Mohammed Hersi : Mr Optimist engagement report

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• Sep 27, 202662x their median

  We should be celebrating the fact that the largest single foreign investment in Kenya (by far) is coming from an African investor.

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• Mar 22, 202455x their median

  President Mnangagwa’s biographer and advisor, Eddie Cross has said that Wicknell Chivhayo who has been dishing out cars to musicians is a nasty and corrupt businessman who employs nobody and produces nothing! He said the Reserve Bank of Zimbabwe’s Auction was abused and public money was looted!

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• Sep 28, 202621x their median

  1/2....Lamu Was Not Born in Lagos it is Half a Century of Kenyan Planning Some Kenyans are frothing at the mouth about the Dangote refinery in Lamu. Some call it a white elephant others say it was dreamt up last month on a flight to Lagos. Before we break ground on Wednesday, let us go back into history. Let us read the plan. Half a century in the making, The Lamu idea is older than most of the people shouting about it. The LAPSSET Corridor Development Authority's own record sets out the timeline: ✅️• 1975: The Government of Kenya, with the assistance of the Government of Japan, carried out a feasibility study on a port at Lamu. ✅️• 2003/04: While drafting the Integrated National Transport Policy, Government proposed a second transport corridor with a deep-sea port at Lamu and road and rail links to Ethiopia, South Sudan and Uganda. ✅️• 2006: Cabinet directed that LAPSSET be studied as a wider regional project. ✅️• 2008: Vision 2030 made LAPSSET a flagship project, and a full corridor study was commissioned covering the port, road and rail, a crude oil pipeline from South Sudan, Uganda and Kenya, a refinery and a product pipeline, three international airports, three resort cities and special economic zones. ✅️• November 2011: The studies were completed. ✅️• 2 March 2012: President Kibaki broke ground at Lamu alongside Ethiopia's Prime Minister Meles Zenawi and South Sudan's President Salva Kiir. The African Union then admitted LAPSSET into its Presidential Infrastructure Champion Initiative, the first project in East Africa to earn that recognition. The refinery was on the list from the day the corridor was designed. It is not a Ruto idea, and it is not a Dangote idea. It is a Kenyan idea, half a century in the making, whose time has finally come. ✅️The 2017 master plan reserved the land In April 2017, the LAPSSET Corridor Development Authority launched the Preliminary Master Plan for Lamu Port City and Investment Framework. It was prepared by WS Atkins, one of the world's leading engineering consultancies, funded by the UK government, and endorsed in Nairobi by more than 100 government, private sector and civil society stakeholders. That document did not merely mention a refinery. It reserved 53 hectares at Lamu for oil tank storage and a refinery, and described its components: crude and product tank farms, primary and secondary processing units, and service areas. It placed the refinery firmly in the medium-term development phase, right beside the port. It also noted that earlier studies by Toyota Tsusho and Japan Port Consultants had already identified the opportunity. So when someone tells you this project was cooked up in a hurry, ask them one question: have you read the master plan? The planners answered "Kenya has no oil" nine years ago. The loudest objection today is that Kenya does not produce enough crude to feed a refinery. The master plan dealt with this in one sentence. Demand for a refinery, it observed, is normally driven by end-user demand, in Kenya and across the wider East African market. The planners never built the case on Turkana oil. They built it on the millions of East Africans who buy petrol, diesel, jet fuel and gas every day. The plan envisaged products moving to Kenyan and Ethiopian markets, and noted that Kenya and Ethiopia had already signed a bilateral agreement to develop a product pipeline. It foresaw exports by sea, by rail, and by pipeline.

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• Oct 1, 202620x their median

  While friends & family come to terms with demise of Wicknell Chivayo (also known as Sir Wicknell). Media in Africa including Kenya refer to him as Tycoon or Zim Millionaire. He was lavish dishing out cash and high value gifts. Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos , Elon Musk , Aliko Dangote et al all have a product or service under their name . They also dont flaunt their wealth they are grounded taking it easy. Please allow me to ask what business was he involved in, manufacturing? Service industry what product ? what service ?

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• Oct 1, 202613x their median

