Category: Business Daily

Kigen manages a payments team in Westlands, Nairobi and treats a simmering compliance glitch like a public relations headache rather than an actual internal staffing people problem.

He delays disciplinary steps for a popular salesperson who bent the firm’s client onboarding rules then calls a baraza that offers platitudes to the same errant salesperson, while assigning the external legal counsel to rewrite a policy procedure that no one reads in order to keep them still in compliance.

‘This place brings out the best in me,’ says an excited Rikki Stein, a music industry veteran best known as having been the manager of Nigerian Afrobeat legend, Fela Anikulapo-Kuti.

We are literally on the stage at the New Afrika Shrine in Lagos, as a local band belts out an Afrobeat number; this is the sound that Fela bequeathed the world. It is 11 pm, and there is still a long night ahead, as the week-long festival, Felabration, is just getting started.

Each night during the week of Fela’s birthday (October 15) the Shrine is literally a riot of culture: live music, talent shows, fashion, food, and drink, the annual festival started by Fela’s eldest daughter, Yeni, in 1998 to celebrate her father’s legacy. ‘I left here at 3am last night and the party was still bubbling,’ remarks Stein, as he gestures at his reserved space marked Rikki’s Corner. Even at the age of 83, he still gets up to do a jig to the rhythm every so often.

Among the international acts performing at this year’s Felabration was the American singer, percussionist, and activist, Madame Gandhi. The Berklee College of Music graduate in sound design plays a hybrid of pre-recorded electronic beats off her computer with live drums and saxophones.

In July, the musician whose given name is Kiran Gandhi, was the opening act for Femi Kuti during the US leg of his Journey Through Life tour. It is not your classic Afrobeat style, but maybe this fusion of percussion and electronic beats is the direction that the genre will take in the years to come.

According to Stein’s 2024 memoir Moving Music, Femi and his elder sister Yeni conceived the idea of building the New Afrika Shrine as a monument to their father’s memory and to replace the original Shrine that was burnt down during an assault by the Nigerian military in 1977.

Using their share from an advance paid by Universal Music for a licence deal for the release of Fela’s remastered catalogue, they designed and built the ‘perfect club’. ‘Five times the size of the original Shrine.from its façade to its deepest recesses, it is imbued with Fela’s spirit,’ writes Stein.

Right from the street in the bustling Lagos suburb of Ikeja that leads to the New Afrika Shrine, the scene is a frantic hub of activity as food and drink trucks line up the dimly-lit street, pumping loud music while hawkers line the pavements through the night.

The venue itself contains a huge stage, large dancing area, with additional sitting space upstairs. The walls are adorned with portraits of Fela, in a typical defiant pose, along with those of other revolutionaries like Patrice Lumumba, Thomas Sankara, Nelson Mandela, Kwame Nkrumah, Marcus Garvey, and Fela’s mother, Funmilayo Ransome-Kuti. The matriarch was a fierce pan-African activist in her own right who championed women’s political and economic rights.

Across the city’s island, the Afrobeat Rebellion: Fela Anikulapo-Kuti, an exhibition that was first mounted at the Philharmonie de Paris in 2022, has come home to Lagos to coincide with Felabration.

Lead curator Seun Alli and her team, with the support of the Kuti family, have reimagined the exhibition for the local audience. ‘This is an important exhibition to understand the life and times of Fela, says Femi, as he gets on stage, to perform at the Ecobank Pan African Centre, which hosts the exhibition until December 28, 2025. The performance had been organised for delegates attending the Forum Creation Africa led by Nigerian Minister for Art, Culture, Tourism and Creative Economy Hannatu Musawa and French Foreign Minister Jean-Noël Barrot.

Femi’s Positive Force is an elaborate group, reminiscent of his father’s band, complete with a horn section, guitars, percussion, and three female dancers in bright multicoloured costumes. He switches between the alto-saxophones and keyboards, instruments that he started playing in his father’s band at the age of 16.

‘I am 63 and completely satisfied. I’ll go down with a smile,’ he says in some of the banter between songs in the course of his 45-minute set. His set is a career retrospective, from the potent political anthem Truth Don Die to crowd favourite Beng, Beng, Beng, to Work on Myself from his latest album. ‘When we write, we don’t listen to our own lyrics,’ he says while introducing the latter. ‘If I can change myself, become a better father, musician, and have more humility, be serious with work, then the change begins there.’

