One of the easiest things in the world is to mistake an outcome for a story. A beautiful home. A thriving business. A failed marriage. A child in an expensive school. A forty-year-old with no savings. Someone who seems to have it all. Someone who appears to have fallen behind. We see the destination and instinctively begin filling in the journey. Hardworking. Lazy. Disciplined. Irresponsible. Lucky. Entitled. Deserving. Wasteful. Perhaps the most dangerous thing about human beings is not that we judge one another. It is how quickly we become certain that our judgment is correct. Because every life has invisible expenses. Not just financial ones. The kind that never appear on a bank statement or a résumé. Some are chosen. Some are imposed. Some are wise. Some are costly mistakes. Most are a complicated mixture of both. One person reaches middle age with very little savings because they spent years paying school fees for younger siblings. Another because they repeatedly made poor financi...
I’m writing this because I’m angry — not the kind of anger that passes, but the kind that grows. The kind that keeps you up at night. I look at Nairobi today and I don’t recognize it. Not because of development. Not because of traffic. But because this city, this country — my home — is being bought up, piece by piece, by people who don’t love it the way we do . And the rest of us? We're being priced out, pushed aside, and told to be quiet. Studio apartments in Westlands are going for 9 million shillings. Who are they for? Certainly not for the ordinary Kenyan. And yet foreigners — many of them — are buying two, three, four houses like it’s a shopping spree, while the people who grew up in these neighborhoods are priced out, forced to the outskirts, or locked into eternal renting. And when we speak up, we’re told, “Hii nchi si yetu?” I see the face of this country changing — and it’s not just cultural. It’s ownership. It’s power. It’s the future slipping out of our hands. To Those...