residual effects of prolonged droughts and floods that have decimated wildlife resources and brought humans and wild animals ever closer together.

The Kenya Wildlife Service last month attributed flooding in the Rift Valley lake ecosystem to rising hippo attacks in the adjacent human settlements, while the drought months of May-June have stoked human-wildlife conflict from elephants and leopards among other animals around large game reserves and forests.

At the same time, compensation has traditionally been slow, in part owing to the cumbersome process of chasing payments that impoverished victims are often subject to, and the lengthy claims verification exercise by state agencies.

In the last financial year, President William Ruto and officials from the tourism and wildlife sector released Sh950 million in compensation payments for victims of human-wildlife conflict, with the government pledging to fast-track future disbursements.

Victims of human-wildlife conflict sometimes wait for years before receiving compensation from the state, and the government pledged to reduce this to a maximum of 90 days.

In the current financial year and into the medium term, the Treasury has further set aside millions of shillings to construct or rehabilitate tens of kilometres of fencing around game reserves, sanctuaries and forests.

While these and other initiatives by the private sector and conservationists are a step in the right direction, they do little to address the underlying causes and long-term impact of human-wildlife conflict.

According to data from the Kenya National Bureau of Statistics, recent wildlife conservation efforts have shown positive outcomes. The population of elephants, Mountain Bongo, Black Rhino and Southern White Rhino has risen significantly from 36,300 thousand in 2021 to 42,100,in 2025.

The endangered 0 populations reached 1,059 and 1,041, respectively, in the same period.

Such numbers ensure that Kenya’s globally renown and rich wildlife diversity is maintained and continues to reap billions in tourism revenue for the country. However, all stakeholders need to adopt a more deliberate and strategic effort to ensure that wildlife resources also benefit the communities living next to them.

In 2024, a parliamentary committee found that rising cases of elephant and leopard attacks around the Rimoi Game Reserve in Keiyo North Constituency for example were exacerbated by inadequate community engagement and awareness in existing wildlife management strategies.

While the community had surrendered their land to set up the game reserve to benefit both the local population and wildlife conservation efforts, these benefits were yet to bear fruit.

Without tangible benefits to the local communities, farmers and homeowners resort to snares, poison and retaliatory killings of rogue wildlife to safeguard their crops and livestock.

This response is however considered more detrimental to the ecosystem while doing little to protect the community from future cases of HWC.

Another strategy that is increasingly becoming popular and gaining traction is building community enterprise resources to create a socio-economic buffer between humans and wildlife in areas prone to conflict.

One such example is the Predator’s Den initiative by regional lender I and M Bank together with partner organisations including German development agency GIZ and the Maa Trust at the Maasai Mara National Reserve.

The Predators Den is a rolling initiative to identify and provide business support to entrepreneurs so they can better position themselves to earn a decent income from resources within their communities such as the Maasai Mara National Reserve.

In the first edition of the initiative, 115 entrepreneurs were taken through training in business planning and financial literacy out of which 20 were shortlisted to pitch their business plans to a group of judges for a chance to secure funding.

Initiatives like this help to bolster community enterprises and address a crucial catalyst for HWC; supporting enterprises linked to conservation and thereby provide an economic incentive for communities living around wildlife resources to safeguard the same.

Other initiatives have seen communities living in areas prone to elephant attacks set up bee-keeping ventures at the edges of their farms.

This capitalises on the elephants’ aversion to bees and provides the community a viable economic opportunity in honey production.

According to data from the Kenya National Bureau of Statistics, KNBS recent wildlife conservation efforts have shown positive outcomes.

Kenya’s elephant population has risen significantly from 36,300 thousand in 2021 to 42,100 thousand in 2025.

One of the most successful films from the 1990s was the Usual Suspects, a crime thriller that introduced the world to Keyser Söze, one of cinema’s most iconic characters.

Both crime lord Söze and the inspiration for the film – a line from the police chief played by Claude Rains in the film noir classic Casablanca – have become synonymous with the futility of unquestioning reliance on blind orthodoxy.

For anyone facing an intractable challenge, rounding up the usual suspects is now shorthand for being seen to do something which everyone accepts will inevitably fail.