  1/3 The New Spirit of Africa Must Not Be Grounded Last week I flew Ethiopian Airlines @flyethiopian to London from Mombasa through Addis Ababa. I had not passed through Bole in fifteen years, and I barely recognised it. From my window I counted the tails on the apron: green, yellow and red, row after row, until they faded into the haze beneath the Entoto hills. Every one of those aircraft is African-owned, maintained by African engineers and flown by African pilots. I have spent over thirty years in African tourism and travelled to more many countries. I have seen the great hubs of Dubai, Schipol , Doha, Istanbul, Frankfurt and Bangkok. I say this without hesitation what Ethiopia has built is the single most important economic institution on our continent and right now, it is in danger. ✅️ 1. A global giant that happens to be African The numbers are staggering. In fiscal 2025/26, Ethiopian reported a record $9.1 billion in revenue, a 20% rise on the previous year, even as geopolitical shocks drove operating costs higher. Passengers grew 10% to 20.7 million, and cargo rose 16% to 897,000 tonnes. Its fleet stands at 178 aircraft, including 26 Airbus A350s and 30 Dreamliners. It flies to more than 160 destinations, over 60 of them in Africa. (aviationweek) And it is only getting started. Its Vision 2035 strategy targets $25 billion in revenue and 67 million passengers a year. (aviationweek) This is not luck. It is the product of decisions most African governments refused to make. ✅️2. The secret professional management and total ownership minus the usual suspect " Corruption " that bedevils rest of Africa. Ethiopian is state-owned, yet run like a business. Governments in Addis have risen and fallen, through revolution, famine and war, but the airline has kept professional managers in the cockpit of decision-making. That alone separates it from the graveyard of African flag carriers destroyed by political interference. ✅️3. It turned geography into strategy. Addis sits at the crossroads of Africa, Europe, the Gulf and Asia, and Ethiopian built a true hub around it. A traveller from Lomé, Lubumbashi or Mombasa can reach Guangzhou, São Paulo or Washington through an African hub, not a foreign one. Above all, Ethiopian decided to own every link in the value chain. It is not an airline. It is an aviation economy. ✅️4. The engineers. Ethiopian MRO is Africa's aircraft hospital. Founded in 1957, it employs over 3,000 technical staff and is certified by the Ethiopian CAA, the FAA, EASA and authorities across Africa and the Middle East. In 2025 alone, the group invested over $150 million in a new component workshop, central warehouse and maintenance hangar, adding more than 170 component repair capabilities. It became the first in Africa and the Middle East to service the 737 MAX's Leap-1B engine to that level outside the manufacturers' own network. Its CEO says it plainly: the secret of Ethiopian's success is its MRO. Airlines spend 10 to 12% of their operating costs on maintenance, and most African carriers send that money abroad. Ethiopian keeps it at home, and services ASKY, Malawian, Zambia Airways and others besides. (General Overview of ET-MRO +4). ✅️5.The people. Aircraft can be bought. Pilots cannot. The Ethiopian Aviation University began in 1956 as a small training centre at the airline's headquarters. Today it trains pilots, technicians, cabin crew, engineers and hospitality professionals, with an annual intake capacity of 4,000 students. In January 2026 it graduated 457 professionals from 12 countries, from Cameroon and Chad to Malawi, Nigeria, Senegal, Tanzania and Uganda. While the world faces a crippling shortage of pilots and engineers, Ethiopian grows its own and trains Africa's too.

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• Sep 30, 20269.9x their median

  Kenyans a case study https://t.co/D4FZg2HegO

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• Aug 30, 20269.6x their median

  1/2 AN OPEN LETTER TO HIS EXCELLENCY THE PRESIDENT . ENOUGH IS ENOUGH ON AIR TRAFFIC CONTROLLER STRIKES Your Excellency, I write this letter as a tourism industry player of over thirty years and, frankly, as a frustrated Kenyan. This morning, August 30, 2026, Jomo Kenyatta International Airport ground to a halt again. Aircraft sat on tarmacs, passengers stood at gates with no answers. Kenya Airways, Jambojet, and international carriers scrambled to manage delays running into hours. This is not a new story. It is the same story we lived through in February 2026. It is the same story the Transport Cabinet Secretary said was resolved after his return-to-work deal. It is the same story that a strike notice in July threatened to reopen, and here we are again, at the end of August, watching it happen for what feels like the third act of a play we should never have had to sit through twice, let alone three times. Your Excellency, how is this still happening? I ask this not as a rhetorical flourish but as a genuine, exhausted question from someone who has spent decades convincing tour operators in Europe, Asia, and North America that Kenya is a destination they can trust with their clients' money and their reputations. Every one of us in this industry has, at some point in the last year, had to sit across from an agent and explain why their client's flight was delayed four hours, why a connecting safari group missed its bush flight, why a conference delegation arrived a day late. We absorb the reputational cost. We absorb the financial cost. We smile and say Kenya is still worth it, and then the same dispute resurfaces months later because it was never actually settled, only paused. We are told we are chasing five million visitor arrivals. That target requires unbroken confidence in Kenya's air connectivity, because tourism is built entirely on the promise that a booking made today will still be honoured on the day of travel. A tourist who cannot trust that their flight will depart on schedule does not simply tolerate the inconvenience. They quietly choose Zanzibar, Mauritius, or Cape Town next time, and they tell their friends to do the same. Nobody sends out a press release when a booking is redirected. It just happens, silently, one cancelled reservation at a time, and by the time the numbers show up in our arrival statistics, it is too late to reverse the damage. What troubles me most is that this is not a natural disaster or a global shock outside our control. This is a labour dispute between a government agency and its own workforce, over a collective bargaining agreement, pay, and working conditions that, by the union's own account, had not been reviewed in fifteen years. That is not a controllers' failure. That is a governance failure. If the grievances are legitimate, they should have been resolved permanently in February, not managed with a temporary return-to-work formula that bought a few months of calm before the same fault line cracked open again in July and again now in August. Your Excellency, I ask you directly why has this been allowed to become a recurring event rather than a resolved chapter? Who within your government is accountable for the fact that a "return-to-work deal" earlier this year clearly did not include a durable settlement of the underlying issues? Tourism, horticulture, and cargo cannot keep absorbing the cost of a dispute that should have been closed permanently after its first occurrence. I am not writing to score political points. I am writing because I, and thousands like me in this sector, have skin in this game every single day. We do not get to strike when things go wrong for us. We simply lose the booking, lose the client, and start over.

