I like camels. Camels are easy. They are yellow, big, and have large humps of fat. They can survive in desert conditions; they can chew cactus and drink salty water. Camels are good at planning — heck, even their bodies are built for them to plan and survive. They can go for months without water or food, they carry people, and they have that funny look that makes me let out a small giggle every time I see one — they look like they are chewing khat.

I am not a big believer in unicorns. No one has ever seen them. They just exist in stories and fairy tales: a horse with a horn on its forehead. I mean, a horse is plausible, but a horse with a horn doesn’t make sense to me.

Humans have always been curious individuals. They are fascinated by nature; that is why they are creating humanoid robots, trying to replicate it so they can feel like creators.

You see, mules are not naturally occurring. That is why some dude on a lazy Saturday afternoon sat down and asked himself, “What if my horse and donkey had coitus? What would they produce?”

In comes the mule. You see, the mule is a very hardworking animal — even more than the donkey because it is larger, and even more hardworking than the horse because it has higher fatigue resistance. But there is a little trouble in the mule’s existence: they cannot reproduce. They are sterile.

The Startup Model

I have been in the startup ecosystem for quite some time now. When I meet founders on a day-to-day basis, they speak big. They are visionary. They talk about how they are solving Problem X for Market Y using Solution Z.

Most of them are very optimistic, hoping they will be the next unicorn. But building a business to that scale is not easy — especially building a business in Africa. This is a continent that is called every name except Africa: The Global South. Third World Countries. Sub-Saharan Africa. We have a million challenges here. But come on, optimism is good for them — they need it. We cannot deny them funding, and we certainly cannot deny them the optimism they need to survive.

However, this “startup” model has been popularized by the Yankees. Their strategy is simple: build aggressively, deploy as much capital as needed, and capture the market. Look at how they built businesses like Facebook (Meta), Uber, and DoorDash. The playbook is to deploy as much cash as possible to capture market share, undercut competitor prices, and grow at all costs. The Venture Capitalists will cater for the losses before they become profitable. Once they own the market, then they hike the prices.

This model was actually borrowed from the tactics the Germans used to attack during World War II: Blitzkrieg. They attacked so fast and so aggressively that their enemies were left dumbfounded. The French saw this when they lost Paris in 1940.

But borrowing that same model to build businesses in Kenya, and Africa at large? It simply will not work. Then how do we build business in markets referred to as the global south or the frontier markets.

The Unicorn: The Invasive Species

First, let’s address the Unicorn. The Unicorn is a creature of abundance. It feeds on two things: Cheap Capital and Massive Consumer Markets. In Yankee land, interest rates were near zero for a decade. Money was free. You could afford to burn billions to acquire customers because once you won, you had a market of 300 million people with high purchasing power ready to spend.

But in Kenya? The Unicorn is an invasive species that cannot breathe our air. Our cost of capital is through the roof — commercial lending rates are averaging 18% to 25%. You cannot “burn” cash here; cash is oxygen. If you hold your breath waiting for market dominance in Africa, you will suffocate before you even get your certificate of incorporation.

Look at the “African Unicorns” like Jumia or the recent struggles of Twiga Foods. They tried the Silicon Valley model: raise massive funding, hire hundreds, and subsidize the cost of goods to capture the market. But the moment the funding dried up (the drought), the model collapsed. Twiga had to lay off a third of its staff and restructure because the unit economics didn’t make sense without constant VC subsidies.

That is why Unicorns have never truly “set foot” in Kenya. The market depth isn’t there. You can’t blitzscale when the average customer spends 40–50% of their income just on food. There is no disposable income to support a growth-at-all-costs model. The Unicorn comes here, starves, and dies.

The Mule: The Kenyan Default

If the Unicorn cannot survive in this environment, and the Camel demands patience and discipline many cannot afford at the beginning, then the Mule becomes the most common outcome. This is not because Kenyans lack ambition or imagination. It is because the Mule is rational. Mule businesses dominate because they solve the most urgent problem in a volatile economy: income certainty.

A kinyozi, a wines and spirits shop, a boda operation, a small retail kiosk, or a rental apartment does not promise scale or market dominance. What it offers is predictability. These businesses convert effort into cash with very little abstraction. You work, and you earn. When you stop working, the income slows or stops. In a country with weak social safety nets and limited access to affordable credit, this logic is not naïve. It is defensive and practical.

This is why Mules feel productive. They are busy by design. They generate daily transactions and visible cash flow. They pay rent, school fees, and hospital bills. For many households, this function is not optional; it is survival. The mistake begins when this reliability is confused with wealth creation, when steady income is assumed to be the same thing as an asset that compounds.

Structurally, the Mule is constrained. Its growth is linear rather than exponential. A barbershop grows by adding more chairs and hiring more barbers. A retail shop grows by increasing stock, rent, and staff. A rental apartment grows by adding units, which almost always requires additional debt. Each step forward raises operating complexity and increases exposure to fixed costs and interest rates. Growth does not reduce fragility; it often amplifies it.

This is what makes the Mule sterile. Not because it earns nothing, but because it cannot compound independently of effort. Most Mule businesses operate on thin margins, require constant working capital, and generate returns that barely keep up with inflation. In many cases, those returns fall below the cost of debt. The business stays alive, but the owner’s equity does not meaningfully grow.

Rental real estate illustrates this clearly. In Nairobi, average rental yields hover around seven to eight percent, while commercial borrowing costs range from eighteen to twenty-five percent. This is not leverage; it is negative carry. The property appears stable on the surface, but in reality, it is quietly transferring value from the owner to the bank each month. The illusion of safety masks a slow erosion of capital.

