Last week’s article regarding a communication snafu seems to have triggered a few readers who, like me, get irked by poor communication. Take Tom, who shared his experience and was happy for me to publish the same here:

“I’ve just read today’s article and wow, you nailed it. The advent of the internet and social media (short message services included) has completely changed how we communicate and not always for the better. “Sospeter’s” case is a perfect example. But honestly, there’s an even worse form I see often in the corporate world, especially from junior colleagues. It usually looks like this:

Dear Tom,
Please note the below.

And “the below” turns out to be a long email thread with multiple attachments, sometimes even parallel threads, with no summary and no indication of what action is required. For those of us who prefer crisp, clear communication, it is really frustrating!”

The least important and most unpleasant task for Tom’s insanely busy day job is trying to decipher and unravel long, unwieldy emails from juniors trying to a) Cover their backsides, b) Seek assistance to enable them to cover their future backsides or c) Giddily illuminate a very exposed colleague’s backside.

But first, let me put on my mature professional hat here and say that we must extend grace to junior colleagues. To be honest, I don’t know that anyone teaches new hires how to write emails. They get a desktop or laptop computer, an email address, a chair and a desk and are asked to start working. There is likely a presumption that a new employee’s form two English class session on how to write a formal letter covered how to have basic business communication etiquette.

Consequently, many employees are set up to fail through an omission in induction. On behalf of Tom, here are a few bits of completely unsolicited advice for young employees.

1. Subject Heading Is Not A Suggestion: The purpose of the subject is to allow your recipient to know fairly quickly what your email is about. We can’t be using “Purchase of new laptops” as the subject heading for a client issue that has blown up in your face because you were too lazy to start a new email thread and just hit reply to the last correspondence we shared. Three things are likely to happen when your recipient sees your email. Firstly, they will skip over it as the topic has been discussed to the Nth degree already. Secondly, they are even more bored out of their skull from receiving incessant emails from you, so they have set a filter in their email program to push your emails to the “Reopen in January 2026” email folder. Thirdly, since you have insisted on using all caps to write all your subject headings and in email etiquette, using all caps is equivalent to shouting, seeing PURCHASE OF NEW LAPTOPS once again will only irk your recipient, who is looking to have a peaceful day.
2. One Swipe – That’s It: Your email should not extend beyond one swipe if being read on a mobile device. No one has time to read a dissertation on what the issue is. Your subject heading already said “Unhappy Client: Erroneous Interest Calculation”. The body of your email then states the name of the client, the issue, when it arose and your proposed resolution. Details such as the miscalculations can be attached and a reference made to the attachment. If your recipient has to scroll down more than once, you’ve lost them. Why? Because they’re reading your email, having found 100+ other emails in their inboxes and they have to decide which ones require action now, and which ones are for sweeping into the “Reopen in January 2026” folder. Help your recipient to help you by making your email easy to understand and action.
3. Reply All – At Your Peril: I once worked in an organization that requested IT Help Desk disable this setting entirely. Why? Because someone from Human Resources would send an update regarding the annual staff retreat. Jane from Client Services would reply to all and ask, “Where is it going to be?” when the blasted location was on line 5 of the email. HR would then reply all to the reply all since they were not sure whether Jane was uniquely email blind or everyone else didn’t quite get it either. Jane would then reply all to the reply all to the reply all and say “thank you” when she only meant for HR to get it. 1800 emails and a catatonic email server later, the CEO of the organization picked up the phone and asked, on behalf of every bored skull in the organization, to ban Jane’s reply all privileges, in fact, heck, ban reply all for everyone while they were at it. The benefit of this reply-all war was that, consequently, every email writer had to be very deliberate about who was in their recipient list before deciding to include them.

Have a communicative week ahead, my friends!

X: @carolmusyoka

Nitpicker podcast

Social media has turned communication into truncated sound, video and word bytes. I recently received a direct message (DM) on LinkedIn from a complete stranger and had no idea how to respond. I then remembered that I often use this column to educate, inform and on the occasional chance, entertain. The complete stranger, let’s call him Sospeter for now, may have skipped the class on how to effectively communicate, so I pray he reads this column to get some lessons. Sospeter’s message said: “Hey Carol. Please have a look at my profile and advise.”

First off, who is Sospeter? I have no clue. Secondly, why has he chosen me, out of the 1.1 billion LinkedIn users worldwide? I also have no clue. Thirdly, why does he want me to look at his profile? You guessed it, I have no clue. Fourthly, where is his profile? Well, I suppose he wanted me to stop what I was doing, double click on his picture and then fall into the social media rabbit hole of doom scrolling a stranger’s profile. Fifthly, what advice was he seeking from me? Insert loud sigh here: I. Do. Not. Know.

