My Story: Why Hard Work Will Not Take You Anywhere In Kenya

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One of the myths doing the rounds amongst Kenyans these days is that those who have not felt the dramatic economic growth under the Kibaki administration are simply lazy and that all a Kenyan has to do is work hard to make it in life.

In one ludicrous laughable example given in the comments area of this blog we are told that the reason why a Mr Onyango has not felt the impact of the economic growth is because they attend endless ODM rallies instead of working. That one really cracked my ribs. There is really no hope for some people in this country. This is NOT true.

Hard work will not automatically make you money in Kenya. The truth is that only the already rich and well connected can make money in Kenya. Corruption is also a great hindrance for the ordinary Kenyan in their quest to make an honest living and the government policies have not been formulated with the idea of creating opportunities for the common man. Rather they have often deliberately been formulated to frustrate small businesses and make things very difficult for them. This is the reason why Kenyans who have relocated elsewhere have ended up being very successful when they were a total failure locally.

The following personal story of what happened to me will illustrate this point better than a 1000 words of empty rhetoric.

I have always been very enterprising and have had a knack for coming up with brilliant ideas that turn an ordinary-looking idea into a very lucrative enterprise. After applying this talent to the businesses of others for a number of years, in the late 90s I opted to go it alone and I launched my own businesses. It was not the first time that I was going into business for myself and I felt that with all my previous experiences under my belt, I stood an excellent chance of being successful this time round.

My area of specialization has always been in publishing and I noted that the market was crying out for a tabloid-style entertainment newsletter that carried both human interest and political articles. But I also recognized that a major problem would be in the distribution of such a publication more than anything else. It is difficult to convince newspaper vendors to display a new publication prominently on their limited space on the newsstands where there are dozens of other publications crying out for attention. I purposed to create a totally new way of selling my new newsletter publication.

These were the early days of what Kenyans came to refer to as alternative press publications, but my publication, called Update, was different. The stories were well researched and well written and the quality of printing was a notch higher. And rather than use coloured newsprint like everybody else was at the time, I used white paper with an extra colour on the cover.

After several experiments and some serious research, I realized that the major hurdle that prevented most people from purchasing a publication was because they were not sure of what the contents were. What if I distributed a free miniature sample of the contents, I asked myself? I then carefully designed a small leaflet where I printed on both sides of the sheet detailed summaries of the articles contained in my publication. At the bottom I put the price.

All this time I was the reporter, editor, publisher and newsvendor all rolled into one. I was not scared of hard work and neither was I afraid of being laughed at. Incidentally I started out selling my publication at crowded public places, by this time I was being helped out by two young men. One day I met an old schoolmate on the bus who saw what I was doing and was totally disgusted. He mocked me and sarcastically asked what I thought I was doing. It was devastating because in our school days we were close friends with this guy, or so I thought. This friend of mine had a very comfortable job in a bank, a job that my entrepreneurial spirit could probably not hold down for too long.

To cut a long story short, after weeks of trial and error, everything suddenly clicked into place and I soon had a large team of vendors exclusively selling my newsletter in every corner of Nairobi. My daily profits climbed up to an average of about Kshs 60,000 per day-I kid you not.

People I knew and even strangers started warning me that I needed to be careful about the circulation department of a certain daily newspaper who felt that my alternative press publication was taking away daily sales from them. That is if a person purchased my publication, they were unlikely to purchase that daily newspaper. Alas I was naïve in those days, like many of the inexperienced readers in this blog who are too fast to dismiss things when they first hear them. I found these suggestions ridiculous and just ignored them. How could a large multi-million shilling daily newspaper get worried about the sales of some small upstart newsletter? That was totally absurd! It did not cross my mind at the time that I had not heard this thing from one person but from several people.

Very soon things started happening to confirm the warnings that I had already received. Firstly my vendors started having problems with City Council Askaris. Now traditionally there has always been a big difference between newspaper vending and hawking and the city bylaws recognize this fact. That is why we have newspaper vendors licensed to sell publications on the streets but we don't have hawkers licensed to sell their non-newspaper wares. Soon our licensed vendors were being arrested on strange trumped up charges like urinating at some street corner or being a public nuisance, and many other tramped up charges from the city by laws. The interesting thing was that the city Askaris were not targeting the vendors selling only the daily newspapers. They seemed exclusively interested only in my vendors.

I went to see the top officers in the city inspectorate at City Hall and they promised to put a stop to this harassment but nothing happened, nothing changed. So I quickly adjusted and learnt how to live with this and dismissed the whole thing as part of the corruption rampant with city council askaris. My policy was clear and known to all my vendors. It was that if they ever got arrested and locked in the police cells I would bail them out at my expense. They were instructed NOT to bribe (because a bribe would quickly get you off the notorious city council lorry long before you arrived at the police station).

I then set up a budget for bailing out my vendors and even employed somebody with some legal knowledge whose work was to do just that. They would then plead guilty in the city council courts and get fined Kshs 500/- the next day, which I quickly paid and they were back to work in a few hours. I factored the whole thing into my expenses. We were advised by a legal expert in these matters that pleading not guilty and waiting for due process would take ages, be too expensive and time consuming. And besides we had little chance of winning without bribing. To this day as a matter of principal I DO NOT BRIBE. Wacha iwe mbaya.

Somebody somewhere decided that they had to go further to stop us.

One day when I was not in, heavily armed plain clothes police officers from CID Nairobi area raided our offices and left with printing plates and a member of staff whom they used to track me down. The way the whole operation was carried out was as if they were arresting a very dangerous criminal.

Those were the days before cell phones but somehow word got to me about what had happened and I rushed to CID headquarters Nairobi where I was told to report the next day. I was very lucky not to have been locked up for the night. What saved me was that the CID officers and their boss had rushed off somewhere to deal with another more urgent matter and had left a message for me at their office.

When I arrived early the next morning, they asked me for my publishing registration certificate.

(To be continued tomorrow.) Read Part II NOW

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