I have attended serious events, and there is currently a surge in discussions about AI tools. Directors are talking about how they use AI, as are many other professionals. While learning about AI is good, let us take a look at human resources departments, which are responsible for recruiting people. Can we really trust AI, a system, to understand human values?

A department advertises a position. I have no problem with the job description being written entirely using AI. However, when people express interest in working for a particular company, the department may use AI to shortlist candidates. Remember that AI can produce misaligned responses and may be biased or discriminatory.

As we move towards a world that seeks gender balance and greater automation in the hiring process, we must consider the risks. In the past, organisations often hired more men than women, and AI might therefore learn to favor résumés containing terms more commonly used by male applicants than by their female counterparts. This could mean assigning higher scores to words such as “executed” over “collaborated.” The problem lies in the systems from which AI learns. As a result, its decisions may conflict with human values in subtle ways.

The organisation then shortlists applicants and invites them for interviews.

Next, the department drafts interview questions using artificial intelligence. Nowadays, you can walk into an interview and almost predict the questions coming your way. There is little creativity, and the whole exercise becomes boring.

“Tell us about yourself.”

“Why do you think this position aligns with you?”

“Tell us about a time you solved an issue that required an agent response.”

“Do you have any questions for us?”

The answers to these questions are already expected, and you can hardly tailor them to your own style if doing so might seem unfamiliar to the interviewer.

For example, you have asked me to tell you about myself. But do you really want to hear that I enjoy a gin and tonic on a Saturday evening or that I love making Negroni cocktails for my friends as we talk through various issues? Or would you want to hear that I was once fired, but changed my ways and learned from the experience?

Perhaps they do not want to hear that good people can also have done bad things. Instead, we sit there for a whole 30 minutes, pretending to be something we are not and telling each other what we think the other person wants to hear.

When a department structures its recruitment process around programmed answers and predictable stories, it creates a single point of failure. There are many things we will never get to say to one another. I cannot be completely honest because honesty might ruin my chances of getting the job.

When a recruiter asks, “Do you have any questions for us?”, they expect something programmed, such as, “What are the growth opportunities within your organisation?” Now I am sitting there pretending that career growth is my primary concern when I have not even secured the job. That is deeply dismaying.

Interview questions should be simple and allow candidates to express themselves naturally.

“What makes you happy?”

“When you started university, why did you choose the course you studied?”

“Tell us about the first job you secured. We know you were still learning, so tell us about a time you failed and what you learned from the experience.”

“What is your take on effective altruism and human prosperity?”

“Is there a professional certification or further study you would like to pursue?”

“Tell us about where you have worked before. What did your typical working day look like?”

“We are a company that promotes work-life balance. What is your favourite coffee, and what do you enjoy doing on weekends?”

When you ask simple, open-ended questions, people tend to reveal more about themselves and develop trust in the person interviewing them. Their answers can also provide insights relevant to what you are trying to assess.

After the interviews have been conducted, the department turns to another AI-generated checklist to identify the right candidate to hire. Once again, this could be a mistake. Human beings have spoken to one another, yet AI is left to make the final choice, even though it did not hear the candidates speak or experience the conversations firsthand.

Hiring employees using AI without meaningful human judgment could lead to failures that an organization will pay for later. It is the high time we focus on substance over credentials. Where buzzwords and bullshitting has no place and where applicants are given 100% human treatment during the hiring process.

On September 12, Dario Amodei published a tweet explaining the importance of slowing down the development of frontier AI. Sam Altman quoted the tweet in agreement. Indeed, prioritizing safety was an important step.

His tweet read as follows

“I agree with Dario that we need to pace the frontier. This has been a primary topic of discussions we’ve had at OpenAI in recent weeks.”

“Committing to having independent evaluators with employee-like access is a great idea, and we will do the same. We’ll have more to share soon.”

Declaring a commitment to AI safety is easy when that commitment comes at little cost. The real test comes when acting on it requires difficult trade-offs, sacrifices in competitiveness, or a willingness to slow down. For frontier AI labs, it is not what they say about safety that ultimately matters, but what they are willing to do when safety and their interests pull in opposite directions.

Over the last week, three AI safety researchers;Mikita Balesgni, Jasmine Wang, and Tomek Korbak, came forward publicly and made statements regarding what they described as unfair dismissals. Mikita Balesgni noted that he believed they had been fired for prioritizing safety over OpenAI’s short-term interests. Jasmine Wang also discussed the reasons she had been given for their dismissals. She stated that OpenAI was attempting to discredit them internally by providing explanations that did not add up and had not been given to the three researchers in writing. She also made an important claim: that OpenAI had pushed other former employees out under suspicious circumstances.

In early September, Mr. Altman stated, “Committing to having independent evaluators with employee-like access is a great idea, and we will do the same.”

Tomek Korbak had been communicating with METR, an external evaluator. Surprisingly, he was reportedly fired for doing so. This raises questions about the nature of OpenAI’s collaboration with METR and whether employees are permitted to share relevant safety information with external evaluators.

These incidents warrant a moment of reflection. How much confidence should we place in frontier AI labs’ claims about their commitment to safety when their actions may tell a different story? Ultimately, safety commitments must be judged not only by what labs publicly declare, but also by the decisions they make when those commitments are put to the test.