For those that might be the only visitors in Jerusalem, LinkedIn is a social media networking platform for professionals. It primarily focuses on connecting business professionals and facilitating career development. Consequently, it is a great way of engaging in a professional manner as there is no room for career limiting insults or garbage spewing radicals who hide behind faceless pseudonyms. Users post their online resumes, connect with other professionals, apply for job openings posted by employers and even post or share articles to promote thought leadership.

Like most social media platforms today, LinkedIn does not come with a user manual. You just have to navigate your way around there, treading carefully to ensure that you don’t trip over an embarassing miscommunication landmine in the very public view of your current and future employer. I find the engagements on the LinkedIn platform much healthier than on the artist formerly known as Twitter, because users are more careful in how they engage as they are showcasing their thought process in a very exposed and attributable manner.

As I woke up on the generous side of bed this morning, I decided to click on Sospeter’s profile. He is a regional manager in an East African organization and a degree holder from a top university in Kenya. He’s not a freshly minted graduate, since his profile shows his first job started in 2005. That should put him in his early to mid forties in terms of age range. He’s been around the sun often enough to know a thing or two about a thing or two. But maybe not the effective communication thing. So I will rewrite Sospeter’s message for him, to help him slide into the “DMs” of other LinkedIn users effectively. Here :

“Hey Carol, I hope you are keeping well. [A basic attempt to care about how I am doing, Sospeter, will be appreciated] I follow you on LinkedIn as I enjoy your regular posts about quantum mechanics, particularly your views on wave particle duality. [Ok I have absolutely no clue what that is, but ChatGPT says it’s very tough. The point is, Sospeter you should demonstrate you know or care a little about what I profess to do.] I am reaching out to you as I see that you are going to speak at the Quantum Mechanics Annual Conference in Geneva later this year. [Context is imperative Sospeter, so that I can know why you chose me out of the 1.1 billion LinkedIn Users and, by this time, my curiosity will be piqued]. I wish to attend the conference and would love your advice on how I can frame my profile in a manner that will get me invited into the exclusive event. [Sospeter, this helps me to know what the aim of your random request for a profile review is.] Please find the profile attached for your ease of reference [You see how I don’t have to hunt all over the regional map for it Sospeter?] I thank you in advance for your kind attention. [ A little gratitude and buttering me up won’t hurt Sospeter, particularly since I don’t know you from a jar of jam.] Regards, Sospeter.

Chat GPT says that LinkedIn plays a crucial role in the modern professional landscape, making it an essential tool for anyone looking to advance their career or build a professional brand. To all the Sospeters out there, please use it as the professional tool it is, and not the roadside socializing app you think it might be.

X:@carolmusyoka

Nitpicker Podcast

The dictionary definition of the word comprehension is “the ability to understand something.” It is also defined as “the setting of questions on a set text to test understanding, as a school exercise.” You must surely remember that part of your high school English studies. Where you would be given a passage to read and then a set of questions would be asked to determine whether you could figure out that an adolescent Tom hastily emerging with adolescent Mary from a bush would certainly end up with a Tom-let nine months later.

Last week I posted on LinkedIn a request on behalf of a friend looking for an accountant. It went something like this:

“A friend of mine in the legal services industry is looking for an accountant. This person must be a full CPA (K) and have a minimum of 5 years working as an accountant in a commercially driven private sector organization. Not the NGO sector, not government or parastatals. Private sector only please.
A couple of polite and very humble requests based on what I have seen someone else who made a similar post go through:
a) Please DM me if you KNOW such a person. Please do NOT DM me if you ARE that person. My friend wants referrals, not the actual job seeker.
b) Please refer someone you have WORKED with and can therefore vouch for their work ethic and standards. Please do NOT refer your relatives, friends, neighbours, chama mates, local village cattle dip outgoing treasurer etc. If that person has held 5 accounting jobs in two years…well…..don’t bother sending their profile.”

For purposes of those not on social media, DM means direct message. DMs are also a slow, torturous and very excruciating way to die slowly from reading sometimes inane and outright ridiculous privately sent communications on a public platform. Within an hour of posting the message, it quickly became apparent to me that many of us see what we want to see. In this particular case, a number read the first sentence and came to a screeching halt at the first fullstop. The words “looking for an accountant” was all that was needed. Consequently, the direct message inbox was flooded with ‘I am the one your friend is looking for’ messages.

Having sifted through those, the next set of responses to deal with were the ones who, at the very least, got to the first qualifier of recommending people that they know. Many of these just tagged their friends who had accountant qualifications. Not the ones who had the specific work experience requested, just an accounting qualification would suffice. Then of course, a call to employment action would be incomplete without the “my brother/sister/friend is an accountant” messages also filtering through.

Eventually the readers who quite likely scored an A ratings in their English comprehension exam emerged from within the communications clutter. These readers had professionally worked with the desired accountants, stated where and when such engagement had occurred and recommended their colleagues accordingly. These were about ten per cent of the total volume of responses received.