I was reminded of this at a recent meeting with a potential unicorn – a billion-dollar AI diagnostics business under pressure from investors to make strategic hires to ease the business’s path to a main market listing.

An interim team was running the place until the nominations committee – which included the former and current chief executives of a couple of high-profile life science companies – found a suitable replacement.

In the meantime, investors watched nervously from the sidelines in the manner of those who have bet the farm on a pair of sevens. What made the meeting remarkable was not the size of the prize, but what it revealed about the failure of the ‘usual suspects’ approach to life science recruitment in the AI age.

All the global executive search giants which currently dominate the C-suite recruitment landscape had failed to convince the investors that they could find suitable candidates. On review, their proposals showed that they were struggling to understand the scale – or even the nature – of the challenge.

That’s why they ended up in a room with me, a small European consultancy with specialist knowledge of the AI sector and 25 years of dirt under my fingernails of placing experts in medical technology.

The proposals I was up against offered the ability to find well-thought-of pharmaceutical and biochemistry generalists. This was fine, except the company needed actual AI diagnostics specialists.

The usual suspects making the pitch were looking to shoehorn in candidates they already knew as generic solutions and failed to show that they had listened to what the client needed or any empirical knowledge of the AI clinical diagnostics sector.

This failure is not entirely down to those well-known recruitment companies. The number of people, globally, who can run a billion-dollar AI clinical diagnostics business – who have experience of managing a listing or even a $100million-plus exit in the sector and, whilst they’re at it, run a 250-person enterprise going gangbusters on commercialisation – is perhaps only a couple of dozen.

This is not hyperbole; it is empirical reality.

The global AI diagnostics market is projected to reach $10.12 billion in 2026, growing at a compound annual rate of 46 percent over the next decade to $209.64 billion by 2034. Yet the talent pool, unsurprisingly, isn’t keeping pace. has not kept pace.

AI, in its current commercial form, has been around for less than a decade, and the number of people with demonstrable AI success in the medical technology sector is a vanishingly small fraction of the total employed.

This scarcity creates a fundamental problem for traditional search firms. Their model depends on volume, on ‘bench strength’, on having a Rolodex of names they can trot out for any assignment.

The usual suspects approach of offering the same polished, pedigreed executives who talk the talk and operate in all the right circles, the inconvenient truth is that looking good and being good are not the same thing.

This critique is not merely anecdotal. Research published in JAMA found that ‘health systems are deploying unproven algorithms with little evidence they improve outcomes – or even do no harm’.

Former FDA commissioner Robert Califf said: “I do not believe there’s a single health system in the United States that’s capable of validating an AI algorithm that’s put into place in a clinical care system.”

The same gap between appearance and reality that plagues AI algorithms plagues executive talent. The usual suspects look like they know what they are doing. That does not mean they do.

External voices

Don’t take my word for it, a 2025 report on talent strategies for precision diagnostics notes that ‘the competition for specialised talent is intensifying across biotech and pharma hubs’ and that ‘job postings for digital pathology, AI in diagnostics, and computational biology have doubled in the past two years’.

Remember that ‘job postings’ in this context are a single-digit percentage of actual need.

The report emphasises that ‘hybrid roles’, combining laboratory and computational backgrounds, are increasingly sought after, and that ‘navigating the regulatory landscape is crucial’.

Similarly, a 2025 analysis of the GenAI healthcare talent market found that “finding talent isn’t the real issue anymore. Managing it is where everything breaks down” .

The report notes that ‘healthcare context is hard to learn’ and that ‘generic contractors don’t bring this context – you spend weeks explaining basics only to churn through them after three months’.

This is precisely the problem with the usual suspects: they bring generic executive credentials but not specific domain expertise.

A recent peer-reviewed paper in the Journal of Laboratory and Precision Medicine emphasised that successful AI integration in laboratory medicine requires ‘multidisciplinary collaboration and change management’, noting that ‘building trust towards AI-assisted patient care’ was a crucial challenge.

The empirical advantage

The usual suspects approach is no longer fit for purpose because the traditional recruitment model is fundamentally misaligned with the reality of AI clinical diagnostics.

It offers scale when what is needed is specificity. It offers bench strength when what is needed is deep, longitudinal knowledge of a narrow pool. It offers polished executives from central casting when what is needed is someone who has done this specific thing before.

