In Carcase for Hounds, Meja Mwangi puts us deep inside the head of General Haraka — a Mau Mau fighter alone in the forest, sick, exhausted, hunted from every side. His allies have disappeared. His ammunition is running low. The government forces, led by D.C. Kingsley, press in from every direction. And still the General fights.
“A feeling of aloneness chilled its way into him. Where were his supporters? When would they come? Would they ever come? Why did they leave him wounded, alone, to fight the soldiers? Fight the war alone. All the time alone.”
I have thought about General Haraka many times over. Not because I was fighting a war — but because the particular loneliness Mwangi describes, the question of where are the people who were supposed to stand with me, is the unspoken interior life of almost every entrepreneur I have ever known building in Kenya.
You are expected to fight on all fronts simultaneously. Sales and finance and operations and HR and compliance and client delivery — all at once, with no general staff, no ammunition depot, no D.C. in Nairobi calling back with reinforcements. Just you, your small band, and the relentless pressure of a system that was not, if we are honest, designed with you in mind.
Since Men Learned to Shoot Without Missing
In his Things Fall Apart, Chinua Achebe once wrote: “Since men have learned to shoot without missing their mark, birds have learned to fly without perching.”
The proverb is used by the character Eneke the bird to explain his constant flying. Because hunters have perfected their aim, the bird must perfect its ability to evade them. He meant it as a proverb about adaptation under threat. I read it as a precise description of the Kenyan entrepreneur’s daily reality.
The system has learned to shoot without missing. The Kenya Employment Act, 2007 — well-intentioned, important, and genuinely necessary to protect workers — has, in practice, become a loaded weapon that disproportionately punishes the small employer who lacks the HR infrastructure to comply with its full weight. And so the bird — the founder, the builder — has learned that they can never perch. Never pause. Never be informal. Never extend trust without documentation. Never be kind without a paper trail.
You cannot shoot without missing if you never stop to take aim. And you cannot take aim if you are never allowed to perch.
Where I Learned to Run
I was born and raised in rural Kakamega. My school was five kilometres from home — one way. I trekked it every morning and every evening, in the early sun and in the dust, in the rain when it came and in the dry when it didn’t. Nobody drove me. There was no bus. There was the road and my feet and the knowledge that, at the end of it, there was a classroom.
I say this not as a complaint — I say it because I want you to understand the arithmetic of what it takes to build something from nothing in this country. You learn the arithmetic young. No shortcuts. No network to call. Just the work and the distance between where you are and where you are going.
My first salary was KES 2,000 per month. I earned it teaching Sciences and Mathematics at that same rural school where I had studied — the school that had shaped me, sitting on the other side of the desk now. Two thousand shillings. I managed it carefully, because you manage carefully when there is no more coming if you don’t. That school, those students, that salary — they taught me more about managing people, resources, and expectations than any MBA module has since.
I tell you this backstory because I want you to understand who is fighting when the Kenyan entrepreneur fights. I am not a pampered product of a comfortable system. Someone who learned to trek before they learned to run.
The Forest Has Many Hunters
Here is what nobody writes on the poster when they celebrate the entrepreneur.
Every formal obligation placed on a large corporation — the tax filings, the compliance frameworks, the HR documentation, the regulatory reporting, the audit trails — is absorbed by a department built specifically for that purpose. A multinational has a tax team. A compliance officer. A legal department. An HR function with its own budget and headcount.
The same obligation placed on a ten-person company is absorbed by one person: the founder.
PAYE. VAT. Corporation tax. Withholding tax. NSSF. NHIF. Annual returns. Business permits. Sector-specific licensing. Data protection compliance. Each one with its own deadline, its own penalty structure, its own inspector who arrives with a clipboard and a fine when something is missed. Each one designed for a system that assumes you have the infrastructure to manage it.
You do not have the infrastructure. You are the infrastructure.
And then there is the human weight. Every person who walks through your door brings their full complexity — their growth, their grievances, their aspirations, their personal crises, their professional failures, and their legal rights. At a large company, there is a department trained and staffed to hold all of that. At Pawa IT, for the longest time, there was me. Engineer by training. Founder by necessity. HR manager, compliance officer, performance manager, and crisis counsellor by default, simultaneously, in the same afternoon.
The forest that General Haraka fought in had visible hunters — D.C. Kingsley and his government forces pressing through the trees. The forest an entrepreneur navigates has hunters that are harder to name: the weight of obligations designed for institutions you are not yet, applied to a company you are still becoming. Be too formal and the bureaucracy swallows you. Be too informal and the absence of structure swallows you differently. There is no position in the clearing that draws no fire.
Since men learned to shoot without missing, birds have learned to fly without perching.
You do not perch. You cannot afford to. The moment you stop moving — stop filing, stop documenting, stop managing, stop building — something in the machinery turns against you. This is not paranoia. This is the operating condition of building a formal SME in Kenya, where the cost of staying compliant is highest for those with the fewest resources to bear it, and the cost of non-compliance is paid by those who were already running out of runway.
Building the Nation
Christopher Barlow’s poem Building the Nation has been taught in Kenyan schools for decades – I studied it back in high school, more than two decades ago! God, sounds a lifetime away! It describes a government driver who takes the Permanent Secretary to a lavish lunch — cold Bell beer, fried chicken, wine to fill the hollowness of the laughs, ice cream to cover the stereotype jokes — and drives him back. On the return journey, the PS yawns and asks: “Did you have any lunch, friend?”
The driver had not. But he had done his share in building the nation.
I have watched that poem play out in the real economy of this country more times than I can count. The entrepreneur who builds the company, trains the talent, creates the jobs, pays the taxes, absorbs the risk, and makes the payroll — usually while eating last, if at all — while the systems that were supposed to support them extract and complicate and add burden upon burden.
The driver built the nation. He was also hungry.
The Weight of It All
John Ruganda, in The Burdens, gives us a line that I have kept close:
“Too much ambition may break a man; too little takes him nowhere. I choose to risk being broken rather than stand still.”
That is the honest declaration of every founder still standing after a decade of building in Kenya. Not a boast. Not a performance. A quiet, private choice made again and again: I know the odds. I know the weight. I know that the forest has a thousand eyes and the system has a thousand clauses. And still I choose this over standing still.
Because the alternative is not safety. It is stagnation dressed as safety. It is watching someone else from six time zones away solve the problems of your market, for your people, with your data, on their terms. That is not an option I can accept. Haraka could not put down his rifle not because he thought he would win — he had no certainty of winning. He fought because the fire in him was hotter than the forest’s cold.
Still I Rise
Maya Angelou knew something about fighting a system designed to defeat you. She wrote:
Out of the huts of history’s shame
I rise
Up from a past that’s rooted in pain
I rise
I’m a black ocean, leaping and wide,
Welling and swelling I bear in the tide.
She was writing about something larger than any one person’s story. But she was also writing about the specific physics of rising after being knocked down by a system that expected you to stay down.
I have sat in Employment Court. I have borrowed money to make payroll. I have shaken hands at resignation meetings while my heart palpitated in my chest.
And I am still building.
Not because the system made it easy. Because I am General Haraka in that forest — sick sometimes, outnumbered often, asking where the reinforcements are — but still carrying the rifle. Still moving. The fire still hotter than the cold rain.
I am the “The lizard that jumped from the high Iroko tree to the ground said he would praise himself if no-one else did.”
I rise. I rise. I rise.
Oscar Limoke is the co-founder of Pawa IT Solutions and Konversations. He writes about technology, leadership, and what it actually costs to build something in Africa.