I know it’s a tough job market and you’re probably saying that people are just “shooting their shot” and trying for jobs regardless of the outcome. One reader, a senior accountant based on their self description, strolled into the comments and wondered out loud, “When I see a lot of demands, I smell a rat. But that’s just me.” Which comment has triggered today’s column. Yes, one should indeed smell a rat. It’s a frustrated, exhausted employer of a rat. The employer on whose behalf I posted the message has seen enough recruitment candidates who look good on paper, interview brilliantly and then proceed to be an utter train smash of an employee when hired to do the job. That employer knows that getting a candidate who has been endorsed by someone who has worked with them is likely to be a step above doing an open call for candidates who are a mix of good, bad and downright unemployable. That rat of an employer has experienced employees with an incompetence that beggars belief and an immeasurable scarcity of integrity.

It takes an inordinate amount of an employer’s time to deal with staffing issues. Time that the employer could have spent on thinking about the business, getting new customers, serving existing customers well and generally being a productive human. Every hour spent working through an errant employee’s issue is valuable time lost that can never be recovered. So yes, the two demands for knowing and working with the recommended candidate may be eyebrow-raising, but a simple comprehension of the last few paragraphs here will explain their genesis.

The Nitpicker Podcast

I am a shoat farmer. Sheep and goats are collectively farmed as shoats. Following the drought of a few years ago, I learnt the hard way that to be a successful shoat farmer you need to be food secure for at least a year. What this means is that you should have food storage for your animals to keep you covered for the periods where they cannot get enough food from grazing out in the fields. So I bought a 1.5 acre field of ready-to-harvest-maize last year and chewed  character development for a week of Sundays thereafter as I learnt the hard way about what it would take to convert that maize into a long term food bank.

Last September, I wrote the following about that harvesting experience:

“Casual laborers were hired and they took an entire day to harvest cut the maize stalks. The full day rate for local casual labor culture requires the employer to provide tea and a scone at 10 a.m. and a meal at lunchtime. If you don’t provide the meal, well, you’ll struggle to get another crew the next day. Contrary to the popular view that labor supply outstrips demand, in my little village in Laikipia you have to give a 48 hour notice to find a crew as there are quite a number of my fellow Nairobi residents doing large scale farming around the area.

Then it got interesting. The harvested maize needed to be transported to my farm and I would have to hire a lorry. The only one available was a decrepit, dilapidated truck that was literally held together by screws of hope and strings of prayer. David, the truck owner, was a cantankerous, foul mouthed diabetic who had no time for the laborers’ requirements for tea and lunch breaks. Due to the condition of the truck, David would drive painstakingly slow, ambling along the 5 kilometre distance with a repurposed dry maize cob as the gear stick holder. He complained every single minute for the two days it took to load the field of maize, transport it and unload it at the farm. On the second day, he pulled my sunburnt hand to the shade of a tree and told me that I was motivating my laborers the wrong way.

According to him, since the laborers were being paid a daily wage, they would take their time to load up the truck. Next time, he growled, I should pay them per truck that was loaded and I would see a change in their efficiency. Once the maize was offloaded, it had to be chopped by a thresher and poured into a pit to prepare it as silage. The thresher was powered by the engine of a tractor and the maize was manually fed into it by two laborers. Three others stood at the thresher exit to distribute and compact the chopped product in the pit . This took another three days. The thresher operator pulled my other sunburnt arm under the shade of a tree and told me that the laborers were moving too slowly for his liking. In future, I should  thresh the maize as it was being harvested and pour the chopped product straight into a tipper truck. The truck would then come and tip the product straight into the silage pit. This would cut both labor and transport costs significantly. Thresher operator was basically validating what cantankerous David had said.”

Because my patience and my telephone farming pockets had been worn thin, this year I decided to listen to the advice given. After planting my own acre of maize, we found a one size fits all resource. This friendly gentleman  – let’s call him Gabriel – comes with his own laborers who cut the maize, feed the stalks through a thresher that has an overhead chute straight into the back of a tipper lorry that then transports the cut silage straight to the storage site where it is compressed using Gabriel’s tractors. Do you see how the entire process fits into one sentence? It cost me 39% of what last year’s experience cost and was executed in one day. I want to tell Cantankerous David and Thresher Operator that they were one hundred percent correct, I appreciate their generous advice and won’t be needing their labor intensive services again.

Meanwhile Gabriel has to be booked way in advance, as his order book is populated by other Laikipia farmers who saw the commercial light a long time ago. Are you a telephone farmer fed up with local labor shenanigans? Do your research assidously, the solutions are right there on the ground.

X:@carolmusyoka

YouTube: The Nitpicker Podcast

When a hyena wants to eat its children, it accuses them of smelling like goats, goes an African proverb. At least that’s what went through my mind as I read through the Horticultural Crops Authority Bill 2024, that was tabled in Parliament last month.

