Maybe this might be tribalistic, I don’t know but I believe that if you come from a certain local region, it only makes sene to invest in your local community before anywhere else. If all you see in this post with is tribalism, well, tough. As far as I know, Luos are fish experts, Maasai and Samburu deal with cows and goats, Indians and Kikuyus are shrewd business men, Mombasa guys are tourism experts blah blah blah…

I heard a tale of two men who won a million shillings (arbitrary figure). The one man was a Kikuyu and the other a Luo. The Luo man went and built a house bought the latest electronics and lived like a king for 5 years. Then the money run out and he was left selling his property one by once. The Kikuyu man spent each and every year trying to figure out how to double the amount of money.

There is a very funny triangle going on in Nyanza province that I believe Luos can solve locally. I have met quite a lot of Luo folks asking me what they can invest in and which stock the should buy and what tech businesses they put their money in. Now to be honest, since Obama became President, some Luo folk became his cousin and others automatically and unrealistically raised their level of living. Obama himself might be rudely surprised to find a cousin of his earning less than 10k driving a Merc. So they won’t do any dirty work. In a Skunkworks talk I gave last year, I mentioned that a lot of people did not want to do dirty jobs. Everyone wants to be tech this and tech that but not a fisherman. Well there is a lot of money in lakeside fish but the originals from lakeside have let the Indians and Kikuyu carve the market up from them. The problem is not with the supply of fish. Its with the storage. If you want to make money from fish, all you need is a cold room. Thats where the money is. Fish will always be in the lake. Customers will always want fish. The transition is the problem. Now most cold rooms in Kisumu are owned by Indians or Kikuyus and I am yet to find one that is owned by a lakeside original brother. And the other non-local individuals decide the prices because they know that the fishermen will not have choices but to deal with them.

You want to invest lakeside, forget building flats or hotels or electronic shops or supermarkets, invest in a cold room and undercut everyone else. You will kill it.