A different approach is needed. In the age of AI, companies with specific requirements need specialist recruiters with deep, hard-earned experience, who do not claim to know everything about everybody, but who know a few things about the people that matter.

This is not knowledge that can be acquired quickly. It is not knowledge that can be bought off the shelf. It is knowledge that has been earned, year by year, placement by placement in a sector where the talent pool is tiny and the stakes can be huge.

On what should have been an ordinary night, with assingments done and lights out, students at Utumishi Academy allegedly set their dormitory on fire. Nine suspects, all fellow students are in custody over the arson.

The instinct, as always, is to call this an isolated incident. To blame a few bad apples. To prosecute, suspend, and move on. We are good at that in Kenya. What we are less good at is asking the uncomfortable question underneath: why does this keep happening?

Because it does keep happening. Over the past two decades, Kenya has recorded dozens of school unrest incidents, from fires and strikes to destruction of property and physical confrontations.

Education authorities and school administrators agree: the cases are not just continuing. They are getting worse. There is a version of this story that blames teenagers for being teenagers.

Adolescents have always tested limits. That is part of growing up. But there is a real difference between a teenager who sneaks out to visit a nearby market and one who plans and carries out an arson attack on fellow students. That difference deserves a closer look.

A friend of mine, a parent, nurse, and psychologist, recently shared a reflection (in a WhatsApp group) that stopped many of us mid-scroll.

She wrote: “Bad adults are not an accident. They are a project. A project that started at age five when a child talked back to an adult and the parent laughed and said, ‘Huyu mtoto ni tough kama mimi.'”

She traced the path from the tantrum at 10 that no one addressed, to the teenager who disrespected a teacher while the parent came to school not to apologise but to argue, to the 28-year-old who cannot hold a job because nobody ever told them they were wrong. She called it “software installed early.” And she has a point.

But the software is being installed in a world that parents, teachers, and communities did not design and cannot fully control.

Think about what Kenyan students are navigating today. A school system that, for all its progress in expanding access, still struggles to meet the emotional needs of young people.

A Competency-Based Curriculum whose rollout has been, to put it kindly, uneven, leaving both teachers and students caught between old expectations and new demands that were never fully explained. Teachers who are overworked, undertrained in counselling, and managing classrooms of 60 or more students with very little support.

Then add social media. Not as a villain, because that framing is too simple, but as an accelerant. TikTok, Instagram, and WhatsApp show young people a very particular image of confidence: loud, fearless, and free of consequences. The teenager who goes viral for arguing with a teacher gets thousands of views. The one who sits quietly and studies gets nothing. That is not a small thing. It shapes what young people believe strength looks like.

Mental health is equally important and almost entirely absent from our school policy conversations.

According to the Kenya National Adolescent Mental Health Survey, over 44 percent of adolescents experienced mental health problems in the past year, with anxiety being the most prevalent.

Boarding schools, which include many of Kenya’s top-performing institutions, cut young people off from their families for months at a time. When you combine academic pressure, emotional isolation, and no structured psychological support, you are sitting on a powder keg. Sometimes, literally. Parents carry a large share of responsibility here.

The habit of defending children at all costs, captured in the familiar phrase Usimshoutie, has produced a generation that has never learned that correction is not cruelty.

Discipline is not punishment. It is teaching a child that choices carry weight, that other people matter, and that “no” is a complete sentence. These are lessons the world will eventually teach, but it does so without patience or mercy.

Utumishi suspects must face justice. The girls who were hurt deserve nothing less. But prosecution alone will not change the deeper problem. Here is what will, backed by evidence from countries that have faced this same reckoning.

Every boarding school in Kenya needs a trained counsellor on staff. Not a teacher doubling up between lessons. A qualified professional whose job is the wellbeing of students. Students need a safe and confidential way to flag concerns before they become crises. Not a suggestion box in a corridor. Finally, parents need practical support, not blame.

Britain launched a dedicated programme in 2018 to embed trained mental health practitioners in schools, an initiative that has since been independently evaluated and expanded.

Australia developed a national student wellbeing framework that formalised expectations around school-based wellbeing support. Kenya’s TSC and Ministry of Education need to ring-fence funding for this. It is not a luxury. It is infrastructure.