First off, like its tax payer resource hungry cousin the Livestock Bill 2024, it seeks to create yet another parastatal called the Horticultural Crops Authority (HCA) with a full board, management and staff. So I moseyed on down the street and visited the Ministry of Agriculture and Livestock Development website to see how in heaven’s name we had not solved for the crucial crisis of agricultural crop oversight in Kenya’s legal history. I found that an Agriculture and Food Authority (AFA), had been created back in 2013.

The AFA is the former Horticultural Crops Directorate which was the former Horticultural Crops Development Authority established in 1967. According to its website, “the focus of the Directorate at inception was mainly the smallholder farmers who had the potential to utilize their own labour, as the production processes were labour intensive, with a view to getting high return for their limited land.” The AFA has a full compliance department that amongst other roles, administers and promotes the Horticulture Crops Regulation 2020 to the horticulture stakeholders to ensure compliance in production, processing, marketing, grading, storage, collection, transportation and traceability of scheduled crops. In addition, the department ensures the registration and licensing of industry players.

But let’s park the duplication of efforts aside here, after all I did mention that folks over at that ministry have a serious penchant for creating fiefdoms at the taxpayer’s expense. Why should you care about this Bill? Under section 4 of the Bill, it will apply to any horticultural produce grown, processed or marketed in Kenya and any farm whether privately or communally held. Under section 6 of the Bill, it states that the newly minted -plastic covers still on the just delivered leather swivel chairs – Horticultural Crops Authority will have the power to regulate growers and dealers of horticultural crops. The Bill then goes ahead to define, in excruciatingly detailed terms, which fruits, herbs and spices, vegetables, medicinal plants and flowers fall under its regulation. From avocadoes, bananas, plantains to mangoes, melons and pawpaws. From basil, thyme and rosemary to moringa, stinging nettle and amaranth. From cabbage, cauliflower and broccoli, to green maize, kale or sukuma wiki, spinach and tomatoes. All these, amongst many others, fall within the ambit of the HCA which, under Section 24, requires commercial growers of these crops to be registered, for free as an added bonus, with their respective county governments.

The drafters of the Bill mysteriously do not define who a commercial grower is, but they do state that a grower is a person who cultivates horticultural crops including a smallholder farmer. If you or your relatives are currently sweating the family land assets for crop production, you are likely to fall within this ambit, assuming that commercial growing means growing any of the above mentioned crops for sale. Another eye brow raising section 27 of the Bill requires a grower of horticultural produce shall use inputs from a registered source. Please note, it states a grower, not a commercial grower thereby casting the net over everyone who grows the crops therein described.

If you apply the same level of keenness as a mover of a deputy presidential impeachment motion being grilled on a hot Senate seat, you will note that the Bill does introduce the role of County Governments into the horticulture value chain, which I can imagine could have been done by amending the existing legal framework. But if they applied that efficiency, then there wouldn’t be an opportunity to issue licenses to exporters of horticultural produce and products, as well as importers and export processors of the same.

In summary, a read of the 42 pages of the HCA Bill leaves one to conclude that someone wants to monitor a lucrative fruit, vegetable, flower and herbs industry by ensuring every yet-to-be-defined commercial grower is registered “for free” whether they are large or small scale. What happens after “free registration” is where the goat likely meets the hyena. The same someone also wants to create a parallel licensing regime to that of the AFA, because the principal role of governments worldwide is to make doing business as difficult as possible for citizens trying to make an honest living.  And finally, the requirement for all growers to purchase inputs from registered sources makes one start to wonder why adopt a prescriptive approach to where hundreds of thousands of farmers buy their inputs?

[email protected]

Last week, I shared a few insights about the PhD thesis I was paying for at the University of side hustle life. Based on the multiple emails I received from readers, it would appear that there are many long suffering city dwelling farmers like me who have burnt both their savings and egos at the rural side hustle stake. The best email was from a reader who succinctly summarized thus: Farming is really hard work and the fastest way to become a millionaire from a billionaire is to become a farmer.

For those thinking of indulging in this ultimate insanity, here are a few more learnings to help you make an informed decision.

Lesson one: locals are not necessarily always rooting for your success. Even if you’re an expatriate who has purchased a farm in the area. Your permanent staff should come from any other part of the country than the one your farm is at. A minimum travel time of 3 hours to the employee’s home provides the distance necessary to ensure that he has no local ties that might influence how things operate on your farm. A local permanent worker will see your farm as an extension of his home and your assets as an extension of his assets. You see, you will be robbed. Constantly. So use expatriates as your permanent workers and use local labor for casual work such as harvesting or weeding.