Questions Worth Asking About AI Frontier Labs and Safety

Frontier AI labs understand that their decisions can have far-reaching consequences. They have also been hiring philosophers. Can we trust that these philosophers have the autonomy to question decisions made by the labs and raise concerns about their approaches to AI development?

Based on the accounts provided by the dismissed employees, it would be naive to assume that they necessarily have such autonomy. I wonder whether these labs, given their substantial financial resources, could hire people to perform less consequential tasks simply to demonstrate to the wider public that they care about humanity, without necessarily giving those individuals meaningful influence over important decisions.

What are the actual job descriptions of AI safety researchers and engineers at frontier AI labs? Are their contributions overshadowed by other priorities? Are they allowed to provide input, and are they involved in decisions concerning the development of increasingly capable systems?

Frontier AI labs have expressed support for independent evaluators such as METR, but these incidents raise questions about whether such commitments are straightforward to implement. Are evaluators given sufficient information to assess the risks posed by AI systems? What information should they have access to, and are there legitimate limits on what can be shared with them?

Safety should never be treated as optional; it should be considered in every decision. I believe AI could change the world for the better, but we must exercise caution throughout the development process.

I don’t believe that AI will turn out wrong, we just don’t know enough to confidently say that it won’t, and our work at the moment remains to collect the fragmented knowledge and the work ahead should keep people at the center.

Formula one is a sport that I love. Imagine that two drivers are competing, in a competition, the goal is to win and to win massively. The route is full of bends and one car is approaching a sharp turn at a high speed, what becomes the danger is the driver’s focus on solely winning rather than the driver recognizing that the sharp bend is almost and his calculations to maneuver are not well thought.

Artificial Intelligence may be headed in a similar direction. Here, I’ll discuss a few instances I have been thinking about lately.

As a collective, the world must become a better place than it was yesterday, and that the measurement of progress. In the AI ecosystem, the world continues to make much capable systems, the companies involved are also competing to be better and that is by building stronger models and much innovative systems, the government also want to lead and have a technological upper hand, and researchers struggling and working round the clock to understand the complex systems that are becoming more capable; the thought is getting to a point of, “ How do we outdo ourselves? How can we get better than company X?” Generally, there is so much going on, And competition is a good thing as it keeps human curios and always looking.

Are we moving so fast enough to understand the shifts along the way?



Human are known to leave a room for mistakes
Two neighbors, Jared and Muchiri, live on the same floor of an apartment building. Jared lives in apartment number 101, while Muchiri lives in apartment number 102. A bad evening happens to Muchiri as he is stressed and he gets distracted. He gets to the apartment and instead of heading to 102 which is his apartment, he opens door 101 which belongs to Jared.

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He meets Jared who is inside.

A reasonable response will be asking, “ What’s happening?” Jared knows that Muchiri is his immediate neighbor and mistakes do happen. So, they have a short discussion about the issue, Muchiri apologizes and the situation comes to a close. Muchiri heads out.

Here, the most important thing is, there is a room for interpretation. There is a room for getting to the bottom of it, “what may have led to such a mistake?”

“He is my neighbor, and a confusion is bound to happen”

That’s what human is. Interpreting situations, distinguishing a mistake and an intentional act, forgiving shortcomings and asking questions before conclusions.

Now imagine automated systems making high level decisions where an outcome of that mistake might be fatal.

I was imagining military systems designed to identify unauthorized movements, detect threats or respond quickly to an awkward behavior. What happens when the systems respond to counter a misinterpretation. One that doesn’t perfectly fit into the intention? It would be a bad situation if they possess nuclear control.

Modern AI can understand context and a very enormous amounts of information. The problem is that Human values are difficult to be reduced to a single objective, as an approach used today may not be used in the next hour, the next day, human are diverse. Security matters but so does proportionality, while speed matters so does caution and the need to recognize an innocent mistake.

When machines begin making high-stake decisions, how much room for human error should we preserve?

When the finish line becomes more important than the ditch
Yesterday I watched a short, which was about car racing and I loved how the instructor (co-driver) guided his driver when they were almost overtaking the car that was ahead “don’t look at him, look at the space that exists “ On another instance, the driver wanted to overtake but the space was narrow and the instructor ruled it as not safe at that particular moment, they slow down and wait for a much straighter line and then, overtake safely.

What if , the driver had interpreted that slowing down would mean loosing?

Development of Artificial intelligence is the same.

Ai companies exist under competition and a geopolitical environment where a breakthrough means; economic value, strategic value and national security insinuations. The incentive structure may be complicated, if one company slows down, steps back to evaluate, while the other progresses in the development, the first may fear falling short.

Ai companies do care about safety, worth noting, but can they afford to slowing down.

Who is willing to brake? Who is willing to step back and evaluate the development?

Treacherous turn

Could AI systems, in the future , be capable of pursuing objectives that do not align with people’s interests. I mean during training, the system may behave well and when not monitored, the goal changes. Similar to individuals who only obey the rules and basic human decency when being watched perhaps by police or fellow beings. After the police leave the scene, the incentive to obey the rules may change.

Today, there is no evidence that the systems are waiting to deceive humanity, but the risk is worth an examination.
Considering football or basketball.

Two teams during a match, they agree that so long as the rules are followed, the teams are willing to accept defeat and respect the outcome, considering they might have a chance to practice and they may emerge winners in the next competition.