Social and emotional learning needs a serious home inside our CBC framework. Teaching children to manage frustration, raise a grievance calmly, and resolve conflict without reaching for destruction is not a soft skill. It is foundational.

A landmark study covering 213 school programmes in the United States found a 24 percent drop in antisocial behaviour among students who received this kind of learning. Singapore embedded it into its national character education programme. Finland introduced peer mediation in classrooms and recorded fall in school violence. These are working models, not untested ideas.

A real, trusted channel. Countries including New Zealand, Canada, and Sweden have invested in structured, confidential channels for students to raise concerns (such as anonymous student helplines, anonymous reporting platform, and legal requirement for every school to maintain a documented grievance pathway for students), and each has reported measurable improvements in early intervention. Kenya should treat this not as an afterthought but as policy.

Australia’s Triple P Positive Parenting Programme, tested in over 100 clinical trials across 25 countries, reduced difficult child behaviour by up to 40 percent and cut parental stress by a quarter. Scotland ran parenting workshops through schools and community centres and recorded measurable improvements in family relationships. When you equip parents with tools rather than shame them with judgment, things change.

None of this is beyond Kenya’s reach. What it requires is political will, budget priority, and the honesty to admit that suspensions and expulsions are not a strategy. They are a delay.

Our children are telling us something. The only question is whether we are ready to listen before the next dormitory burns.

Does how you think matter more than what you think? Can the best match often be a mismatch? In management meetings, is having everyone nod their heads in agreement, being congruent, always a good thing? Do we lust after the beauty of certainty when many business decisions are ugly, ambiguous and clouded? Do we tend to make up stories, relying more on wishful thinking rather than evidence?

‘It is wise to take admissions of uncertainty seriously’, Daniel Kahneman noted, ‘but declarations of high confidence mainly tell you that an individual has constructed a coherent story in his mind, not necessarily that the story is true.’

We love to be right in our management decision-making. After all, our reputation depends on it. Our brain’s survival default programming is ‘I am dead-on correct. Here are the facts and figures data to support my view.’ But what if the data is wrong, or the assumptions are false? Or, what happens when there is no hard data?

Is ‘don’t rock the boat’ the unspoken management mantra where you work? Most people don’t want to be seen as the disruptor who swims upstream against the current of conventional wisdom. After all, being the source of an upset or risking making a bad decision could impact one’s career prospects and ability to pay the mortgage. Isn’t it just better to keep quiet and just fit in?

Craving congruence – alignment

‘Congruence is a social science term for cultural ‘fit’ among an institution’s components – values, goals, vision, self-concepts, and leadership styles. Since the 1980s, congruence has been a pillar of organisational theory.

An effective culture is both consistent and strong. When all signals point clearly in the same direction, it promotes self-reinforcing consistency, and people like consistency,’ notes David Epstein.

‘Business school students are widely taught to believe the congruence model, that a good manager can always align every element of work into a culture where all influences are mutually reinforcing-whether toward cohesion or individualism. But cultures can actually be too internally consistent. With incongruence, you’re building in cross-checks,’ says psychologist Philip Tetlock, author of Superforecasting: The Art and Science of Prediction.

We often tend to think that ambiguity, having a degree of uncertainty, is a bad thing in corporate decision- making. It’s understandable why we crave certainty, like salty tortilla chips. We love consistency and alignment. Dealing with paradox is a pain.

But research has shown that ‘the most effective leaders and organisations had range; they were, in effect, paradoxical. They could be demanding and nurturing, orderly and entrepreneurial, even hierarchical and individualistic, all at once.

Philip Tetlock and Barbara Mellers showed that thinkers who tolerate ambiguity make the best forecasts; one of Tetlock’s former graduate students, University of Texas professor Shefali Patil, spearheaded a project with them to show that cultures can build in a form of ambiguity that forces decision makers to use more than one tool, and to become more flexible and learn more readily,’ writes Epstein.

Challenger – launch or delay?

Classic example of an ability to make a launch, to go ahead, or delay, when there is no data right in front of you, in unusual circumstances, is the Challenger space shuttle.