Lesson two: If you are rearing animals, you need the services of a local vet. Just like children, animals fall sick at the oddest of times and from the most unlikely of causes. Recently an angry swarm of bees landed on my farm and attacked my sheep and goats. Our vet, a lovely lady who mobilizes very quickly on her motorcycle, had to rush over to the farm to inject the animals with an antihistamine as they reacted very badly to the bee stings. A few weeks later a sheep started bloating rapidly and died within two days. Daktari came over and performed a post mortem that revealed that the sheep had swallowed a bee that wreaked internal havoc on the poor animal. And yes, I had to pay for the post mortem too! Consequently, training staff on how to carry out basic animal health practices like bimonthly deworming, spraying against ticks, injecting against coughs that may develop into bigger pulmonary issues amongst other interventions is critical if you want your animals to remain healthy without breaking the bank on vet fees.

Lesson three: Cheap is expensive. Just because animals don’t use forks and knives as they eat does not mean they shouldn’t get quality feeds. I had invested, like every budding farmer, in some fowl that was good at foraging for its own food. In trying to grow the flock, I started buying feeds from a shop in Nanyuki town. For the first 2 years I had that flock, not a single egg was laid by the females. When I shared this story with another farmer, they took a minute to pick themselves off the floor from where they were rolling in laughter. Animal feeds are one of this country’s biggest scam. It turns out that many feed manufacturers mill maize cobs that have zero nutritive value and then mix that with some maize meal and pack it into sacks. When I started buying proper animal feeds from a shop in Nanyuki town that is the authorized distributor of feeds manufactured by mainstream millers, my fowl started dropping eggs like 50 bob notes at a pre-election political rally. The bigger concern for anyone buying animal feeds, including dog owners, is the level of aflatoxin in the feeds which is fatal for animals. Don’t keep animals if you’re not prepared to either buy feeds from a legitimate manufacturer or formulate the feeds yourself.

Lesson four: You’re on your own in this venture. Today you can get insurance for your mobile phone and even for your clothes, cups and sufurias in case they get burnt in a domestic fire. But you will struggle to find any insurance for your livestock despite feeding, housing and medicating those assets. Good livestock is about good genetics, thus you have to buy good stock typically from a breeding farm several rivers away from your farm. These live assets are transported to your farm on the wheels of faith and live on your farm covered by the feverish words of daily supplication to a higher deity.  As I concluded last week, if you’re thinking of farming, ask. Ask again. And when you’re done asking, ask once more to save yourself some school fees.

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The Merriam-Webster Dictionary defines gaslighting as the psychological manipulation of a person usually over an extended period of time that causes the victim to question the validity of their own thoughts, perception of reality, or memories and typically leads to confusion, loss of confidence and self-esteem, uncertainty of one’s emotional or mental stability and a dependency on the perpetrator.

The dictionary continues to explain that the term gaslighting originated from the title of a 1938 play and the movies based on that play, the plots of which involve a man attempting to make his wife believe that she is going insane. His mysterious activities in the attic cause the house’s gas lights to dim, but he insists to his wife that the lights are not dimming and that she can’t trust her own perceptions.

I ended my column last Monday by saying that following the Gen Z protests the previous week, corporate leaders need Gen Z mentors to help them get a real time understanding of their current and future customers. Then things became hotter last Tuesday and Thursday. Gas flame hot. Conversations on various social media platforms became emotive, passionate and even incendiary. Two debates on two different groups that I am a member of stood out for me. The first, a neighborhood group, had two members of parliament (MPs) who voted yes and were specifically called out for this. One MP hugged a mute tree and remained as silent as a Manchester United fan at a Premier League Recent Winner’s Whatsapp group as the group chatter went on and on about how tone deaf the political class were choosing to be against their constituents. The second MP chose to leap off the self-incriminating cliff with defensive clap backs on why they voted yes, once a video of them speaking in Parliament supporting the controversial Finance Bill was posted on the group. This MP thumped their chest and said they had nothing to apologize for. The abuses that followed sent the second MP to join the first one sitting under the Old Trafford mute tree.

The second debate was on a different group of professional colleagues. Amongst them is a senior public servant who chose to come in and throw a grenade.  Rather than reading the room where there was also much discussion about the reason behind the tax protests, the individual chose to paint a picture of chaos, fear and despondency if the protests, that had started having violent outcomes by this time, didn’t end. The individual did not for a single minute explain the rationale behind the Finance Bill. Not a single minute. Consequently, many of the other group members called the individual out, asking them to remove the rose-tinted glasses and red carpet lined blinkers that were blocking them from seeing what the mood of the nation was. Following the withdrawal of the Finance Bill later that day, nothing has been heard from the individual who likely joined the other MPs sitting under the Old Trafford mute tree.

Members of Parliament post dancing videos on Tiktok, swaying their hips with shiny faces lifted to the Range Rover heavens, thanking their Lexus gods for the far they have come. When called out for the exuberance of their instant coffee wealth, they rubbish the naysayers and call them jealous. They gaslight the public and tell them how a stable country is critical for prosperity and that the new taxes will be good for the country. They look for an evil bogeyman who is pulling the strings of resistance, since Kenyans are unable, neither individually nor collectively, to see wanton wastage and blatant corruption.