As AI systems become more autonomous, it’s worth considering creating the systems that can accept defeat and compromise.

Progress sometimes means going back

I believe that the most important principle in AI development is; that progress does not always lean forward. We imagine it as a very straight line, where the first version is followed by the second, the third and then the fourth, where capabilities increase upwards. But the development is more, a like, that of a journey through unfamiliar territories.

We should take two steps forward and one backwards sometimes.

Not because we witnessed failure.

Because we discovered something that needs reassessing, more innovation, or perhaps something that requires an extra thought.

Where questions have a room

What surprised us?

What went wrong?

Did the safety mechanism work?

What don’t we understand from what we have at hand?

Should we move forward, modify, pause or reverse?

The mistake would be division, where two camps are created; Pro AI ( those that believe AI will change the world) and con Ai ( those who believe that AI might destroy the world)

Ai could increase human potential and expand what they are capable of accomplishing.

Acknowledging the possibilities does not require ignorance of the risks however.

As the system becomes more powerful, a dire need exists , the need to understand what is being built, how it’s being deployed and whether we have the capacity of keeping up with the race.

The road ahead may have bends, and that doesn’t mean that driving should stop, but we should keep driving but driving safely.

What I am here to talk about is something different. I am here to talk about the behaviour and the victimhood that some of those who experience racism, or who believe they are experiencing it carry with them. About the lens through which certain incidents are being interpreted. About the question of whether, in our entirely justified alertness to racism, we have sometimes begun seeing it where it does not exist, and what that costs us.
A while back, Larry Madowo (Kenyan and CNN journalist) shot a video in Buenos Aires, Argentina. He made a comment that he had been walking for over an hour without encountering a single Black person. The observation was made with a particular energy, the energy of someone noting an absence that felt significant, that felt like it meant something about the space he was in. I want to assess this logically. Argentina has a specific demographic reality. It is a country shaped by European immigration, by Spanish colonial history, by a particular cultural identity that is its own and distinct. Walking through Buenos Aires and not encountering many Black people is not evidence of racism. It is evidence of demographics, of history, of migration patterns, of how populations are distributed across a vast continent.

What struck me about the observation was the path chosen. The path of noting what was absent, who was not there, rather than engaging with what was present. Argentina has a culture of extraordinary richness. The rodeo tradition. The beef culture. The tango. The particular warmth of a society that takes its evenings seriously and its meals even more seriously. These were all there, waiting to be observed and appreciated. The choice to lead with the absence of Black faces is, to me, a choice that tells us something, not about Argentina, but about the lens through which the observation was made.

Is it victimhood? Is it looking for a reason to feel inferior?
I do not want to be harsh about it. But I do want to ask the question honestly. Because I think it is a question worth asking.

Before the World Cup began, the United States played a friendly match against Ghana. After the match, as players exchanged jerseys and greeted each other, one of those beautiful moments that remind you what sport is actually for, Christian Pulisic was approached by a Ghanaian player. They greeted each other. And then Pulisic wiped his hand on his shirt. A tweet from a Ghanaian went viral. Pulisic had wiped his hand after greeting a Black player. This was racism. This was evidence of contempt. This was something that needed to be called out.

Let me offer a different interpretation. Sometimes, after ninety minutes of football, your hands are sweaty. Sometimes you greet someone and immediately feel the dampness on your palm and you feel slightly embarrassed about it and you wipe it on your shirt. I have done this. You have probably done this. It is a thing that happens to human beings who have been physically active and whose hands produce moisture.

The question I want to ask is this, are we always looking for a reason to be inferior? Are we always living slightly in the future, where racism is always incoming, so that we can point to it when it arrives, and so attuned to its arrival that we see it in a wiped hand after a football match? Are we always scanning for the evidence rather than enjoying the golden moments in front of us? That is not vigilance. That is a scarcity mindset applied to human interaction.

When Egypt played Iran at the round of 32 recently, the VAR intervened to rule out an Iranian goal. The Egyptian coaching staff was satisfied. The technology had done its job. Yesterday, Egypt lost a decision. Salah went down in the box. The VAR reviewed it. The review showed that Alvarez had clearly won the ball before Salah stumbled onto his leg and fell. No penalty was awarded. The FIFA rules on this are not ambiguous. The Egyptian team’s response was to cry racism. The reason they were not getting the calls, the suggestion went, was because they were African.

But the question that needs to be asked is simple and direct.
Why was the VAR not racist when it intervened to disallow the Iranian goal?

Why did the technology become a tool of racism only when it produced a result that went against Egypt?

Should penalties be awarded to teams that feel aggrieved rather than to teams that have actually been fouled?

Should the rules of the game bend for the perceived identity of the players involved?

These are not rhetorical questions designed to dismiss racism in football, which exists and has been documented extensively. They are genuine questions about consistency. About what it means to apply a racism accusation selectively, in moments of loss rather than moments of gain. That selectivity undermines the accusation. It makes it harder to be taken seriously precisely when it needs to be taken seriously most.

I have seen videos online, disturbing ones, of Black men approaching white men and demanding they do twenty push-ups to prove they are not racist. The framing is presented as confrontation, as accountability, as a calling out of privilege. What it actually is, in my assessment, is a scarcity mindset made visible. It is looking for a reason to label. It is looking for a reason to perform inferiority, to put another person at the edge of a dynamic that they did not choose to enter, and to define the entire interaction by difference rather than by the humanity that both people share.

