PART ONE
The Salary Illusion
CHAPTER 2
You Earned It on the 28th. Fourteen People Spent It Before You Did.
Count them. Not metaphorically. Actually count them. The landlord. Kenya Power. Nairobi Water. The HELB deduction that has been running for seven years and still has three to go. Your mother. Your aunt who calls on the 27th with the timing of someone who has been watching a calendar. The colleague whose loan you have rolled over twice without naming it a loan. The chama contribution due on the 1st because the chairlady sends a reminder at 6am and silence is considered a statement. The tithe, if you are the kind of person who tithes, which is a full ten percent of a number that was already shrinking before you gave it to God.
Zawadi once sat down to count hers. She was trying to understand why a KSh 65,000 salary felt like KSh 20,000 by the second week. She listed everything with a claim on her money before she could make a discretionary decision: rent, utilities, two running M-Shwari loans, her mother’s monthly contribution, the baby shower gift she had committed to in the group chat, the gym membership she had not cancelled, the data bundle that auto-renewed. The total was...