Harvard Business School turned this into one of it’s most popular case studies, ‘Carter Racing’, using the Challenger events, but disguising them in a case where a team has to decide in one hour before the big championship race of the season, whether to have the car enter the race, where the engine has failed unpredictably in the past.

In the Challenger disaster, an explosion of the US space shuttle orbiter Challenger happened shortly after its launch from Cape Canaveral, Florida, on January 28, 1986. The disaster claimed the lives of seven astronauts. It is probably the most significant event in the history of spaceflight in terms of its impact on the general public and on the US space programme.

Even deeper was the impact on NASA. Blinded by the success of the early Shuttle flights, the Agency’s management had developed a careless attitude toward warnings coming from the engineering community.

NASA had committed the Shuttle to an impossible schedule even before it entered service to ensure funding. Over time, NASA management had grown increasingly impatient with the technical delays that operating such a complex machine required. NASA believed an unusually cold Florida morning should not stop a billion-dollar programme with a track record of success.

‘The Columbia Accident Investigation Board concluded that NASA’s culture ’emphasised chain of command, procedure, following the rules, and going by the book. While rules and procedures were essential for coordination, they had an unintended negative effect.’ Once again, ‘allegiance to hierarchy and procedure’ had ended in disaster,’ writes Epstein. A little arguing, pushing back is not a bad thing. It’s a healthy essential.

For generations, the back-office routine of a growing business looked remarkably the same.

At the end of every month, finance teams braced themselves for a familiar ritual: hunting down missing paper receipts, manually reconciling scattered bank statements, and trying to patch together incomplete spreadsheets.

Today, this fragmented approach is no longer just an administrative headache-it is a critical business risk. In an economy that moves at supersonic speed, relying on manual records, delayed approvals, and opaque cash flows can leave leadership teams flying blind.

Without real-time financial data, budgeting becomes guesswork, fraud risks rise, and closing the books on time feels nearly impossible.

Because of this, forward-thinking enterprises are leaving outdated habits behind. They are embracing centralised, digital platforms to eliminate operational friction and build a clearer path toward scale.

Modern corporate finance platforms are transforming fragmented chaos into automated, predictable workflows.

Across various industries, these tools are helping to tackle operational pain points such as managing corporate spending across diverse channels like bank transfers, mobile money, or merchant pay bills and executing bulk payouts like monthly payroll, supplier settlements, or utility bills.

While the operational advantages of these digital financial solutions are clear, several issues continue to impede their adoption across the broader business ecosystem, and particularly among small businesses. These include digital and financial illiteracy, data security concerns, and implementation costs.

To truly unlock the macroeconomic benefits of digitised finance, a coordinated effort from multiple stakeholders is needed.

For starters, policymakers and financial authorities must create clear data protection standards and offer compliance incentives for small businesses to accelerate the transition away from cash-heavy operations.

Meanwhile, software developers must prioritise user-friendly interfaces alongside dedicated client support to ensure that non-technical business owners can confidently deploy digital tools with minimal onboarding training.

Additionally, service providers must offer cost-effective, predictable, and low transaction fees so that growing enterprises can scale without worrying about unexpected costs.

They must also ensure that the solutions they provide integrate smoothly with existing accounting software and local payment infrastructure (such as standard banking APIs and mobile network operators), to allow for easy data synchronisation and frictionless reconciliation.

Embracing digital tools is no longer merely an information technology upgrade; it is a vital strategic decision.

By supporting the development and adoption of robust financial tools, we can empower ground teams with instant access to funds, give finance teams full visibility over cash flows, and free leaders from administrative bottlenecks so they can focus on what matters most: growth and sustainable impact.

Fuel is not merely a commodity consumed at the pump. It is a strategic enabler of productivity, trade, mobility, food security, manufacturing, and public service delivery. When its price rises sharply, every sector of the economy as well as every household feels the strain.

Earlier this month, petrol in Nairobi rose to Sh214.25 per litre and diesel climbed to a historic Sh242.92 per litre. The immediate reaction from transport operators, businesses, and consumers reflected the central role fuel plays in determining both the cost of living and the cost of doing business.

The government’s subsequent engagement with stakeholders and measures aimed at easing diesel prices were therefore timely and welcome, but it was a response, not a solution. The real economic lesson from this crisis lies beyond the pump.

