Edward #Odious debt “Can’t pay won’t pay”

We have lost the art of visiting people. Now when you visit a friend o kare you are inconveniencing them.

G-to-G a.k.a Goon to Goon arrangement

A Nigerian lady shares how moving to Ukraine for study to becoming a refugee due to an active war. 🏷️ IG/the_oluwaseyi_

Hadi maziwa inadhani iko kwa blender😂😂😂mamaye!!!🤧🤧

My boda delivery guy today came doning a Tutam hat, asked him why, told me walipewa na mia mbili na aoni ubaya, told him this is the last delivery he will ever make kwangu, whole neighborhood has blacklisted him on errands that's 2k aday. Choices must have consequences onwards.

What happened to the industry? It was the perfect storm: an unsustainable fiscal policy colliding with a collapsing business climate. Let me explain with one product as an example. When we opened Tribeka in August 2011, we sourced beer from distributors at KES 82–89 per bottle. We retailed it at KES 200 Monday to Wednesday, then KES 250 from Reggae Thursday all the way through Sunday. That delivered a 200% gross margin. It was incredibly lucrative. We paid down debt fast, took on new debt for expansion, and opened Natives in November 2012. Then everything started unravelling. The new administration chose to fuel growth with massive debt-financed infrastructure. They pointed to the low tax-to-GDP ratio (distorted by counting these non-cash-generating assets toward GDP) and declared taxation too low. The lowest-hanging fruit? Sin taxes on alcohol. Annual hikes followed, and by 2018 wholesale prices had climbed to KES 180. To protect our old margin we would have needed to sell at KES 540 — but the street price stayed stuck at KES 250. Our gross margin collapsed to just 38% before salaries, rent, taxes or anything else. The tax burden had by then spread across the entire economy. Real incomes stagnated, so people cut household spending to the bone. The era of dropping KES 100k on a table was over. By 2015 we had scaled to 8 venues, 380 permanent staff (550 on weekends counting temps), and $11 million in annual revenue. The cracks were already visible. I hoped the crazy 8%+ deficits were just a pre-election anomaly and that we’d see budget discipline after the vote. Instead, they doubled down. They even indexed alcohol tax hikes to CPI — which was madness, because the inflation was being caused by the very taxes and money printing they were doing. By 2018 we were injecting fresh millions just to cover salaries and rent in some outlets. We were actually relieved when leases expired, even as some landlords tried to muscle us for “goodwill” payments. Minimum wage had jumped from KES 8k to 14k, Tribeka rent had soared from KES 500k to 1.2 million, and we faced an endless parade of extortionate “bureaucracy taxes” and compliance costs. Today purchasing power hasn’t recovered much. The liquor business is nothing like it was. I walked away with heavy losses, but the lessons I learned are worth their weight in gold. No regrets. If I were starting again today, I’d open a Michelin-starred restaurant serving a cozy 50 pax and cater strictly to the 1% — the ones who’ve used the Cantillon effect to suck the country dry through rent-seeking, plus the rich foreigners riding the same wave.