If you have lived in Nairobi long enough to have owned a six-kilogram gas cylinder, otherwise just called “gas,” you should know this proverb, and if you do not, please do. It is a piece of urban survival wisdom: always make a habit of greeting the people who sell charcoal, because cooking gas has a quiet habit of running out in the middle of the night.
Gas is a seductive city convenience. It burns with a clean, blue, confident flame. It makes no smoke, leaves no soot on the bottom of your sufuria, and requires no fanning on a cold evening. When the cylinder is full, it is remarkably easy to drive past the neighbourhood makaa dealer sitting beside his black gunny sacks at the corner kiosk. You keep your car windows rolled up against the dust. You do not wave. Not necessarily out of malice, mind you, but out of oblivion. You belong to the clean-energy economy now; it simply never occurs to you that your kitchen and his charcoal sack belong to the same ecosystem.
The late Wahome Mutahi, the master chronicler of Kenyan life whom we all knew as “Whispers,” spent his entire literary career documenting this specific strain of middle-class amnesia. In his columns, the “Son of the Soil” would acquire a modest promotion or a temporary windfall, move to a slightly quieter suburb, and immediately forget the geography of his own survival, right until the Friday evening auctioneers arrived or the urban plumbing failed.
Because the gas has no honest gauge. It never expires at two o’clock on a sunny Saturday afternoon when the petrol stations are open and the delivery riders are reachable. It dies with a faint, final hiss at 10:45 PM on a rainy Tuesday, when the ugali is still raw flour boiling in water and the children are waiting at the table. In that sudden, humbling silence, the blue flame is gone. You have to put on a jacket, walk down three flights of stairs, and knock on the corrugated iron sheet of the very charcoal seller you walked past at six o’clock.
Updated to add translation to the non-Kenyans:”Salamianga Watu wa Kuuza Makaa, Gas Huisha Usiku” verbatim and literally translates to , ” Be saying Hello to the Charcoal Sellers, Gas Finishes at Night”. Any other translations will los the meaning
For the last twelve years, I have watched a very similar human drama play out across corporate Kenya and the funded corridors of our technology ecosystem.
Before we go further…
Before I go any further, let me set the record straight on two counts. First, my heart goes out deeply to the hundreds of brilliant, hardworking Kenyan engineers, product managers, and operators who have lost their livelihoods in the recent waves of multinational restructurings and startup closures. These are immensely talented men and women who did everything right, wrote world-class code, and still found themselves casualties of boardroom decisions made thousands of miles away. Second, I must tip my hat to the principled industry leaders in our market: the men and women who have walked with local builders like us from day one, who hold us to uncompromisingly high standards, and who still open doors and give us a fair shot every time they move to a new table. We exist because of their stewardship.
It is precisely because I care about where those displaced engineers will land, and because I have seen what happens when local leaders intentionally build local capacity, that we must have an honest conversation about the amnesia that afflicts the rest of the room
The Ocol Complex in the Silicon Savannah
In 1966, the Ugandan poet Okot p’Bitek published Song of Lawino, a biting, musical monologue in which a traditional Acholi wife laments the transformation of her university-educated husband, Ocol. Having tasted Western schooling and colonial proximity, Ocol returns home disgusted by everything native. He despises his people’s dances, mocks their medicine, and looks at his own homestead as a site of backwardness. Lawino watches him with a mixture of sorrow and sharp irony, noting that Ocol has become a man who borrows his pride from a house he does not own.
Spend a few years building a technology services company in Nairobi, and you will recognize Ocol’s dilemma in the boardrooms around you.
Now, do not get me wrong. I would not still be standing here twelve years into building Pawa IT Solutions, and later Konversations, if every Kenyan executive suffered from this affliction. Some of the best business and the most transformative opportunities of my life have come from the hands of our most decorated industry and technology leaders. There are men and women at the very top of their game who have vouched for us and spoken our names in rooms we could never have imagined entering on our own.
There are the Day Ones, the leaders who rode with us from the beginning when both we and they were still crawling and figuring out how to get started; even today, when they have the internal infrastructure and the technical capability to do everything themselves, they still buy from us out of a deep sense of shared history and ecosystem stewardship. And then there are the true OGs of this industry: every time they cross the aisle to a new company or take up a bigger seat at a new table, they remember us, they look for us, and they make sure we get a fair shot in their new home. Those rare Kenyans are worth their weight in gold, far too few and far between, and perhaps I owe them a dedicated essay of their own just to properly honour the debt builders like me owe them.
Still, having seen what those secure, grounded leaders can do, the behaviour of the other camp stands out all the more starkly.
Over the years, I have sat across from countless other Kenyan executives, CTOs, procurement heads, and venture-backed founders. These are brilliant men and women, raised on the same soil as the rest of us, educated in the same public universities, riding on the same matatus before the stock options vested or the donor funding cleared. Yet, the moment they ascend into a multinational satellite office, a Tier-1 bank, or a startup freshly plump with four million dollars in seed capital, a curious amnesia sets in.
Ask them why they do not contract local technology service providers or partner with Kenyan SMEs, and the answers come out rehearsed, polished, and dripping with a quiet self-loathing.
“Kenyan developers, service providers, and SMEs just do not have what it takes,” one will tell you over a flat white in Kilimani. “Local vendors lack capacity,” another will say, before signing a six-figure retainer with a boutique consultancy in London or a dev shop in Bangalore. Some decide that because their runway looks infinite on a spreadsheet, they must build every single peripheral tool and operations stack entirely in-house. Others simply outsource the whole engineering function to India, convinced that a mediocre developer three time zones away is inherently superior to a senior engineer sitting two streets away on Ngong Road.