The numbers make our dependence plain.

According to the 2026 Kenya National Bureau of Statistics Economic Survey, the transport and storage sector alone consumed petroleum products valued at approximately Sh550.7 billion. National demand grew from 5.2 million tonnes in 2024 to 5.7 million tonnes in 2025, with diesel consumption exceeding 2.4 million tonnes.

Kenya imports every litre of its refined petroleum, leaving us fully exposed to global oil market volatility, geopolitical tensions, and the depreciation of the shilling, which ensures that even when global crude prices ease, relief at the pump is partial at best.

The consequences are particularly severe for small and medium enterprises (SMEs), which form the backbone of Kenya’s economy. Many lack the financial buffers necessary to absorb sudden cost increases.

Higher fuel prices translate directly into reduced profitability, constrained growth, and increased pressure on employment. Rising logistics and production costs also undermine Kenya’s competitiveness within the region. But 80 percent of Kenya’s workforce in the informal economy boda boda operators, market traders, jua kali artisans are hit harder still. Their losses do not appear in corporate accounts. They appear in fewer trips made, thinner margins, and children kept home when school fees cannot be met.

Perhaps the most pressing issue exposed by the fuel crisis is the shrinking disposable income of Kenyan households. Even before the recent fuel price increases, many salaried workers were already grappling with reduced take-home pay due to PAYE obligations, Affordable Housing Levy contributions, SHIF deductions, and higher NSSF rates.

The result is a narrowing of household purchasing power at precisely the moment when the prices of essential goods and services are rising.

A more progressive PAYE structure with wider tax bands and lower marginal rates would restore spending power, stimulate demand, and ultimately broaden the tax base. Protecting household incomes is not a welfare measure; it is an economic stabilisation tool.

The urgency of these interventions becomes clearer when viewed against Kenya’s recent progress in managing inflation. Inflation declined from 4.5 percent in 2024 to 4.1 per cent in 2025, while transport inflation fell from 5 per cent to 3.2 percent.

These hard-won gains are now directly at risk. Fuel shocks cascade into food prices, manufacturing costs, and public service delivery budgets at the county level.

Allowing them to pass through unchecked is a policy choice, not an inevitability.

What Kenya requires is a structural reform. A Strategic Petroleum Reserve Act should mandate a minimum 90-day domestic reserve, funded through a transparent, auditable levy. A price-smoothing mechanism of the kind operating in Chile, Malaysia, and India should prevent global volatility from being transmitted immediately to consumers.

and in full to consumers. A review of the fuel tax architecture should seek a balance between revenue mobilisation and economic competitiveness. Inefficiencies in fuel clearance and supply chains must be addressed.

At the same time, the country should accelerate investments in electric mobility, charging infrastructure, and strategic fuel reserves to strengthen resilience against future shocks.

Yet structural reform means little without accountability for what has already been collected. Parliament’s Public Investment Committee on Commercial and Energy Affairs recently directed the Auditor-General to carry out a forensic audit of revenue generated by the Kenya Roads Board from the fuel levy for the financial years 2020/21 to 2022/23, a direct response to a Ksh2.76 billion unreconciled variance between what KRB recorded as payable to the Kenya Urban Roads Authority and what KURA recorded as receivable.

The Auditor-General had already flagged that Road Maintenance Levy Fund receivables of Ksh5.18 billion ‘could not be confirmed.’ This is not an isolated discrepancy.

A prior special audit found that Ksh18.14 billion from the Petroleum Development Levy Fund was illegally redirected to road construction projects, while a further Ksh4.54 billion was transferred to the Ministry of Energy for purposes unrelated to petroleum. In 2024/25, KRA collected a record Ksh119.7 billion from the Roads Maintenance Levy alone. Motorists are paying more than ever. The question is whether they are getting what they paid for.

ICPAK’s role in this conversation extends beyond tax reform. As the professional body representing accountants in Kenya, we should be demanding accountability and transparency of the billions collected through fuel levies each year, including the Petroleum Development Levy and the Road Maintenance Levy. Accountability for public revenues is not merely a technical exercise. It is a civic and moral obligation, and we intend to pursue it.