The Mule rarely fails in a dramatic way. It fails silently. It consumes time, energy, and capital while delivering just enough return to discourage rethinking the model. This is why Mules persist. They are not broken businesses; they are complete businesses. They do exactly what they were designed to do: convert labor into income. What they do not do is scale independently of the owner or generate returns that compound without constant input.

The real risk, therefore, is not building a Mule. The real risk is building a Mule while believing you are building a Camel.

In the African context, Mules are often a necessary first phase. They stabilize households, generate initial capital, and reduce downside risk in uncertain environments. But without a deliberate transition — without reinvesting surplus into businesses with pricing power, healthier margins, and cash reserves — the Mule becomes a ceiling. And ceilings, unlike floors, are difficult to break through.

The Camel: The African King

This brings us back to the Camel. The Camel is the only business model that genuinely respects African reality. Unlike the Unicorn, it does not depend on a constant flow of cheap venture capital to stay alive. It assumes scarcity as the default condition. When capital is available, the Camel takes it in cautiously, stores it as reserves, and prepares for the long stretch ahead. It is built to move through environments defined by high taxes, abrupt policy shifts, currency depreciation, and persistent inflation without collapsing at the first sign of stress.

At the core of the Camel is an obsession with unit economics. It does not defer profitability to a hypothetical future. It makes money on the very first transaction. If it costs one hundred shillings to produce a good or deliver a service, it is sold for one hundred and fifty. There are no subsidies disguised as growth strategies, no cashback schemes, no promises of monetizing later once “scale” is achieved. In markets where capital is expensive and unpredictable, discipline is not a virtue; it is survival.

In Africa, businesses are not built for graceful exits; they are built to endure. The Camel assumes drought as a certainty, not a risk. It assumes governments will change the rules without warning. It assumes the currency will weaken over time. Under these conditions, the Unicorn suffocates when funding dries up, and the Mule collapses under the weight of constant effort. The Camel survives because it was designed with these constraints in mind. This is not theory. We have seen Camel businesses walk through decades of volatility and come out intact.

Consider Bidco Africa. Bidco did not begin with a pitch deck or a vision of market domination. It began with soap and cooking oil — products that households buy consistently, regardless of economic cycles. The company focused on manufacturing essentials, controlling costs aggressively, pricing for margins rather than vanity growth, and reinvesting profits back into capacity. Every bar of soap sold generated real cash. Bidco survived currency shocks, political instability, import competition, and capital scarcity not because it was shielded from these forces, but because its model absorbed them. It did not subsidize consumers to capture users; it captured cash flow. That is Camel behavior.

The same logic applies to Devki Group. Steel and cement are not glamorous sectors. There are no demo days for factories, no viral growth narratives. But Devki understood a fundamental truth: Africa will always need roads, housing, and infrastructure. The company committed to heavy upfront capital expenditure, localized manufacturing to reduce foreign exchange exposure, and tight margins driven by massive volume. Cost discipline was relentless. Devki does not depend on foreign investor sentiment or favorable global cycles. It depends on assets, production, and cash generation. When imported steel becomes expensive due to currency weakness, Devki gains an advantage. When the shilling depreciates, Devki wins again. This is a Camel that has learned the desert and mastered it.

Choosing the Right Animal

Every business in Africa eventually reveals what animal it is, regardless of what the pitch deck claims. The Unicorn, the Mule, and the Camel are not aspirations; they are outcomes shaped by capital, markets, and discipline. A clear example of this dynamic is Muthokinju Paints and Cement. They operate in an industry that traditionally behaves like a Mule. Hardware and paint businesses in Kenya are typically small, owner-managed operations, dependent on daily oversight and limited in their ability to grow beyond a single location.

What sets Muthokinju apart is that it refused to accept those structural limits as inevitable. Rather than treating hardware retail as a one-shop livelihood business, the company approached it as an operational system. Over time, it invested in standardized processes, professional management, and deliberate branch expansion. This allowed the business to grow across multiple locations without becoming fragile under operational complexity.

Muthokinju did not reinvent the product category, nor did it rely on subsidized growth or external capital cycles. Instead, it demonstrated how a traditionally labor-bound sector can be redesigned for endurance. By turning a shop-based model into a structured, repeatable operation, it shifted a Mule industry closer to Camel behavior — prioritizing resilience, cash generation, and long-term survival over speed or spectacle.

The problem is not that founders dream of Unicorns. The problem is importing a model designed for abundance into an environment defined by constraint. When capital is expensive, consumers are price-sensitive, and policy is unpredictable, pretending otherwise does not create innovation — it creates fragility. The Unicorn fails here not because founders are incompetent, but because the terrain is hostile to that biology.

The Mule emerges where survival matters more than scale. It is honest work. It feeds families and stabilizes households. But it should be named correctly. A Mule is an income engine, not a wealth engine. Treating it as anything else leads to slow disappointment rather than dramatic failure. The danger is not riding the Mule; it is believing the road ends somewhere it never can.

The Camel is not glamorous, and it is rarely celebrated. It grows slowly, hoards cash, prices for margin, and assumes the worst will happen. But that is precisely why it survives. In African markets, resilience is not a conservative choice; it is a competitive advantage. Businesses that endure currency shocks, policy reversals, and capital droughts are not lucky — they are designed that way.

The real question for founders and investors is not which animal sounds impressive, but which one can live here. In a desert, biology matters more than ambition. And in Africa, the businesses that last will be the ones designed for the land they walk through — and paced for the journey ahead.

Source: Medium