Kenya was a very sunny, blue sky, energetic, vibrant place. As a tourist, it is fascinating to see the former British colony’s history, culture, evolution, development and how an African society plays its role between the African neighbors, the Western world, and the Eastern world.
However, I was not there as a tourist. I was there for business, and this is what I think about their business culture.
In general, they are very procedural and process driven, and it makes them super slow to process your need. It must be the training from their former parent country’s education and organization. The British essence are everywhere. The locals drink mainly tea, not coffee, which totally blew my mind. Due diligence are always there, but half of the time they don’t know what is required nor understanding of their internal process, hence you will not get what you needed on the first try.
Because of what I do, I can see that taxation is a strong concept for the country, very British. For my venture, the government would take out an accumulative of 57% from our income, which leaves no room for profit after taken out marketing and operation expenses. If you trying to do things in a legal way, it would not be efficient, let along being profitable.
Then the 3rd world operation mentality comes in to play. If you want to make more, skim off taxes, or as simple as having your application process faster with a telecom company, you would need to bribe the officials. Bribery gets you to places in this country. If you get caught by the police smoking shisha in a public bar, because shisha is banned in Kenya but bars still serve them, you can bribe the police to get out of your jail time. If you get pull over by the police because something that you haven’t done, they want money. If you want your payment and bank account expedited and be ready tomorrow, slip them some money. If you want to cut your taxes from 57% to half, show ‘em the money. It’s a world of highway robberies and corruption. Every business person can tell you that they know a person who knows the President or Vice President of Kenya. I think this place is just bad for business overall, and especially limiting the potential of the locals.
In retrospect, it is obvious that they neglect their locals severely. You can just tell by how unpaved and broken the roads are, even in the center city. The police are triads with badges. Electricity comes on and off, so the nicer residential and commercial buildings have their own backup generators. They are very tribe based, meaning they are racist against themselves believing that Tribe A are known for their business sense, while Tribe B is good for nothing.
Kenya is one of the top African countries, so you can imagine how the other African countries would be like. Pushing this idea further, the African continent needs to go through generation of mentality changes before they can be any dominant power on Earth. The everyday blue sky sunny day is great, the air is crisp and clean, but it is dark and stormy days for business.