I was invited to Kenya by @bharatthakrar (BT) to join his company @WPPScangroup in 2010. BT and I disagreed on several issues over the years, but he was clear: keep the clients and the business growing, and he would not interfere but help you grow. He kept his promise. My team saw growth, I grew, and I worked the longest stint of my career at WPP Scangroup—13 long years. I made Kenya my home, made several friends, and built a life in Kenya.

Don’t get me wrong, BT is no angel. He made mistakes and bulldozed some decisions, but for all his flaws, no one else has built what he did on this continent. Today, at the AGM, many questions arose about how he engineered losses to the company he built (and I can confirm he did not). No one commended him for building a talent pool strong enough to create businesses with the knowledge, experience, and ability to challenge the industry leader. To me, that’s his biggest credit. I felt sad about the financial decline, moral corruption, and hubris-driven behaviour of our last employer as we sat in the AGM with my co-founder and partner @scsawe as shareholders (we were harassed and almost barred by @imageregistrars and the company) and wondered what it would take for them to acknowledge reality. They lost businesses to their own hubris, their leadership’s nonchalance, continued contempt for reality, threatening behaviour internally and externally, and the constant need to blame everyone else for their failures, including Gen Z (remember the comments around 2025 AGM?)