Racism is real. The push-ups prove nothing about it. What they demonstrate is something about the person demanding them, a need to establish a power dynamic through the accusation rather than to address genuine injustice through genuine means.

There is far more that unites humanity than divides it. The question is which reality we choose to look for and what we find when we look.

Victimhood is not the same as being a victim. Being a victim of racism is a real thing that happens to real people with real consequences. Victimhood is what can develop afterward which is a lens, a default interpretation, a way of moving through the world that processes ambiguous events as confirmation of the worst rather than engaging with their full complexity. The cost of that lens is high. It is paid in missed experiences, in misread interactions, in relationships that never form, in beautiful things never seen because you were looking for what was absent rather than engaging with what was present.

Look at things with optimism and hope. Not the blind optimism that ignores the real work ahead. Not the hope that pretends racism is solved or that the grievances of history are settled. But the stubborn thing inside that insists, despite all the evidence to the contrary, that something better awaits, so long as we have the courage to keep reaching, keep thinking, and keep building on the progress that has already been made.
There is far more that unites us. Choose to look for it.

Till the next one. I appreciate you reading my thoughts.

Not because they are careless. Not because they are unintelligent. But because education, as it has been designed and delivered across most of the developing world, has almost nothing to say about money. We produce graduates who can analyze literature, solve equations, write policy papers, and build software, and who have never been formally taught what to do with a salary, how to think about debt, or why insurance exists.

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This is the first and most fundamental reason we are not yet there. Financial literacy is not the same as financial management. Knowing how to balance a ledger is not the same as understanding why you should open a retirement account at twenty-five. And until education systems in the developing world treat financial literacy as a core subject rather than an afterthought, the most educated people will continue missing their financial goals.
Part of the problem is that financial literacy is poorly understood even by those who claim to teach it. It is reduced, in most conversations, to saving money and avoiding debt. These are important. But they are two items on a much longer list.

Financial literacy is understanding taxes, how they work, what you owe, and how to navigate them legally and intelligently. It is knowing the difference between saving and investing, and why both matter at different stages of life. It is building skills continuously, because your earning capacity is your most important financial asset and it depreciates if you do not maintain it. It is estate planning. very important, knowing what happens to what you have built when you are no longer here to protect it. It is insurance, which most young people treat as an expense rather than understanding it as a risk management tool. It is budgeting with honesty rather than optimism. It is understanding loans and debts, not just how to get them, but how they behave over time and what they cost in the long run. It is retirement planning, started early enough to actually matter. And it is career and education strategy, understanding that the choices you make about how you spend your time and develop your skills have direct financial consequences that compound over decades.

That is financial literacy. Most people in the developing world have been introduced to perhaps two or three items on that list, if they are lucky.

Hydration break
I got a joke. So I told my doctor that I broke my arm in two places. He told me to stop going to those places.

You have gotten your first job. You are happy. The salary arrives and it is prompt and it is real and it is yours. It is completely natural, in that moment, to think about your next steps. The problem is that we tend to think about those steps from a position of assumed permanence, as if the salary will always be there, as if the job is guaranteed, as if the conditions that produced this moment will remain constant indefinitely.

We tend to think so much physically in that moment. About the things we can buy, the places we can go, the life we can now visibly construct. And while that is human and understandable, it is also the beginning of a financial miscalculation that catches up with people years later.

We live in a scarce world. Resources are finite. Circumstances change. Jobs end. Health shifts. Markets move. The person who builds their financial life on the assumption of permanence is building on sand. Financial literacy teaches you to build on something more honest, on the acknowledgment that nothing is guaranteed, and that your decisions today are your protection tomorrow. An emergency fund is important, it is sold everywhere and I will not dwell on it, but it is only the beginning of what building on honest ground looks like.

The compromised financial advisor

Here is a point that will make some people uncomfortable, and I want to state upfront that I am not dismissing the role of financial advisors. They are important. Many of them are talented, well-intentioned professionals doing genuinely good work. But in the developing world context, there is a structural problem with the financial advisory industry that we need to discuss honestly.

The market for independent financial advice in Africa is small. Demand is low, costs are high, and a purely independent consulting model is difficult to sustain financially. As a result, the majority of financial advisors operating across the continent are affiliated, to banks, to insurance companies, to hedge institutions, to real estate firms, to telecommunications companies with financial products. They carry the brands, they sell the products, and they earn commissions or agreed benefits for doing so.

This creates a fundamental conflict of interest. However good the advisor’s intentions, however genuine their care for the client, they have a target. They have an affiliation. When they sit across from you and recommend a product, that recommendation is operating within a constraint that pure financial advice should not have. They are not fully independent. And advice that is not fully independent is, by definition, compromised, not necessarily corrupt, but compromised. That distinction matters enormously when you are making decisions about your financial future.

The flood of false information
There is another challenge that does not get discussed enough, because it is uncomfortable to name directly. There are predators in the financial space. People dressed in suits, standing on stages and behind screens, claiming extraordinary returns on investments they made, building followings of people who trust them with their financial decisions and their financial futures.