Sustainable prosperity will come from a country that has built strategic reserves, reformed its price architecture, protected the purchasing power of its workers, and structured its institutions to manage energy as the national asset it is, not the revenue instrument it has become.

That is the real economic lesson from Kenya’s fuel crisis. The question is whether we are ready to act on it.

The Kenya Roads Board (KRB) has trimmed its roads bond target to Sh120 billion from Sh175 billion, revealing a reduced quantum of funding to reimburse bank loans taken to compensate contractors for pending bills.

The National Assembly Committee on Transport has revealed the reduced roads bond target but has not disclosed timelines for the floating of the securitised instrument.

The KRB had been expected to raise Sh175 billion from a bond by the first quarter of 2026, to repay commercial bank loans, which were obtained as a bridge facility to fast-track the clearance of road sector pending bills.

The government has turned to securitisation to clear the significant pile of unpaid funds to contractors amid a fiscal straitjacket, which has seen the majority of tax revenues channelled to debt service.

‘The committee noted that the securitisation process supported by the Sh5 per litre from the fuel levy has commenced,’ the Budget and Appropriation Committee observed, referencing submissions by its Transport counterpart, in a report considering the final 2026-27 budget estimates.

‘Once the bond is floated, it is expected to mobilise approximately Sh120 billion.’

The committee did not give the timelines for the bond, while the National Treasury also failed to disclose timelines for the paper’s issuance from recent enquiries by this publication.

President William Ruto, in March, said the government planned to sell the bond to the public and list the securities on the Nairobi Securities Exchange (NSE).

The KRB had previously proposed to mobilise funds for the bond from investment clubs.

Proceeds from the bond will settle a portion of an estimated Sh175 billion in bank loans, which helped clear historical road sector pending bills up to December 2024.

Investors in the bond are to receive payments from the securitised Road Maintenance Levy Fund (RMLF), where Sh7 of every Sh25 from the sale of a litre of petrol and diesel is hived off.

‘In the course of this year, we will be bringing to the market the road maintenance levy fund securitisation bond, which has enabled us to settle the pending bills crisis that had stalled road projects everywhere in Kenya,’ President Ruto said in March.

‘The RMLF has raised for us Sh175 billion, and we will be bringing it here (to the Nairobi Securities Exchange) so people can trade it as well.’

President Ruto also failed to set a date for the bond’s issuance.

Four commercial banks, including the Trade and Development Bank, KCB Bank Kenya, Absa Bank Kenya and UBA Kenya Bank, provided financing to clear the contractors’ arrears ahead of the issuance of the roads bond programme.

The Sh175 billion bond was to be the first of two, with the government mulling a second paper to raise Sh125 billion to cover future arrears to contractors in the sector.

The Cabinet approved the setting aside of Sh12 from the Road Maintenance Levy Fund (per sale of a litre of petrol or diesel) to facilitate payments to investors in the two bonds.

The settlement of road sector pending bills has enabled contractors to resume works, contributing to the rebound of the construction sector in 2025.

The construction industry grew by 6.8 percent in 2025, recovering from a 0.7 percent contraction in 2024 as per data from the Kenya National Bureau of Statistics (KNBS).

‘Cement consumption increased by 20.3 percent to 10,300 tonnes. The length of paved roads stood at 25,400 kilometres in 2025, while residential housing units completed by the State Department for Housing and Urban Development more than quadrupled, from 1,655 units in 2024 to 6,738 units in 2025,’ the KNBS said in its 2026 Economic Survey report.

The National Assembly has pushed for powers to inspect the securitisation of government revenues as the State leverages the innovation as a new avenue for projects’ cash.

Securitisation refers to the ring-fencing of specific revenue streams to pay lenders funding various government projects, with the money acting as collateral.

The Public Debt and Privatisation Committee has previously warned that the reliance on alternative funding approaches may create additional debt risks while hiding shortfalls in the availability of mainstream financing, like external debt.

The International Monetary Fund, meanwhile, wants Kenya to include funds raised from securitisation as part of the public debt stock.

The stock of national government pending bills stood at Sh471.7 billion in March 2026, rising slightly from Sh468.5 billion in December 2025.