The exhibition itself is an outstanding multi-sensory timeline through Fela’s life, his music, and his politics, packed with letters, photographs, magazine and newspaper clippings, vinyl records, audio-visual, and instruments like the massive Gbedu drum from Fela’s Yoruba community that he introduced to his band in the 1980s

Visitors see his costumes, notably the trademark embroidered jackets, and in a hilarious twist, a section dedicated to the underwear that Fela was often pictured wearing when holding court in his self-proclaimed Kalakuta Republic.

It is left up to Femi to sum up his father’s idiosyncrasies: ‘Was Fela perfect? I’ll never lie that he was. But he was a genius, and God gave him the ability to write songs that are monumental, historical.’

My brief in this space is to comment on topical business and economic issues. But I would be burying my head in the sand if I didn’t say something about Mr Raila Odinga, who passed on in India last week – an event already rippling through boardrooms and markets alike.

Indeed, this is one of those rare moments when commentary in the business and economics space isn’t a digression but almost a duty – because this passing will ripple across many sectors.

The expiry of the African Growth and Opportunity Act (Agoa) on September 30, 2025, closed a chapter in US-Africa trade relations that began in 2000. For 25 years, Agoa functioned as a preferential market access gateway to the US for qualifying sub-Saharan African countries.

Its termination, abrupt in its immediate effects and uncertain in its future trajectory, has triggered alarm across governments, exporters and workers whose businesses were built around duty-free access to the vast US market.

At the same time, the African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA), the continent’s flagship integration project, is still trying to find its operational stride. The intersecting forces of Agoa’s end and AfCFTA’s slow start create both short-term shocks and long-term opportunities. News reports and government statements in the last days of September 2025 warned of potential job losses in the tens to hundreds of thousands, particularly in concentrated apparel hubs. Employers facing sudden demand contraction may cut shifts, lay off workers, or close facilities altogether.

The termination raises the business risk premium for investors considering African light manufacturing. Importers that rely on secure, long-run preferences may shift production to countries with more predictable access, accentuating capital flight or investment freezes.

The aggregate macro effect could be lower export earnings, higher unemployment in affected towns, and a weakening of nascent domestic industrial linkages that had begun to form around export hubs.

If Agoa’s end is a shock, the AfCFTA that has been formally operational since 2021 and ratified by over 50 African states is the continent’s most credible platform for a collective response. Five years into implementation, AfCFTA’s results are mixed. Why has it had a slow start?

Africa’s transport and logistics networks are fragmented and expensive. Poor roads, congested ports, slow border procedures, and weak customs cooperation hamper intra-African shipping and raise transaction costs, undermining trade even where tariffs have been reduced.

Overlapping regional blocs, divergent standards, and differing national regulations create unpredictable trade friction. Companies attempting cross-border trade encounter dozens of different procedures and certifications.

Negotiated phasing, special treatment for sensitive sectors, and long transition periods for some member countries mean that full tariff liberalisation is slow because many products remain on exclusion lists or protected schedules.

Many countries lack sufficient upstream producers, finance, and standards compliance to support cross-border value chains. Without firms that can source inputs regionally, tariff liberalisation alone will not spark rapid intra-African trade.

Implementing AfCFTA requires harmonised customs systems, dispute settlement, rules of origin frameworks, and enforcement. This is a heavy coordination task for 55 states with different capacities and priorities. Progress is uneven and often dependent on donor-funded technical assistance.

These obstacles explain how AfCFTA, despite wide ratification, still sees intra-African trade levels well below the intra-EU or intra-ASEAN comparatives thereby leaving a gap that Agoa has helped to fill for some exporters.

However, it can be leveraged purposefully to soften the Agoa shock and create more resilient, African-centered value chains. Going forward there are a few practical proposals.

Encourage apparel and agro-processors to re-source inputs regionally so that margins are captured inside Africa. The AfCFTA Guided Trade Initiative has already piloted tariff concessions for selected products and scaling this could create viable intra-African supply webs that substitute some lost US demand.

Complex or lengthened rules of origin hamper firms that previously relied on Agoa’s simpler regimes. AfCFTA institutions should prioritise simplified, predictable rules for sectors displaced by Agoa’s end and coordinate mutual recognition of standards.