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A leader once said, “if you want a propaganda to be effective, you have to flood the area with so many things that are untrue that people will no longer know what is true and what is false.” This is exactly what has happened in the financial content space, particularly online. The signal has been drowned by noise. The genuine educators have been buried under an avalanche of confident, well-dressed, articulate people who are selling something, whether a course, a product, a scheme, or simply their own ego dressed as expertise.

Personal finances and financial goals are an individual journey. What worked for someone else, in their circumstances, with their risk tolerance, at their stage of life, may not work for you. What worked yesterday may not work today. The market is not static. The economy is not static. Your life is not static. Equipping yourself with genuine financial knowledge, the kind that helps you think rather than the kind that tells you what to do, is the only real protection against the demagogues. Information is your greatest asset. Not people who tell you do this, do that. Information! INFORMATION

One of the most damaging myths about financial progress is that it is a straight line. That you begin, you follow the steps, and you arrive. The reality is considerably messier and considerably more human than that. Reaching financial goals requires taking two steps forward and sometimes one step back, to assess, to recalibrate, to understand what the landscape actually looks like from where you now stand rather than where you thought you would be.

Do not follow the numbers that others have taken simply because they took them. Do not agree with everything. Do not have the fear of disagreeing. Agreeing with everyone is not wisdom, it is the abdication of individual judgment, and individual judgment is exactly what financial literacy is trying to build. You do not need extensive organizing experience to begin. You do not need to have everything figured out before you take the first step. The best is yet to come, and it comes to those who start.


There is real hope in rising financially in the developing world. Not the naive hope that ignores the hard work of inquiry and the sourcing of knowledge that the journey requires. But the kind of hope that is stubborn inside, that insists, despite all the evidence to the contrary, that something better awaits. So long as we have the courage to keep reaching, keep working, keep building on the progress we have already made.
We are not yet there. But we are not standing still either. And the distance between here and there closes every time one more person decides that understanding their money is worth the discomfort of learning something new. Information is your greatest asset. Protect it. Seek it. Use it well.

Thanks for reading.
I love the song by the way

Then the Energy and Petroleum Regulatory Authority (EPRA) moved. Petrol jumped to 206.97 shillings. Diesel climbed to 206.84. In one regulatory decision, petrol had risen by nearly 29 shillings and diesel by over 40. And diesel, which powers the trucks that carry food, the matatus that carry commuters, the generators that keep businesses running, the farming equipment that feeds the country, diesel was now almost level with petrol. Almost identical prices for two fuels that have historically occupied very different positions in the Kenyan economy.

The response on the streets was immediate and it was felt in the body before it was understood in the mind. Matatu fares went up. Food prices in the market moved. The cost of getting to work changed overnight. The cost of feeding a family changed overnight. Everything that moves or is moved by diesel absorbed the shock and passed it along the chain until it arrived, quietly and inevitably, at the ordinary Kenyan who had nothing to do with any regulatory decision and no ability to appeal it.

Then, almost as quickly as it had gone up, the price was reduced. Ten shillings. Overnight. No extended deliberation. No transparent process. Just, down by ten. As if the forty had been a mistake someone noticed on their way out the door.

This is not how a rational pricing system behaves. This is how a system behaves when price is not a signal emerging from the interaction of buyers and sellers, but a lever pulled by a regulatory body operating according to political calculations that have nothing to do with supply, demand, or the welfare of ordinary Kenyans.
The Austrian school of economic thought, developed by thinkers who understood that markets are not mechanisms to be engineered but ecosystems to be respected, does has a very clear position on what we just witnessed at the pump.

Markets are self-correcting. Sometimes supply grows too fast for demand to keep up. Sometimes demand grows so fast that supply cannot follow. There are many reasons this can happen, being a war in another part of the world, a drought, a shipping disruption, a technological shift. Whatever the cause, the market has a response mechanism that does not require a regulatory body to activate it. Buyers and sellers react to the imbalance. Prices move. Behavior changes. Entrepreneurs identify gaps and fill them. The system finds a new equilibrium, not because anyone designed it to, but because millions of individual decisions, each made in pursuit of individual interest, collectively produce order.

This is what Friedrich Hayek called the knowledge problem. No single body, not EPRA, not the government, not the most sophisticated regulatory authority in the world, possesses the dispersed, local, constantly changing knowledge that millions of market participants carry and act on every day. When a government sets a price, it is substituting one person’s calculation for the collective intelligence of an entire economy. And one person’s calculation, however well-intentioned, will always be wrong in ways that the market would have corrected on its own.

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The government of Kenya has pointed to the conflict between Israel and Iran and the resulting disruption at the Strait of Hormuz as a reason for the fuel price hike. Global supply chains are under pressure. Oil prices internationally have been affected. Kenya, as an importer, absorbs those shocks.

This is partially true. And it is also an excuse.

Here is what the Austrian argument asks us to consider , if industries like Shell, Total, and other fuel companies were allowed to compete freely in the Kenyan market, without regulatory pricing frameworks that remove the incentive to find cheaper sources, negotiate better contracts, invest in alternative supply routes, or innovate around disruptions, what would happen?

They would compete for customers. Competition for customers means competing on price. Competing on price means finding every possible way to reduce cost. A company that cannot source fuel affordably during a global disruption loses customers to one that can. So they find ways. They build relationships with alternative suppliers. They invest in storage. They hedge against global price movements. They innovate, because innovation is what businesses do when their survival depends on it and the government is not standing between them and the consequences of their decisions.