We get it, dear public servants. We get it completely. You know better than us what is good for us. You know what good governance looks like from the third floor of your newly purchased Karen villas. You rush to give us good governance as your chase cars run us off the road, with the ubiquitous dour faced bodyguard pointing an ashen walkie talkie holding wrist at us for daring to share the same tarmac that you do.

You have set world class governance standards from all the international benchmarking you have done and would have continued to do in the quadrupled parliamentary travel budget that the Finance Bill had set. We remain in stupefied awe of your brilliance as you attempt to gaslight us into a chaos-led submission. What a sad time for Kenya. What a sad time for our children, the heirs of your prosperity legacy.

Twitter/X:@carolmusyoka

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The Merriam Webster Online Dictionary defines the word “Woke” as: aware of and actively attentive to important societal facts and issues (especially issues of racial and social justice).

Last week’s Gen Z protests brought woke-ism to Kenya in the most incredibly fascinating way. In case you are the only visitor in Jerusalem who doesn’t know about the peaceful protests last week, I cannot help you. Let your fingers do the walking for you and find your way to the social media virtual realm because that is where all the action is happening. The issue that should have any organizational leaders worried today is that while we were watching the peaceful protests on the streets of various towns in the country, the real violence was happening off the streets and in a virtual realm.

Earlier this month, the telephone numbers of politicians and public figures were leaked online and circulated widely with tips being openly shared online on what damage could be done with this kind of information. The tongue-in-cheek advice did not stop there as the online warriors had nothing but time and online street smarts going for them so they dug up history. One politician, whose rise to fame was as a mid 1990s comedian specializing in political parody, trashed the protests as being fake. Before you could say redykulass, a clip from the politician’s nineties show was shared online juxtaposed to his parliamentary claims of fakeness. The clip was one of his classical parodies on the buffoonery of politicians at the time. The internet never forgets.

Another nominated senator who famously campaigns for women’s right to feminine hygiene products decided to go after a “blogger’ that shared her number and had him arrested for breach of data privacy. She herself had posted her own number on a social media platform a day before as she corralled support for her campaign, asking people to keep calling and keep texting her. Having been “awokened” to the fact that she had posted her number already, she quickly deleted her own post. Before you could spell “Always”,  keyboard warriors had already taken screen shots of the post and proceeded to call out her hypocrisy by sharing the screenshots widely. Because the internet never forgets.

A first term member of parliament (MP) who is a successful entrepreneur that ran and won on an independent ticket decided to vote yes to the Finance Bill last Thursday. The list of all the MPs who voted yes was in circulation on social media faster than you can say sportpesa. The keyboard warriors went to work, whipping up a boycott frenzy of businesses associated with him including a popular night club. Someone pulled up a tweet from two years ago where his spouse  was congratulating him at his MP swearing in ceremony and asked the spouse a difficult question about her choices. Because the internet never forgets.

Youtube and TikTok have democratized the content creation space by providing free platforms for absolutely anyone to take a video on a phone and publish it to the world. Careers have been created for anyone who is skilled enough to read the room and know how to entertain, educate or just inform. And the same platforms create the space for these content creators to monetize their creativity through sharing of advertising revenue. What the Gen Z have managed to do in a short time is to wake us all up to what the true democratizing power of social media is beyond its informative, educative and entertaining aspects. It can uplift a brand and provide immeasurable props to coffee shops and mosques that give critical aid to injured protestors. It can be weaponized and shoot down a brand faster than a police water cannon fells peaceful protestors in Kenyatta Avenue, Nairobi. It can wrap its supporting arms around felled demonstrators and fund raise for those held in jails or injured in hospitals.

We now have a generation who takes control of their own narrative and will not allow us to control that narrative for them. They are tax paying, national ID carrying members of the public who can no longer be told that they can’t sit at the adults table. It’s business unusual for government functionaries and corporate business leaders. We don’t understand what’s coming down the road and about to hit us in the form of future customers and future tax payers. If you are in leadership, you need a Gen Z mentor. They will help you navigate this new order. And please remember, the internet never forgets.

[email protected]

Twitter/X: @carolmusyoka

I’ve promised myself not to mention the “C” word in this opinion piece as you the reader are probably as sick and tired of being sick and tired about reading about that pandemic’s insidious takeover of the world as we know it. If ever there was a time when every single business owner or leader was forcibly required to be creative it is now. From how to get the production of your goods continuing in a highly disrupted supply chain, to how to deliver your services in a safe environment for both staff and clients, to how to keep your non-essential staff engaged as they sit at home twiddling their thumbs worrying about if and when that redundancy letter comes through from HR.

