What the hell happened to Nairobi Show???
I went to the Nairobi Show recently and honestly, I left wondering: what the fuck happened to this country?
Let me start with the entrance fees.
KSh 350 for adults. Fine.
But KSh 300 for children?
Who the hell is bringing their kids to the show at KSh 300 a head?
I remember a time when the Nairobi Show was something families could actually go to. Kids were charged significantly less. It was an event you took your children to because they could walk around, see things, learn things, discover stuff.
Now you're basically looking at KSh 1,300 for two parents and two kids just to walk through the gate.
And then you get inside.
Where are the exhibitions?
This is the part that genuinely shocked me.
I remember going to the Nairobi Show and seeing companies showcasing actual products and innovations.
New agricultural equipment.
New cooking technologies.
Biogas systems.
Machinery.
New inventions.
Companies showing people, “Look what we've built.”
That's what made the show interesting.
This time?
Empty stalls everywhere.
And the stalls that were occupied were overwhelmingly government-related institutions, food vendors, hawkers and a handful of companies that could obviously afford to be there.
And that got me thinking.
What does it say about the state of the private sector when an exhibition that is supposed to showcase what Kenya is producing has so little private-sector participation?
Because the Nairobi Show isn't supposed to just be a giant marketplace for nyama, clothes and snacks.
It's supposed to be a showcase of what the country is building.
You should walk through there and come out thinking:
"Damn. Look at what Kenyans are making."
Instead, I kept seeing empty space.
And then there was another thing I noticed.
Where were the Chinese businesses?
Where were the Indian businesses?
For years, you could go to these kinds of exhibitions and find foreign companies and entrepreneurs showcasing machinery, equipment, technology, manufacturing products and all kinds of things.
This time?
Almost nothing.
Maybe I caught the show on a bad year. Maybe there were exhibitors I simply didn't encounter.
But that's precisely why the whole thing bothered me.
Because when you walk through a national exhibition and the overwhelming impression you get is:
government institutions + food vendors + hawkers + empty stalls
you have to ask yourself what happened to the productive economy underneath all of that.
And here's the thing:
I'm not an economist.
I'm not going to pretend that one exhibition can tell me exactly what Kenya's GDP, private investment or manufacturing output is doing.
But I do know what I saw.
And what I saw did not look like a country confidently showcasing a thriving private sector.
It looked like a country where the people who are supposed to be building, manufacturing, innovating and investing are increasingly absent from the room.
And that, to me, is far more disturbing than an empty stall.
Because the Nairobi Show is supposed to be a mirror of what we're building.
And if the mirror is mostly empty, maybe we should stop arguing about whether the reflection looks good and start asking why there's so little in front of it.
And yes, politically, I have to ask the obvious question too:
What the fuck has this government actually done to create an environment where businesses want to invest, manufacture, innovate and show up?
Because if this is what one of our country's biggest public exhibitions looks like, I'm not interested in being told everything is fine simply because some macroeconomic number somewhere says otherwise.
I was there.
I saw what was there.
And I saw what wasn't.
Fuck Ruto and his government for whatever responsibility they bear for this mess.
But more importantly:
What the fuck happened to the Nairobi Show?