When you are sitting on a massive corporate budget or a generous foreign grant, it feels safe to despise the local ecosystem. You do not need the local SME. You do not need to give a Kenyan service provider a chance to cut their teeth on your enterprise contract, to build capacity through your feedback, or to grow their balance sheet through your prompt payment. You have the blue flame of foreign capital. Why would you ever greet the charcoal seller?
When the Fist Meets the Face
Mike Tyson once summarized the fragility of human arrogance in a single sentence: “Everyone has a plan until they get punched in the mouth.”
Between January 2023 and March 2026, the African technology and corporate ecosystem was punched squarely in the mouth.
For years, the plan was simple: raise endlessly from Silicon Valley, draw infinitely from development finance institutions, or secure a comfortable, dollar-pegged perch at a global technology giant’s local hub. From that elevated altitude, one could lecture the local market about “global standards” without ever having to survive local economics.
Then the arithmetic changed. Over those thirty-eight months between early 2023 and the first quarter of 2026, Africa’s tech ecosystem recorded at least 56 major layoff events, resulting in nearly 5,000 disclosed job losses. Those are only the numbers that made the press releases; the quiet non-renewals and structural freezes run much deeper.
Consider the giants. Microsoft is currently planning job cuts at its Africa Development Centre (ADC) right here in Nairobi. For anyone paying attention to corporate physics, this is not an isolated tremor; it follows the sudden, clinical closure of Microsoft’s Lagos engineering centre in 2024. When a boardroom in Redmond, Washington, needs to rebalance its quarterly expenditure around artificial intelligence infrastructure, a development centre in Westlands is not a sacred covenant. It is a row on an Excel sheet. A single keystroke can dissolve an entire department before Nairobi wakes up for morning traffic.
Or consider the grant-fed aristocracy of our startup scene. More than 30 Kenyan startups that had built their operations, their valuations, and their executive salaries on USAID grants ranging from $500,000 to $6 million are now staring into an existential abyss following the withdrawal of US funding. Overnight, the runway evaporated. The conferences stopped. The in-house “innovation labs” that were too proud to work with local agencies suddenly cannot make next month’s payroll.
The gas has run out. And as always, it has run out at night.
Sharks in the Indian Ocean, Crocodiles on River Road
During the early days of Alibaba, when American internet giants with billions in cash entered China to displace local players, Jack Ma offered a lesson in corporate ecology. “eBay may be a shark in the ocean,” he observed, “but I am a crocodile in the Yangtze River. If we fight in the ocean, we lose. If we fight in the Yangtze River, we win.”
We have our own geography for this truth in Kenya. We learned to survive on River Road.
River Road is not a body of water; it is the unvarnished, unforgiving artery of Nairobi’s real economy. It is where businesses are built without a safety net, where margins are defended with sheer grit under a merciless afternoon sun, and where the early years are fuelled by street-corner meals of mayai boiro, roasted maize, and a thirty-shilling smokie pasua between client meetings. On River Road, survival depends entirely on whether a local customer values what you built enough to pay for it today.
Bootstrapped Kenyan firms are the crocodiles of River Road. We learned to breathe in murky waters, navigating ninety-day invoice cycles that stretch into six months, punitive tax regimes, currency shocks, and enterprise clients who demand world-class reliability at a fraction of global cost. In Hilary Ng’weno’s classic Nairobi novel, The Men from Pretoria, there is a quiet recognition of how this city actually functions beneath the headlines. The institutions that endure here are rarely the ones with the loudest announcements; they are the ones adapted to the street-level realities of the river.
While the funded ecosystem often lamented to international panels that Kenya lacked adequate engineering talent or mature B2B vendors, the local SMEs on the ground were quietly keeping the country’s digital infrastructure running. We were taking in fresh graduates from regional universities and technical colleges that the corporate elite barely knew existed; I will not dishonour those institutions or the brilliant young minds they produce by naming them as obscure, just because the multinationals never bothered to look their way until we had already polished them. We were absorbing the friction of the local market, paying local taxes, and building real, revenue-funded capacity.
Weather, Climate, and the Brazier
I do not write this from a place of triumph. Anyone who has spent over a decade meeting payroll in Kenya knows this market is far too humbling to ever rejoice in another person’s contraction. Having walked through my own share of public storms, smear campaigns, and the quiet betrayals of people I once stood by, I have no appetite for schadenfreude.
When the neighbour with the empty cylinder knocks at eleven o’clock at night, the charcoal seller does not lecture him or slam the window. He wakes up, weighs the makaa, wraps it in old newspaper, and helps his neighbour finish cooking dinner. His dignity is in his trade, not in his grievances. The local SMEs and indigenous tech builders are still here, keeping the brazier lit. When the global cycle turns, we do not pack up for Delaware or Amsterdam; we stay right here and build for the next decade.
My only reflection for my brothers and sisters still riding high on the tenth floor is that we must stop confusing weather with climate. A three-year grant cycle or a multinational expansion wave is just warm weather. In George R.R. Martin’s Westeros, the children of a long summer always come to believe that the warmth is permanent, right up until the elders remind them of the only forecast that never fails: Winter is coming. To mistake a seasonal breeze from Seattle or San Francisco for the permanent climate of Nairobi is to know very little about how the world actually works.
While your summer lasts, look out of the window. Give the local builder in the trenches a fair hearing. Hold them to high standards, pay their invoices on time, and let them earn your trust rather than disqualifying them because they share your passport.
Because corporate badges are temporary, and foreign runway always has an end date. Sooner or later, the valve on the cylinder will hiss, the kitchen will go quiet, and we will all have to meet at the bottom of the stairs.
Salamianga watu wa kuuza makaa. Gas huisha usiku.
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.