We are having to be more creative in finding things to do that will bring in income, not just currently, but even in the future when we get to the other side of the “C” word. The good news is that if we crack this challenge we can deliver services beyond just Nairobi to geographical jurisdictions that we had never thought about. The winners (because if our print media is to be believed, there are always winners and losers) are the internet service providers globally, as this innovation will be taking place in multiple industries and multiple places. Software developers will also win big, as the demand for previously physically delivered services is bound to surge particularly for those in the educational space. Courier companies are also likely to get increasing demand as documents have to be sent from person to person, which documents previously would have been signed in a co-working space as well as goods being delivered, as many companies reduce their own delivery capacity to cut costs.

I wrote last week that I had decided to flee to my deserted office to escape a barrage of academic questions from my children, since they were knee deep in remote learning. But this past week required me to work from home and I sat next to my 9 year old as she had a music class on Zoom, the online meeting platform. First she shooed me away as my shoulder was visible in the screen. So I gingerly relocated to a metre away and had to literally sit on my hands as the teacher played a video which allegedly had music, but which the students, at least my daughter and myself, who sat in the peanut gallery, couldn’t hear. So I asked her to type in the chat room that she couldn’t hear the music, only to find that five other students were chatting about having the same problem. Meanwhile the teacher was swaying to the inaudible sounds, eyes closed, in complete bliss. I couldn’t stand it anymore and pushed my daughter aside, waving furiously at the teacher to wake up and read the chats (imagine hands in the air typing on an invisible keyboard as a sign that teacher needs to check the chat bar). The other children whose eyes were open as they weren’t in the same auditory bliss as the teacher, started laughing, but the teacher couldn’t hear because a) she had muted all the students and b) her eyes were still closed. My daughter, absolutely mortified and horrified simultaneously, pushed me away, grabbed the computer and told me never to darken her class door again. So that was how I was fired from my oversight role, quite unceremoniously I might add, with no indications on whether I would ever be allowed to sit in on a class again. Anyway my man of the match was the kid who, given the last five minutes of the class to speak, shouted out “Miss, are we going to have an online class party on closing day?” Bless his social distanced heart.

When we get to the other side of this “C” word, one thing for sure is that we will all collectively appreciate the fact that with the right infrastructure for power, computers and printers, it is possible to get all the children in Kenya to have access to quality education. This does not necessarily require government intervention, rather, private sector initiatives that are always looking for ways to increase impactful corporate social responsibility. Working closely with an academic institution that can provide teaching resources, corporates can adopt a school in a remote area, provide solar power capability as well as a large screen for the lessons, few computers for downloading teaching materials, printing paper for answer sheets, and a couple of scanning machines to scan the worksheets back to the urban teacher. It may sound simplistic on paper, but as a parent who’s had to go through this for the last few weeks, it is a deeply impactful challenge worth cracking.

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Twitter: @carolmusyoka

We are living through very difficult times of a Covid-19 pandemic. I run a small consultancy with employees and all I can think about is how we can keep the business running and pay salaries when it is manifestly clear that business is going to grind slowly to a halt as the economy takes a beating. I have seen many friends and acquaintances on social media posting about their own office and business closures already, with only 9 identified Covid-19 patients as at the time of writing this. Many have already experienced cancellations from clients and significantly reduced sales. A large media group just announced massive job redundancies, which must have already been under serious consideration before this pandemic hit and could be unrelated to it

I loved history when I was in school. Reading how the world has been shaped over centuries through war, industrial revolutions, religion, human rights as well as shifts in demographics and populace has always been fascinating. The beauty about reading books is that one is comfortably seated and distantly attached to such events, having nothing but the luxury of applying intellectual analysis on the cause and the subsequent effect of these events. The last one week has left me despondent because we are all smack in the middle of a global event that will have massive ramifications on every single worldwide citizen. There is no luxury of detachedly watching it from the sidelines, rather, we are having to make decisions that will have an impact on lives. From whether or not to attend a critical social function, how employees should work remotely if possible, how clients can be serviced virtually, how non Covid-19 related illnesses can be treated without hospital visits and so on, we are having to make multiple decisions simultaneously and pray that these are the right ones.