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• Sep 29, 20267.1x their median

  1/2 Lamu's Refinery Is Not Tourism's Enemy. It Is Tourism's Biggest Opportunity in a Generation. Tomorrow, His Excellency President William Samoei Ruto @WilliamsRuto and Alhaji Aliko Dangote Dangote @AlikoDangote Industries will break ground on the Dangote East Africa Refinery in Lamu. Before the ribbon is even cut, a familiar chorus has already begun: the refinery will kill Lamu tourism, smoke will choke the dhows, and the tourists will flee. I have spent more than 30 years in this industry. I have watched Kenyan tourism survive terror alerts, travel advisories, pandemics and politics. Let me say this plainly: this refinery is not a threat to tourism in Lamu. It is the single greatest opportunity our coastal hospitality sector has been handed in a generation. ✅️First, understand the size of Lamu Lamu County covers more than 6,000 square kilometres. That is nearly a quarter of the entire Republic of Rwanda, and more than eight times the size of Singapore. Singapore fits a global financial centre, one of the world's busiest ports, heavy petrochemical industry on Jurong Island and a world-class tourism economy into a fraction of Lamu's land mass. Nobody cancels a holiday to Sentosa because there is a refinery down the coast. The refinery sits on the mainland, near the new port at Kililana. Lamu Old Town, Shela, Manda and the archipelago that the world loves remain exactly what they are: a UNESCO World Heritage Site and some of the most beautiful island coastline on the Indian Ocean. Industry and heritage can coexist when there is space and planning. Lamu has both. ✅️Second, follow the money into the hotels This is a $16 billion project, over Ksh 2 trillion, expected to take about three years to build and to create some 60,000 jobs. Think about what that means for anyone who owns a bed in Lamu, Malindi or Watamu. Engineers, project managers, financiers, consultants, contractors, auditors, insurers, government delegations and regional investors will be travelling to Lamu every week for years. They need rooms. They need restaurants. They need transfers, boats, laundry, meeting rooms and weekend escapes. This is corporate business, and corporate business is the most reliable income a hotelier can have. It fills rooms on a wet Tuesday in May, not just on a sunny Saturday in December. For years, Lamu hoteliers have lived and died by the leisure season. Corporate demand will flatten that seasonality. Occupancy in the low months, the very months that bleed our properties, will rise. ✅️Third, MICE is coming, Where industry goes, meetings follow. Suppliers will hold conferences. Regional energy ministers will convene. Investors will want to see the site. Training programmes will run for thousands of new workers. Product launches, board retreats and incentive trips will follow the money. Meetings, Incentives, Conferences and Exhibitions is the highest-yielding segment in global tourism. A MICE delegate spends far more per day than a leisure traveller. Lamu, with its culture, cuisine and island charm, can become the place where East Africa's energy sector does business by day and unwinds at sunset in a dhow. That is a product no other refinery town on earth can offer. ✅️ Fourth, infrastructure changes everything The biggest obstacle to Lamu tourism has never been oil. It has been access. Expensive flights, limited routes, and roads that have tested the patience of every tour operator I know. A project of this scale does not happen without roads, reliable power, water, telecoms, an upgraded airport and more frequent flights. Every one of those investments benefits the tourist. A guest who can fly in easily, stay connected and move safely is a guest who comes back and tells his friends.

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• Aug 26, 20266.4x their median

  Le Palais des Bambous était une résidence somptueuse construite à Gbadolite, dans la province du Nord-Ubangi en République démocratique du Congo, pour le maréchal Mobutu. 🇨🇩 Le palais comptait 350 chambres et faisait partie des impressionnants ouvrages construits dans sa ville natale.

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• Sep 27, 20265.2x their median

  Well Kenyans are travelling to SA as tourists in a big way. SA Tourism board consider Kenya a bread butter source market. Uchumi ni mbaya tu kwako. https://t.co/HFNydgzMAi

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