Alex Mbithi stands at a bus stop on Thika road on a drizzling April morning. In his hands is small box with sweets in it. The face he wears is that of a man who has given up in life, on such an early morning.
“I used to make profits of up to Shs 250 a day selling sweets because of traffic jam,” says Alex. “Now all that is just a dream.”
Previously, there was a notorious traffic jam on the road that had motorists crawling for up to an hour on a stretch that now takes them 2 minutes on the new 8-lane highway. Motorists and passengers used to get late for work and lose many man hours at this particular point. Little known to them however, someone was earning a living out of that.
It takes approximately 10 minutes for one to get to the city center from Safari Park Hotel on the new road. This means Alex and many others like him who used sell their wares in the morning and evening cannot do so. These hundreds of businessmen and women have to suddenly look for other ‘markets’ to sell their items and still earn a living.
On the other hand, the new infrastructure development has opened avenues for other businesses to thrive, the biggest beneficiary being real estate development.
Just the other day, fire razed several floors of Kimathi House. Those floors housed several businesses, some of which might not have been insured. Watching the news on the Kimathi House fire, you couldn’t help but read the agony in the faces of those who lost a livelihood, just like in the Thika Road case. Fires and demolitions are a common calamity for the Nairobi entrepreneur.
This begs us to ask: if you are currently running your own business, how prepared are you for the unforeseen?