African institutions, notably regional development banks and national export-promotion agencies, should provide bridge financing, export credits and working capital to affected factories to avoid mass layoffs while firms retool for regional markets. Public procurement can also be used to guarantee demand during transition.

Investment in ports, rail corridors, and single-window customs systems reduces trade costs. Donor programmes and public-private partnerships must be redirected to fast-close critical bottlenecks that make intra-continental trade commercially viable.

Exporters need help upgrading to meet regionally harmonised standards. Technical assistance for factory modernisation, quality labs and workforce skilling will raise the competitiveness of African manufacturers across African markets and beyond.

African negotiators should pursue reciprocal, rules-based agreements with major partners not to replicate Agoa but to secure access that is more predictable over the medium term. While AfCFTA builds continental market capacity, parallel diplomatic efforts can stabilise external demand as industries transition.

Political economy: windows of urgency and opportunity

AGOA’s expiry is a political inflection point. For governments, private sector actors and multilateral partners, the question is how quickly Africa can convert short-term emergency responses into durable industrial strategy.

AfCFTA offers the institutional architecture but only if its operational deficits are treated with urgency and financed at scale. The alternative is prolonged deindustrialisation in places that had just begun to industrialise.

Agoa’s termination is a shock, not the end of Africa’s trade story. The continent must not treat the loss of US preferences as solely a diplomatic challenge; it is a policy design, industrial strategy and infrastructure challenge. AfCFTA will not fully substitute the US market overnight, but it is the most powerful endogenous mechanism Africa has to create larger, denser regional markets that can absorb productive capacity, build value chains, and reduce vulnerability to unilateral preference shifts.

Success demands accelerated AfCFTA implementation from simplified rules and targeted finance to hard logistics investment and urgent international cooperation to ensure a soft transition for workers and exporters.

If African governments and partners respond with coherent, well-funded strategies, the end of Agoa could become the painful catalyst for a more self-reliant, regionally integrated industrialisation.

Mweni runs a small Nairobi team in a Riverside Drive tech firm. Over the years, she treats work pressure like a private battle.

If and when a key client threatens to leave the firm, she pivots and cancels all her staff one-on-one meetings, but keeps her client retention battle plan in her head without sharing it, and powers through working extra hours and nights alone to try to remedy the problem.

Paul Onditi has long been regarded as one of Kenya’s most distinctive contemporary artists. The 45-year-old painter and printmaker moved to Germany in 2000 to study at the Hochschule fr Gestaltung Offenbach am Main, returning home a decade later to a vibrant but evolving Nairobi art scene.

Two years after his return, he held Another World is Possible at the Alliance Française, the exhibition that launched his career.

Some empires are built with five-year plans and venture capital. Wawira Njiru began with 25 hungry children and a kitchen in Ruiru. Fresh out of university in Australia with a nutrition degree and no clear plan, Wawira wanted to do something, anything, for the children back home in Ruiru. School feeding was not the dream. It was simply what urgently needed to be done at that time.

That was 2012. Today, Food4Education feeds 600,000 children daily across 1,500 schools in 13 counties. The organisation processes 100 tonnes of ingredients every day and has delivered over 100 million meals. It employs 5,000 people. Some of those original 25 children now work for her.

A few weeks before his demise, former Prime Minister Raila Odinga argued fervently for the discontinuation of the Constituency Development Fund (CDF). He weighed in several times as Parliament scrambbled to find ways to circumvent the law and keep the fund.

Opinion about CDF is mixed, depending on who you ask. There is a good number of people who believe CDF has been a force for good, and as such, the government should find a way to keep it.

Many diehards of the fund argue that it has empowered local communities to decide and invest in development projects that affect their lives. They see it as a lifeline to the poor, delivering public goods, filling in where county or national governments have failed.

Banks have begun to recognise music as more than just art. They are exploring ways to treat songs, catalogues, and royalties as collateral for loans, a move that could unlock long-awaited financing for the creative industry.

For decades, musicians have self-financed their careers, paying out of pocket for studio sessions, production, promotion, and distribution. Without formal credit structures, many musicians and producers are unable to make songs due to financial challenges.

A fish processor has suffered a setback after the High Court dismissed its application to reinstate a case where it was challenging the termination of a Sh1.49 billion contract for a proposed ultra-modern fish hub at Liwatoni in Mombasa.

The case had been referred for arbitration in accordance with a clause under the conditions of the contract.