Kenya plans to further securitise the yearly Sh32 billion Railway Development Levy Fund to help fund the extension of the standard gauge railway from Naivasha to Kisumu, and onwards to Malaba on the border with Uganda.

As visitors streamed through the aisles of this year’s International Floriculture Trade Exhibition (IFTEX) in Nairobi, many found themselves pausing at one particular stand.

Towering above arrangements of fresh-cut blooms was a life-sized horse sculpture crafted entirely from flowers. Built by Kenyan exporter Ole Engai Growers, the installation quickly became one of the exhibition’s most photographed attractions, drawing visitors eager to capture its intricate details and imposing presence.

Yet beyond its artistic appeal, the floral horse told a deeper story about the realities of Kenya’s flower industry. Despite growing pressures, the industry continues to grow in ambition and resilience.

“The inspiration came from the zodiac and the idea of energy, endurance and growth,” said Anjili Shah, the company’s co-director. “The horse symbolises all of that, and we wanted to translate it using the flowers we grow ourselves.”

Business growth

The concept was developed by the company’s creative management team and executed by a senior designer. The effort earned the company a Silver Award for Design Excellence at this year’s IFTEX.

Operating on approximately 29 hectares in Uasin Gishu County, the family-run enterprise produces premium cut flowers for export. While gypsophila remains its flagship product, the farm also grows a wide range of varieties, including delphiniums, asters, kangaroo paws, dianthus and kiwi mellow cultivars.

“We are essentially a family-run flower business, with partners working together,” said co-founder and director Sanir Shah. “Our main production is gypsophila, but we also grow a wide range of varieties depending on market demand.”

The company exports an estimated 1,200 tonnes of flowers annually, serving primarily European markets while expanding its presence in the Middle East. Like many flower exporters, however, its growth ambitions are increasingly shaped by factors beyond the farm gate.

Rising uncertainty

Behind the colourful displays and commercial deals at IFTEX lies an industry grappling with rising costs, climate uncertainty and intensifying competition.

Freight costs, in particular, have emerged as one of the biggest challenges.

“Five years ago, we were paying around $1.40 per kilo for freight. Now it is over $4 per kilo,” said Shah. “That is a massive increase. You can imagine the pressure on margins.”

For flower exporters, whose products must reach overseas markets quickly and in perfect condition, transport costs can determine profitability.

The Kenya Flower Council (KFC) says rising freight charges, coupled with fuel price increases, have become a major concern across the sector.

Speaking during the official opening of IFTEX 2026, KFC chief executive Clement Tulezi said escalating logistics costs were placing significant operational pressure on exporters.

According to the council, freight rates have risen from approximately $3.10 per kilogramme to nearly $5.00 per kilogramme in a relatively short period. During peak seasons, freight can account for more than 40 percent of total export costs.

The industry is also contending with higher fertiliser prices, increased production expenses and delayed tax refunds, factors that have squeezed cash flow for many growers.

Sh10 billion VAT refunds

KFC is urging the government to release pending VAT refunds worth approximately Sh10 billion and to consider tax relief measures on key agricultural inputs.

Exporters say countries such as Ethiopia continue to enjoy lower logistics costs, making it difficult for Kenyan growers to remain competitive in some international markets.

“We cannot easily increase flower prices because the market is very sensitive,” said Shah. “When freight costs increase, we are hit directly.”

Global events have further complicated operations. Conflicts affecting international flight routes have occasionally disrupted cargo availability, while changing weather patterns have made production planning increasingly unpredictable.

“This year, we expected a dry spell in January, February and March, but instead we had unexpected rain,” Shah said. “You cannot fully predict the weather anymore, and that affects everything from planting schedules to quality control.”

Despite these headwinds, Kenya’s flower industry remains one of the country’s most important export earners.

The sector generated approximately $845 million in 2025, contributing around 1.5 percent of GDP and maintaining its position as the largest segment within horticulture.

Kenya exports flowers to more than 60 countries, with roughly 70 percent destined for the European Union. The Netherlands remains the primary gateway into European markets, while demand from the Middle East, Asia and Eastern Europe continues to expand.

The 2026 edition of IFTEX, themed “Shaping the Future of Floriculture”, brought together more than 200 exhibitors from across the value chain, including breeders, growers, logistics providers and input suppliers.