The human mind is wired to find what it focuses on. When fuel companies are focused on competing for Kenyan consumers, they find ways to keep fuel available and affordable. When they are operating within a regulated pricing framework where the government sets the number regardless of their efficiency, the incentive to find, innovate, and compete is blunted. Why work harder for a price you did not earn and cannot keep?
When prices spike and the public reacts, the political pressure to subsidize is enormous. And subsidies feel good. They feel like the government is on your side, absorbing the shock so you do not have to. For a moment, the pain is reduced. The number at the pump is lower than it would otherwise be.

But subsidies do not make fuel cheaper. They make fuel appear cheaper to the person buying it while hiding the true cost somewhere else, in the national budget, in public debt, in taxes that will be collected from the same people who felt relieved at the pump. The cost does not disappear. It is simply deferred and dispersed, which makes it harder to see and easier to ignore.

More dangerously, subsidies remove the price signal that would otherwise tell producers to produce more, consumers to use less, and entrepreneurs to develop alternatives. An artificially low price says, there is no problem here, no shortage, no urgency. Carry on. Meanwhile the underlying conditions that caused the price to rise in the first place remain unaddressed, accumulating quietly until the subsidy becomes fiscally unsustainable and the price correction, when it finally comes, is far more painful than it would have been if the market had been allowed to adjust gradually on its own.

Risk is a cost and choice is a benefit. When the government removes risk from the equation through subsidies and price controls, it also removes choice, the choice that producers and consumers would have made, the innovations that would have emerged, the alternatives that would have been built. A nation that subsidizes its way through every price shock is a nation that never builds the resilience to withstand the next one.
The government’s real failure here is not the 40 shilling hike or the 10 shilling reduction. Those are symptoms. The real failure is the inability, or unwillingness, to create the conditions for genuine competition in the fuel sector.

Fair competition is hard. It requires institutions that enforce contracts without favoritism, regulatory frameworks that set rules without picking winners, and a state that is willing to step back from a sector it has grown accustomed to controlling. It requires trusting that people are innovative, that given a real market to compete in, businesses will find ways to serve customers better and cheaper than any government body could mandate them to.

Money will always remain a way to achieve goals and not the goal itself. The goal for Kenyans standing at the fuel pump is not the money spent, it is the movement it enables. The business that can open. The school run that can happen. The farm produce that can reach the market. The matatu that can complete its route. When fuel becomes unaffordable, it is not just a price problem. It is a mobility problem, a food security problem, an economic participation problem, gender inequality. It touches everything.

And a free market, properly competitive, properly regulated for fairness rather than for price, would serve those goals better than EPRA setting numbers on a board and calling it policy.
Let the market breathe. Set the rules for fairness and then step back. Trust that Kenyans, buyers, sellers, entrepreneurs, innovators, will find the equilibrium that no regulatory body can calculate from a boardroom in Nairobi.

I want to thank , who we had a discussion about leadership interference.

Nobody goes to Ngong Racecourse for the horses only. Nataka kusema hivi wazi wazi, bila aibu. The horses are beautiful. The races are real. The Directors Millionaires Cup is a legitimate event with legitimate jockeys and a legitimate WINNER board that stands tall in the middle of the grounds.

What people come for, kwa sana, is everything else the golden hour light on the Ngong Hills, the cocktails, the music, the company, and the very specific energy of Nairobi's youth dressed to kill and operating at full social capacity. This is our field report from that day. Presented honestly, with the names of the girls kept anonymous.
The girl who was familiar to us will go by the name “ prani” and her friend “ sola”

It started, as most great Nairobi adventures do, at Trics, a gaming cafe in the CBD that I would highly recommend to both ladies and gentlemen. Maboyz mpaka waguze fifa game mbili tatu. We assembled there first. My full crew showed up wakiwa wamefiness luku ajabu. Nick, . Prani, who had been to Ngong before and therefore held the position of senior consultant. Prani's friend Sola, who we had never met before.

Before we boarded a Super Metro to Ngong, the boys held an emergency economic summit. The agenda was one item, Bei ya Tei at Ngong Racecourse are criminal, and we were not going to pay them without at least arriving prepared.
I, Nduati, economist, LSE graduate, who was at that moment grounded to a halt of an economic quagmire, proposed the solution. A mzinga. One litre of Flirt Vodka, apple flavour. We would drink it on the matatu, arrive at the racecourse already zikiwa zimeshika kama thong, and then purchase one reasonable cocktail each to maintain the ultimate boiling point. Drinks from outside are not allowed inside, so the mzinga had to be fully deployed before we reached the gate.
Tulipitisha motion kama finance bill. The mzinga was purchased. We boarded the matatu.

Tulimaliza kama maji. Bila huruma.

Upon arrival, before we had even reached the gate, the first thing noticeable was and Prani. They had shown up, independently, without any coordination or prior discussion, in the exact same pink jacket. Hawakupanga hivi. The universe iliamua peke yake.
We laughed about it on the way in. We were already high enough that everything was funnier than it needed to be. By the time we got to the gate, the mzinga had done its work perfectly and we were exactly where we needed to be mentally for a day at the Directors Millionaires Cup. Sasa skiza!

Inside the racecourse, there is a spiral staircase on the side of one of the buildings. It has a green sign at the bottom that says, very clearly, OFFICIALS ONLY.

