There is a particular kind of humility that follows a fall. It does not announce itself. It does not write a press release or compose a holding statement. It comes in very early on a quiet morning, sits down at a desk with a blank document, and begins asking the questions it has been successfully avoiding for years.
What did I do? Where did the rain begin to beat us? How did I get here—with the best of intentions, with twelve years of building something real—and still end up here?
Chinua Achebe, in his essay on Nigeria’s failures, reaches for an Igbo proverb to frame the only question that matters after a fall: “Where did the rain begin to beat us?” Not who else was standing in the storm. Not whether the rain was fair. Where, specifically, did we fail to build shelter?
The rain began beating us long before anyone noticed it was raining. It began in the years when the company was small enough that my personality could substitute for policy—when my goodwill stood in for a grievance process, when being liked felt the same as being fair, when treating people like “family” seemed like the same thing as creating an environment where everyone was genuinely safe. It was not.
A founder who is the culture is running a company with a single point of failure. When the founder makes a mistake—and every founder makes mistakes—there is no independent structure to absorb it, challenge it, or give the people affected a safe channel to be heard. There is only the person, uncontained by the institution that was never properly built around them.
That is where the rain started. In the space where the institution should have been.
In his poem The Second Coming, W.B. Yeats wrote the lines that Achebe would later borrow for his masterwork:
“Turning and turning in the widening gyre,
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world.”
Achebe chose that phrase because it described something precise—not a dramatic explosion, but a quieter, more insidious process. The centre of a company does not usually collapse in one moment. It erodes. The things that held everything together—the shared understandings, the unwritten codes, the mutual obligations honoured on a handshake—weaken slowly, invisibly, until the day they can no longer bear the weight.
That is what happened at Pawa IT. Not a failure of product. Not a failure of strategy. A slow erosion of invisible architecture. When the centre finally gave way, it gave way loudly—publicly, in the way that things which have been quietly failing for a long time eventually do.
The most honest thing a leader can do after that kind of fall is stop explaining and start working. Not working to manage the narrative. Working—quietly, methodically, unglamorously—to fix the actual thing that broke.
This is what that work looked like. It is not a comfortable essay to write. But the discomfort is the point.
The Death of Folklore
Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o’s Weep Not Child rests on a conviction that structured, documented, verifiable knowledge is the path to dignity and liberation. What Ngũgĩ understood—and what I came to understand at real personal cost—is that the undocumented alternative, the passed-down assumptions and the “everyone knows how we do things here,” is not knowledge at all. It is folklore.
We had no independent HR function that any employee could trust to operate outside my influence. No formal grievance pathway. A Code of Business Conduct that existed as a document but had never been taught or embedded into daily practice. A culture of informality and personal access that, without structural guardrails, left people with no safe architecture for the moments when the culture failed them.
Ken Saro-Wiwa, in Africa Kills Her Sun, makes the uncomfortable argument that destruction is rarely inflicted on us entirely from the outside. It is often self-inflicted by the empowered who leave systems vague because vagueness preserves their authority. That was us.
Folklore cannot protect anyone when an institution is tested. Our institution was tested. The folklore failed. And standing in the rubble of that failure, the question was simple and frightening: where do we actually begin?
Bringing in Outside Eyes
The hardest thing for any founder to admit is that they cannot see clearly inside their own organisation. Not because they are dishonest, but because proximity is a form of blindness. You carry too much context, too many relationships, and too much history to evaluate anything impartially. You cannot be both the surgeon and the patient.
So we hired outside eyes.
For over a year, we engaged an independent HR consultancy to do what we had never done properly before: audit every process from the ground up. Employment contracts. Onboarding procedures. Performance management frameworks. Grievance and disciplinary policies.
Choosing outside eyes was not an admission of incompetence. It was an admission of the limits of self-knowledge, which is a harder, more honest thing.
The Day I Stood Before the Team
By the time the headlines actually hit in October 2025, the internal reality of Pawa IT was already vastly different. We had been working with the HR consultant for over a year. The new policies were in place. The employees who had joined us between 2023 and 2025 were in shock.
But the internet does not care about your feelings. The news came fast and furious. The LinkedIn think-pieces swirled. I had nowhere to hide.
I called a company-wide town hall.
I brought no slide deck. I just stood in the room and looked at the people who had trusted me with their livelihoods. I told them all there was to tell about the issue. I apologized. I told them it was a deep shame that they had to be associated with this ugly news, and the hardest truth was that there was absolutely nothing I could do to protect them from it.
I owned the ghost of the past. I told them that the early version of me—the founder who was instrumental in our initial growth, who prided himself on a culture of ‘informality’ and borderless ‘openness’—had inadvertently laid the groundwork for this exact catastrophe. That lack of boundaries had led to this unfortunate ending.
But as the storm raged outside, I gave them a charge. I told them to take absolute responsibility for the company’s culture moving forward.
Then, I gave them the brutal truth. I told them that as a leader, I still had a long way to go, and I confessed that the ghosts of my past were inevitably going to drag the company—and likely them—through the mud for a while. It was a cold, agonizing reality, and I refused to hide it from them. I told them plainly that I was going to be their heaviest burden before the dust settled.
But I promised them one thing. The ride ahead would be incredibly rough, but we were not stepping into the dark. The painful, quiet work to rebuild our foundation hadn’t just started; I had set those wheels in motion years ago. Out of this public fire, a new Pawa IT was already emerging—stronger, sharper, and unbroken. And so it came to pass. Story for another day
The Long Work
Rebuilding after a fall is not a moment. It is a practice.
The rain beat us. But we finally built the shelter.