PART ONE
The Salary Illusion
CHAPTER 7
You Are Not Bad with Money. You Are Surrounded by People Who Need It.
There is a version of your financial situation that is a character flaw: that you are undisciplined, impulsive, unable to defer gratification, constitutionally incapable of saving. This version is convenient because it locates the entire problem inside you, which means it can be fixed with enough willpower and the right budgeting app. This version is also wrong, or at least incomplete. It misses the most important variable in the Nairobi financial equation: other people.
The Nairobi professional does not live in a financial vacuum. They live inside a network of relationships, each of which has financial implications, many of which are non-negotiable. The family is not optional. The community obligations are not optional. The colleague who asks for money is optional in theory and almost never in practice, because the cost of saying no, the social cost, the guilt cost, the reputation cost, is often calculated as higher than the cost of giving. These calculations happen quickly and below the level of conscious thought. By the time you have said yes, you have already done the math.
Black tax is the most documented version of this dynamic, but it is not the...