Over and above all of that is having to battle with the differences of opinion on how serious this is. One person I spoke to last week was extremely relaxed about this, after all, they opined, it’s just like a very serious bout of influenza and can be treated as such. No need to panic, they said, there are more serious things to worry about like HIV and insane bodaboda drivers. Another person I spoke to has taken the completely opposite view, this is Armageddon and we all need to build wartime bunkers, hunker down and hibernate until this storm blows over. My greatest challenge personally last week was having to deal with my two daughters who now have to home school. As the school closure was sudden, I had no idea that I would need computer equipment for all of them. We have one laptop for use domestically, but being in different classes and schools, each of them were now required to check in to class virtually, and there the fight started. The younger one was adamant that she cannot use an iPad to log into zoom as the icons of the other students that were attending the class were too small and she needed to see their faces. Turns out that the first ten minutes of the virtual class consisted of giddying screams of happiness at seeing friends online and shouts of hi! She then required me to help her with her school work. She’s nine years old. I could navigate through the music and English papers, but anyone who knows me well will tell you that mathematics has never ever been my friend. When it came to the mathematics papers, “ask your older sister,” was my mind boggled response at the end of the day. I fled to the office the following day, having told all my employees to work from home in the interest of health safety. I couldn’t bear for my older daughter to bring her physics papers with their electrodes, neutrons and what-you-may-confoundedly-call-it. Being alone in the office is practicing responsible social distance, is it not?

I am open to be judged for my utter and complete realization that I have delegated academic learning to teachers as they are far better placed to lead this noble educational cause. I am not ashamed to admit there are things I can do, like impart morals and social values, and things I cannot do like patiently answer questions. If we survive this, I know that the lessons I am taking out from this epochal period is that teachers are the most unrecognized heroes on God’s green earth. We will come out of this stronger as mankind, with new ways of working and educating that might end up reducing the costs of service delivery. If anything, the future history books will tell us that were it not for the third industrial revolution called technology, we would have crashed and burned through this pandemic.

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Twitter: @carolmusyoka

I have worked with numerous Boards over the last decade in my corporate governance consultancy and have come to deeply appreciate the role of the company secretary. The assumption of a “secretarial” role, which would infer simply taking minutes and ordering yet another confounded double cappuccino with soy milk and half a teaspoon of sugar for fussy Directors is a far cry from what this indispensable office bearer is responsible for. The company secretary is responsible for the efficient administration of a company, particularly with regard to ensuring compliance with statutory and regulatory requirements as well as ensuring that decisions of the Board of Directors are implemented.
A few years ago, after undertaking a Board evaluation where the role of the company secretary was being assessed by Directors, a visibly disturbed chief executive pulled me aside after I had submitted the results. “You mean there are so many things that the company secretary is supposed to be doing and yet ours probably does only a third of them?” Well, I thought to myself, this was not the time to throw the clearly underutilized resource under the bus. “It depends on what your terms of reference are. If you don’t define these clearly from the beginning then you will simply get what you ask and pay for,” I responded. The company in question was using an outsourced company secretarial service and management were not exposed to the various value additions that they could demand from their provider. But value additions aside, there are some basic requirements that a good company secretary should have. Firstly, the company secretary not only takes the minutes, but ensures that any matters arising out of the meeting are tabulated into an action tracking log. The company secretary should work with management during the subsequent quarter to ensure that these items are followed through for execution so that by the time the next meeting rolls up, the action log is populated with the outcomes making for a smooth and faster session when it comes to reviewing the action items. I have attended Board meetings where at the point where minutes are being confirmed, the chairman asks Directors to read through them and see if there are any matters arising. What follows is a chief executing bumbling through the ones he can remember doing and fobbing off the ones that he clean forgot to execute. Meanwhile, since there is no action log on record, the matters arising from past meetings quite often fall through the cracks, only to be remembered when a crisis unfolds.
Secondly, a good company secretary keeps the Board informed of any regulatory changes that have occurred or expected to occur. An even better company secretary ensures that Directors get the requisite training on the regulatory changes particularly where they are great significance and impact to the company and the Directors in their personal capacities. A few years ago, the Capital Markets Authority (CMA) was undertaking a review of the corporate governance code and had several stakeholder forums where it invited company secretaries as well as Directors of listed companies. The changes that the CMA was proposing were far reaching and the cost of governance was going to significantly increase with the introduction of legal audits, governance audits and independently facilitated Board evaluations. As a Director in some listed companies, the company secretaries in most of the Boards I sat on immediately alerted Directors that there was going to be a major change in the regulatory framework that not only had cost implications, but also required far more Director engagement in the undertaking of their fiduciary obligations. However, on one Board, the company secretary, who I had seen present at the stakeholder forums, remained completely mum. I politely asked, at the any other business point of the meeting, if the company secretary was going to inform the Board of the impending changes. A shrug of the shoulders and some mumbling about doing that later was the lackadaisical response. There was never any mention of it again by the time I left the Board a few months later.
A good company secretary can make a Board achieve its oversight objectives as long as they consider themselves the conscience of the Board. They play a delicate role in ensuring that the Board’s engagements with management are well informed, with the right amount of information flowing for appropriate decision making while not appearing to be a whistle blower when operational information is mischievously withheld. A less than stellar company secretary will only do what is required at a minimum: filing statutory returns, taking minutes and ensuring that Directors get ocean facing rooms at the annual coastal Board retreat. Which secretary do you have?

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Twitter: @carolmusyoka