Prani saw this sign and immediately began climbing. Alikuwa na confidence, coz she was with Mr. Hllary

Hillary raised his phone. Sola raised her phone. Two cameras, full photoshoot energy, zero acknowledgment that the sign existed. Prani posed halfway up the stairs, while hillary guided her on some fire posses to make, she was the chief steward of the entire event, one hand raised, smiling at both cameras simultaneously. Lakini uyo mtoto alikuwa ameiva.
She finished up. Alishuka salama na tukaendelea na safari.

There were horses. They ran. One of them won. The WINNER board announced it. The Directors Millionaires Cup was contested and concluded.

We watched.

Nick, who does not drink and is not particularly fond of girlies, stood beside me with the quiet energy of a philosophy professor observing human behavior in the field. He assessed the crowd, the horses, the golden hour light on the hills, and whatever calculations he was running internally. He kept his conclusions to himself. I respect this man. No drama, just a guy who loves chelsea

Kisha mbio ziliisha na kila mtu akaacha kujifanya ndio maana walifikia. All were waiting for the afterparty.

The afterparty began and Nairobi as usual goes off kuliko missile huko Hezbollah.

Girls were on fire. The music was going. People had cocktails. The green grass of the racecourse, which had been a respectable space for a legitimate horse racing event approximately forty minutes earlier, was now a full dance floor under open sky. Winding. Lap dances. Full commitment to the moment. Chesaa!

We bought cocktails to complete the immersion. The mzinga had built the foundation. The cocktails were the finishing coat.

Hillary and Prani , still in their matching pink jackets, disappeared into their own world entirely.
Nick assessed the situation one final time, made a decision that was entirely consistent with his character, and left. No drama. No announcement. Just gone. A man who knew his limits and respected them. We respect it.

“ Dale don dale” by Don Omar was playing. If you know this song, you understand what it does to a crowd. If you do not know this song, please listen to it here.
Dale don dale by don omar

I approached Sola, who was dancing. The timing felt right. The music was right. The cocktail was right. The Flirt Vodka foundation beneath everything was very right.

Sola stopped dancing. She looked at me. And she said, with absolute clarity and zero room for negotiation “Cheki bro, We don't do that here. I’m gay”

Ni UCHUNGU sana mandugu. We accept and move on kwa heshima na nikaendelea. Irriz war irriz, maisha yanaendelea.

What I did not know at this point , what none of us knew yet, was that Sola alikuwa achomoe kadi ya jocker. Sola always had a plan. I just did not have enough information yet to understand it.
God closes one door and opens another, na pombe ndani yake.

I turned from Sola’s rejection and found myself in the company of a group of five girls who were warm, fun, and equipped with Gilbeys and Soju. I went there, nilikuwa nafanyiwa crop rotation kudance . They even offered to add their drinks to my cocktail. A welcome package I had not anticipated.

We danced for twenty minutes. They were excellent company. The economist from LSE had recalibrated quickly and found a significantly better investment portfolio. The portfolio was performing well.

After the five girls, I went to find my brother .

I found him seated. Prani was on his lap. They were kissing and drinking. The matching pink jackets were still on. The universe, which had dressed them alike in the morning, had apparently decided to see the joke all the way through to its conclusion.

Hillary looked at Prani and asked “Mbona unasmile”

Prani giggled. Then she said , “I like what I see.”

Hillary’s hand was on her thigh. Not even slightly.
" hebu onja ii cocktail yangu usikie venye inaslap kama uongo ya Ruto” Hillary had won, alikuwa anapokezwa drink vinoma.
I looked at my friend, this man who had boarded a Super Metro with me, shared a mzinga of Flirt Vodka apple flavour, climbed no OFFICIALS ONLY stairs, and he was here. Thriving. Lap situation fully established. Client satisfaction guaranteed.

My brother was winning, and that is all that matters.
I spotted something across the tent. A lady arguing with a man she had come with. The argument had a clear cause, he had been spotted kissing other ladies. She was not pleased. Alikuwa amejaa ngori. She was standing there, annoyed, available, and completely unaware that an economist from LSE was about to enter the picture.

I arrived like bitcoin in 2014. Early. At the lowest possible entry point. Before anyone else had assessed the value of the situation. My history teacher who taught us the scramble and partition of Africa always said, “ The best time to approach a girl is when things are not okay.”

Her name was Zeenat.

We danced. We smoked some weed. We had a good time in the way that Ngong Racecourse afterparties make possible , the golden hour long gone now, the music still going, the hills dark in the distance. She kissed me. The way she kissed me, omg. Some things do not need further elaboration. Ilikuwa moja ya kutoa hasira.

Then she left. Like a perfect, well-timed market movement. In. Returns delivered. Out. No complications.
Before we get to Sola’s finale, I want to say this clearly, usifikirie Ngong Racecourse ni ya vijana tu.

Wababa pia wako on. Suited. Calm. Whisky in hand. No mzinga on a matatu. No Flirt Vodka apple flavour. Just quiet, experienced, precise selection, wakichagua bale with the confidence of men who have been doing this since before you were born. Budget tofauti. Mission moja. Tunawaheshimu wababa.

The afterparty wound down. We regrouped, me, Hillary, Prani, and Sola. The team, reassembled. We found Sola in the company of a man. The man was in the company of other men. A whole setup. A whole situation.

