Author: Ableditor

For decades, owning a home in Kenya meant buying into the city. Nairobi, its suburbs and the expanding satellite towns were where ambition was concentrated. But another dream is quietly taking shape. It is a house on a few acres of land, solar panels on the roof, a borehole or water-harvesting system, vegetables growing outside the kitchen, chickens in the backyard, perhaps a few goats or dairy cows — and no neighbour arguing about parking. Call it off-grid living. Call it a farm. Call it escaping the madness. Whatever the name, it could become one of Kenya’s most interesting lifestyle…

There was a time when living in Kilimani, Kileleshwa or Lavington meant having a compound, a garden, a few trees and perhaps enough distance from your neighbour to forget they existed. Then the cranes arrived. Today, Nairobi’s once-leafy neighbourhoods increasingly resemble vertical cities. Old bungalows disappear behind construction hoardings and return as 20-storey towers with swimming pools, gyms, rooftop lounges and hundreds of apartments. In some streets, balconies now stare directly into other balconies. We call this development. I am not entirely convinced. There is no question that Nairobi needs more housing. A growing population, urbanisation and the rising cost…

For generations, the Kenyan dream of owning a home was closely tied to location. The closer to Nairobi’s established suburbs, the better. Karen, Runda, Lavington, Kilimani, Westlands and Kileleshwa represented status, convenience and investment. But that equation is changing. Increasingly, Kenyans are asking a different question: Why pay a premium to live in the city when the same money can buy a better home, more space and a stronger sense of community outside it? This is fuelling the rise of managed and master-planned communities in places such as Ruiru, Kiambu, Athi River, Syokimau, Juja, Ngong and Chaka. Developments such as…

For decades, East Africa has talked about the transformative promise of oil. Now, after years of delays, court battles, political negotiations and infrastructure disputes, that promise is finally approaching reality. Uganda is preparing to become an oil exporter, with its first commercial cargo of Pearl Sweet crude expected by the end of 2026, potentially loading in December. Production from the Tilenga and Kingfisher fields is expected eventually to reach about 230,000 barrels per day. But Uganda’s oil story is actually a regional story. Its crude will travel through Tanzania via the 1,443-kilometre East African Crude Oil Pipeline (EACOP) to the…

There was a time when a South African DJ could spend the night making thousands of people dance and still struggle to convince the world that what they were doing was a serious business. That argument is becoming harder to make. From Johannesburg and Pretoria to Durban and Cape Town, South Africa’s house-music culture has evolved from a nightlife phenomenon into a formidable export industry. Afro house, deep house, gqom, amapiano and the newer 3-Step sound are crossing borders, filling stadiums and turning DJs into global cultural entrepreneurs. The transformation is visible in the numbers, but perhaps more importantly, it…

There is a new kind of pollution choking the internet, and it does not come from factories. It comes from prompts. AI slop is the endless stream of low-effort, AI-generated articles, videos, images, reports, presentations and social media posts produced because machines have made creating content almost effortless. It is cheap, fast and abundant. It is also increasingly difficult to avoid. The problem is not artificial intelligence itself. The problem is what happens when humans stop thinking and start outsourcing the thinking. That distinction matters. A carefully researched report assisted by AI is not slop. A student using AI to…

For decades, the computing industry lived by a comforting rule: wait long enough and technology gets cheaper, smaller and more powerful. That rule is now under pressure. The global artificial intelligence boom is turning the humble semiconductor into one of the most strategically valuable — and increasingly expensive — pieces of infrastructure on Earth. The result could reshape everything from hyperscale data centres to laptops and smartphones. The immediate problem is memory. High-bandwidth memory, or HBM, has become indispensable to the accelerators powering generative AI. Unlike conventional memory, HBM is designed to move enormous amounts of data between processors and…

For a company that once taught the technology industry how to think differently, Apple has spent much of the post-Steve Jobs era doing something rather different: watching. The launch of the iPhone Duo, Apple’s first foldable iPhone, is impressive. It is also an admission. The $1,999 device, unveiled this week under new CEO John Ternus, opens into a 7.6-inch display, brings iPhone and iPad-like experiences together and uses Apple’s custom silicon, hinge and software integration to make the foldable form factor feel distinctly Apple. But let’s call it what it is: Apple has arrived late to a party Samsung has…

President William Ruto’s recent remarks on Burundian immigrants operating businesses in Kenya have opened an uncomfortable conversation about who gets to work, trade and build a livelihood across East Africa. The President’s message was blunt: foreigners should not take over businesses that Kenyans can operate. For many struggling traders, this sounds like overdue protection. For others, particularly within the East African Community, it raises a more difficult question: where does protecting local enterprise end and regional integration begin? There is a legitimate argument behind the government’s position. Kenyan traders operate in an increasingly difficult environment, battling taxation, expensive credit, high…

For years, basketball in Kenya was largely treated as a sport played on the margins of the country’s commercial sporting economy. Nairobi City Thunder is challenging that perception — not simply by winning games, but by demonstrating that a basketball club can be built as a serious entertainment, media and investment business. At the centre of that transformation is Marcel Awori, Chief of Staff at Nairobi City Thunder, who has become one of the emerging voices in Africa’s sports-business ecosystem. Awori’s perspective is refreshingly commercial. In a recent interview, he described the reality of running a professional basketball organisation as…