Articles Tagged Sunday Nation

Trees and development don’t go together? Of course they do. As I discussed here last week, sustained development does not take place at the expense of the environment. Ask Haiti, which in a frenzy of slashing forests for wood fuel, reduced forest cover from more than 60 per cent to under 2 per cent in […]

This is the time of year when Nairobi becomes Jacaranda City. Everywhere you look, the famed trees are in blossom, painting the skyscape a vivid lilac, and precipitating our well-known ‘purple rain’ as they shed their flowers and create beautiful natural carpets all over the city. But look around, and you will see that this […]

This is my 500th column on this page. To commemorate the occasion, let me take you on a little journey. Let us go back to the Kenya of a decade ago, when I first started writing in the Sunday Nation. In 2002, this country was broken. It had been plundered dry. It was in the […]

It must be easy to starve the education sector of funds, if your own children are not affected by the decision. If your offspring invariably go to private educational institutions, here or abroad, I imagine it is not difficult to wield the axe and say, “We can’t pay, won’t pay.” Your kids will be just […]

There is a simple, widely observable incongruity in the higher planes of business life. Where are all the women? Specifically, where are all the women when it comes to decision-making and direction-setting? Look at the upper echelons of corporate life, and you will see only a few token feminine faces. This situation is found even […]

There is a persistent drone in the air of human endeavour, and it goes something like this. Don’t try too hard; it’s not worth it. Don’t try to achieve too much; you’ll fail and it will hurt. Don’t stand out from the crowd; the crowd will shun you and you will be lonely. Be average. […]

“Today, the economy is the biggest news in India and politicians are only listened to when they talk about the economy.” I wrote those words on this page in January 2010, to preface the proposition that India was on an irreversible forward economic march. I was horribly wrong, and I apologize. At the time, all […]

Travel is great for a variety of reasons. One of the most important is the possibility of serendipitously coming across something you might not otherwise have seen. This happened to me recently when I opened a magazine on an airplane to find the following: “There was this one instance when a woman in her early […]

The BBC World Service has left Bush House. So what? The British broadcaster announced last month that it was leaving its venerable studios at Bush House, to move to the more modern premises across London that house the rest of its news operations. What could be wrong with that? Nothing. And everything. What is this […]

There is nothing quite like Kenyans when it comes to our propensity to laugh at ourselves. I discover this every so often on Twitter, when making a few comical observations: often the hashtag created will go viral in a matter of minutes, as Kenyans on Twitter pile in with their own rib-tickling insights. #HowToSpotAKenyan was […]

Kenyan leaders, what are you looking at if not at the carnage on our roads? We have always had a high rate of road accidents, but it has now reached crisis proportions. There seem to be awful crashes occurring across Kenya every single day. These result in deaths and dismemberments, grief and disruption, tragedy and […]

I don’t get it. I just don’t. It should be blindingly obvious to every owner of every business that it runs primarily on just one thing: the goodwill of its customers. If customers obtain value from you, they keep buying. If they keep buying, you keep making a profit. If you keep making a profit, […]

Hello there, young Africans. If you are about to reach adulthood around about now, or in the coming few years, you are lucky people. You were born at exactly the right time in Africa’s history. You will be at the heart of Africa’s political coming-of-age and its economic rebirth. Let me explain. When you were […]

Too many employees feel disillusioned and disenchanted. Too many feel stuck in dead-end jobs with no prospect of growth or advancement. Too many are stagnating on the chair they sit on, petrifying their careers instead of electrifying them. Global surveys bear out this observation. As many as two out of every five employees feel little […]

Looking at my mobile phone bill the other day, I noticed that the part of the bill generated by making calls has been falling steadily, while the data component has been rising. That reminded me: just over two years ago, I wrote on this page that the future of your business lay in the palm […]

I was fascinated to read this on the Harvard Business Review blog network recently: “Recently I asked a high-level Singapore official how Singapore’s companies would be able to compete in a world of countries whose companies have greater access to low-cost labor (as in China) and cutting-edge innovation (as in the U.S.). His response was […]

Do you want to know how to spot a good leader? Here’s a simple test: Good leaders spend more time looking out of windows than into mirrors. Let me explain. Good leaders are insatiably curious about the world. They are always interested in what’s going on, in how things work, in what’s changing and what’s […]

Is there a job in the world more difficult than succeeding Steve Jobs? Tim Cook had to take on that role after the legendary Apple CEO succumbed to cancer last year. Imagine yourself in his shoes: taking over from the man who almost singlehandedly created the world’s most valuable company; a master showman lauded and […]

Picture yourself at the funeral of a very rich person. This person owned much land and had plenty stashed away in plenty of bank accounts. There are many people present at this funeral, as there always are when a wealthy person passes away. The now-expired man of means is being given a fitting send-off. But […]

To be widely respected in Kenya today, you need to have just one thing. Just one. All of the things that normally generate respect – virtue, compassion, wisdom, knowledge – have been thrown in the gutter. In the society we have crafted, only one thing matters, and you know what that one thing is. Money. […]

Picture water dripping onto a large rock. The drops of water seem utterly ineffective in making even the slightest dent on the rock, which is sleek and solid and immovable. The water keeps dripping, for days, months, years. Yet there is no effect on the rock. One day, however, that rock will crumble completely. The […]

While watching a cookery programme on TV the other day, I came across a most interesting word. The word is “kodawari,” and it is in Japanese. The programme in question showed a master sushi maker at work. Sushi has always fascinated me: for its artistry; its painstaking attention to detail; its insistence on the finest, […]

Tesco is the United Kingdom’s most dominant retailer. For a couple of decades now, the supermarket chain has been all-powerful, accounting for one in eight pounds that Britons spend in shops and commanding 30% market share, in addition to being the nation’s largest private employer. And Tesco is not merely a grocer these days; it […]

Picture yourself at one of our many fruit-and-vegetable markets. If you frequent these places, I have no doubt that you have a favourite vendor that you habitually buy from. Why is that, when there are usually dozens of stalls before you, all offering very similar products at very similar prices? What makes you choose one […]

Back in 2003, we thought we had put the era of truly horrible state corporations behind us. The new government of the day, swept into power in a massive rejection of the failures and excesses of the 1990s, promised to reform the public sector and revitalize all of Kenya’s dead or dying parastatals. A good […]

Whatever happened to “First-Time Quality?” It seems to have become an irrelevance in Kenya today. The idea is simple enough. If you get something right the first time, you don’t have to incur the cost of inspections, revisits, rework or repeat jobs. If you pay acute attention and maintain a high standard when you do […]

Kenya has spent more on infrastructure projects in the past decade than at any other time in its history. And there is more to come. That is a great and necessary thing. Projects like undersea cables, superhighways and bypasses, link roads, rural power connections, bridges and port expansions will all have significant impact on our […]

I was sitting by my favourite ocean (there is only one) the other day (I was on a break, remember) and I noticed some ominous-looking dark clouds over the ocean. I asked a passing waiter whether he thought it might rain. He looked at the sky, and said with gratifying certainty: “No chance. Those clouds […]