The man was warm. He welcomed us. He offered me a beer. Then he looked at our group, two boys, two girls, and asked, quite reasonably, why I was not accompanied by Sola.

Nilinyamaza . Kwa sababu maelezo yote of everything, was too much to deliver at this hour. Silence was the only appropriate response. The man gave Sola two thousand shillings. We called an Uber.
Sola paid for it.
The rejection was not personal. It was professional. She had a plan and I was not part of it.
Racecourse was fun.

Bien has a line about exactly this. Waking up, getting ready, sitting back down kwa sababu sina mahali pa kwenda. The first time that lyric found me, I was three weeks into my job search, sitting in the same spot I’d sat the day before. I laughed, then felt something crack open in my chest. Being “seen” by a song does that to you.

Tulikuwa tunaexpect nini, exactly? We did everything right. Tulienda shule. Tukafanya exams. Some of us sold cows, moved to bedsitters in Ruiru or Rongai, survived on smokie pasua and borrowed wifi ; all in the name of the future. Graduation day came with photos and ululations and aunties saying “sasa utaanza kupata pesa zako.” Mfuko yangu imekuwa ya kubeba ishirini na kumi isikae empty banange!

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Then the future arrived. And it looked like an inbox full of rejection emails, or worse ; silence. The kind of silence that makes you wonder if your application even landed anywhere, or just dissolved into some company’s spam folder like it was never sent.

Three months in, I stopped counting the applications. What I started counting instead were the days I managed to get out of bed before 10am. Small wins inn it.

The thing nobody posts on LinkedIn. Social media itakuambia everyone is hustling, landing roles, “excited to announce.” And you’re there, phone in hand, feeling like the whole world got a memo you didn’t receive.

The depression that comes with unemployment si ile ya kuonekana. It doesn’t always look like crying. Sometimes it looks like sleeping too much. Sometimes it looks like scrolling for four hours and not remembering a single thing you saw. Sometimes it looks like laughing at a meme at 2am while something heavy sits on your chest.

Vijana wengi wanaona hii. Sijui kama ndio tunaita dust, but its something close. Most won’t say it out loud. Because how do you explain to your parents that you’re tired ; not from doing too much, but from the weight of waiting?

Na nyumbani si rahisi jombaa, you go home, or you call home, and before the phone is even fully on your ear , “Uko aje? Kuna news gani? Ulifuatilia ile application?”

Every. Single. Day.

And you love them. You know they mean well. Lakini kuna siku unajisikia kama unajibu press conference bila results ya kutoa. Hot air type shit. The questions start to feel less like concern and more like a countdown timer on your chest. Tick. Tick. Tick.

There comes a point where you have to say, quietly or not so quietly ; Nyamaza mamuu, nyamaza ungoje! Acha tu. Let things happen. Not because you’re ungrateful. Not because you’ve given up. But because you are trying, deeply and daily, in ways they cannot see.

Every application is an act of hope. Every rejection you swallow alone , bila kuwashow , is its own kind of strength.

The job search is already loud inside your head. Home should not be another interview.

What parents don’t always understand is that their child isn’t sitting still. Anafanya bidii ni vile results zinacheza chini. The silence isn’t laziness -it’s someone trying to protect you both from the weight of not yet. Because saying “nothing new today” for the fortieth time doesn’t get easier. It just gets quieter.

So if you’re reading this and you’re the parent, the auntie, the older cousin, nawaomba kwa upole: ask them how they’re doing, not just where they’ve applied. Story nyingi achia Gidi na Ghost. The difference is everything.

Vitu vidogo vilinisave, I won’t sell you a productivity routine. Sitakuambia wake up at 5am and journal. What I will tell you is what actually helped, imperfectly, on the hard days.

Walking. Not for fitness - just to remind my body that the world outside my room still existed. Some days unaenda tu, bila destination. You notice a flower pushing through a cracked pavement. You nod at a mama mboga, na wasichana wa wenyewe kwa sababu mungu naye ni fundi. You come back home and something is slightly looser in your chest.

Documentaries. Books. The kind that take you somewhere else entirely. Because sometimes your brain needs a holiday from your own situation.

And then there are the days you grab your boys and head to the pool table near the bar. Tunashika ka quarter ka KC, someone breaks, someone argues a foul, someone is too loud about a shot that didn’t go in — and for a moment, the job applications don’t exist. Tukicheka na mabeshte, not because everything is fine, but because we refuse to let the waiting swallow us whole. We are not wasting time. We are choosing, deliberately, not to drown in stress. That too is survival.

And one thing I kept coming back to, almost like a mantra ; hakuna kitu ya kudumu, labda mpoa wako ule wa kudumu. Nothing is permanent. Not the rejection. Not the waiting. Not this specific version of your life that feels like it’s standing still while everyone else moves.

Kama unasoma hii saa tatu usiku Najua unajisikia invisible. Like you studied, you tried, na bado haijafanya kazi. Like something is wrong with you. There isn’t. The market is brutal, the economy is lying, and the gap between what was promised to our generation and what actually exists it’s real, and it’s not your fault.

But you are still here. Still applying. Still finding small reasons to get out of bed, even on the days your shirt stays ironed and you go nowhere.

That’s not failure. That’s resilience wearing casual clothes.

Utafika. Just not today, and that has to be okay for now. Nakuaminia !

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