In the glittering conferences and smug policy statements, Kenya is called a “frontier of opportunity.” But behind the hashtags and hired PR firms, the truth rots quietly in unpaid offices, auctioned homes, and the hollow eyes of once-bold entrepreneurs who dared to believe they could build something in this country.

You sit in your office – if you can still call it that – surrounded by peeling walls and silence, three months deep in rent arrears. The only visitors you get now are the flies and the auctioneers plotting which of your broken dreams to sell first.

At home, or what used to be home, six months of unpaid rent hang over your head like a guillotine. The landlord’s patience ran out long ago. Now he sends threatening messages laden with legal jargon. Sleep left you months ago, but the nightmares stayed.

In two weeks, your office will be stripped bare by men whose specialty is profiting from your despair – dreaded auctioneers. Everything you toiled to build – the furniture, the equipment, and the hopes – will be paraded in the sun like a public execution.

You once believed in service delivery, in building Kenya. That faith cost you Ksh45 million shillings, trapped in a county government ledger gathering dust and broken promises. Three years and counting. Every polite follow-up is met with ghosted calls or the timeworn ‘tafadhali rudi baada ya mwezi (come back after one month).

The bank that smiled as they handed you the loan now smiles even wider as they auction your father-in-law’s house. Yes, that same father-in-law who welcomed you into his family with pride is now watching his lifetime of work vanish under a bank’s hammer because you believed in hustling.

Meanwhile, the Kenya Revenue Authority – champions of collecting from the dead – froze your accounts. “Compliance,” they call it, as if wringing blood from a stone was an Olympic diadem. They demand taxes from money you were never paid, taxes on invoices that remain unpaid because their beloved government partners are now professional thieves in suits.

Your phone used to vibrate with opportunities and “bro, we need to link up” messages. Now it vibrates with threats, auction notices, and the dead silence of friends you once lent to, who now view you as a cursed man they must avoid at all costs.

Your wife? Gone. Took the kids. Left a note about needing “stability” — a stability you spent years trying to build on a foundation of quicksand and government tenders. You haven’t heard a word from them since. Only their laughter echoes in your dreams, mocking you.

Your siblings, those who celebrated your first cheque with drunken toasts, now dismiss you as a disgrace. Family, it turns out, loves you most when you’re a walking ATM.

Cut the cash flow, cut the relationship.

Your mother, once your biggest cheerleader, now lies sick in a county hospital, receiving the sort of treatment that should qualify as a human rights violation. Three months of watching her deteriorate because you can’t afford private care, and because in Kenya, public healthcare is where dreams and lives go to die.

Depression is no longer a visitor; it moved in, rearranged the furniture, and took permanent residence in your mind. You have stared down the abyss so many times that it now feels like an old friend whispering the “easy way out.”

This – this slow, methodical destruction-is – is the lived reality of thousands of Kenyan entrepreneurs. People who dared to dream. People who once believed that effort, talent, and patriotism were enough.

Kenya is not just in a recession; Kenya is a full-blown economic crime scene. The perpetrators sit in air-conditioned offices, holding press briefings, announcing taxes on bread and second-hand underwear, while wearing imported Italian suits.

The political class has graduated from stealing public funds to stealing entire futures. They no longer loot just money; they loot hope, ambition, and dignity. Their greed is not

• A Tell Media report / By Steve Biko Wafula