Business Daily (Nairobi)
Jenny Luesby
30 May 2011
column
Last week I received an e-mail on a mailing list that made my heart go out. It was from the Kenyan Association of Residents Associations, Kara, to say it had had all its computers stolen in an overnight raid.
It went on to describe the incident, a gang turning up at night, tying up the guard, and clearing the offices completely. And then to say the raid was designed to stop it from operating, and that it would operate anyway.
The reason it so caught my attention was because it was an experience my own company lived through twice, that overnight burglary taking it all.
I can still remember every second of the phone call at 3am, telling me the office had been broken into, and all the computers were gone. And opening the next morning, with everyone arriving for work only to stare at the wipe-out of all we had been up until the close of business the day before.
Under attack
It must happen to so many young companies here, and it’s easy to see how many it must finish off.
Yet how many times, when something like that happens, do we here in Kenya believe that it was malicious — targeted at us alone?
In Kara’s case, it could have been personal. It’s an association taking on the establishment: not so much an ordinary residents’ association, but more of a civil campaigning group. In our case, maybe it was targeted too. At the time our sole product was for a client who was being systematically attacked by a much larger competitor. And certainly, we had reason to believe we were under attack. The product was a website, and we watched one week as our server records showed someone on a Kenyan IP address repeatedly trying to get into the site to hack it, and failing, only for the following Monday to see that website entered and destroyed – from Asia.
Stop you
Yet the thefts, I’m sure, weren’t about felling our particular business. That same gang caused a lot of damage in our area before being caught and stopped. Even the website hacking could as easily have been one dysfunctional individual.
I was discussing with my son the other day something an errant half-uncle used to do when he was a teenager – how he and his friends would walk over the top of people’s cars in the night, as a ‘prank’. So that would be some family, with all the concerns that all of us have about paying bills and making good, and a car parked outside, waking the next morning to a car with dents to boot, roof and bonnet amounting to hundreds of pounds worth of damage.
Did those mothers and fathers stare at their damaged cars, and start working out who was out to get them?
For sure, when the hammer falls, and the asset base you’ve so painstakingly built is suddenly smashed, it almost helps to believe someone did it to stop you.
It gives it a point, and means you can channel the anger exactly into not being stopped.
A random act by someone no longer able to remember what it would be like to be on the receiving end of their grab, or joke, or evening entertainment, is much harder to come to terms with.
Yet survival still rests on the exact same spirit. In our case, I remember the staff meeting that morning, and using language that can’t be relayed in this column. Let’s say the point was, ‘never mind the computers’.
The work and project we were dedicated to was more important than the hardware, and the staff our biggest asset. We would find and get new computers. And we did.
The truth is that whether malicious or random, these traumas strike us all along the way. And Not many.
Find strength
But recovery does not rest on money, or fate. It doesn’t depend on the scale of the act, or the level of the devastation. Nor even on who did it, and why.
It depends on knowing we aren’t finished, and that we’ll pick up the first brick, and then the next, and build again, a house that we then find is even more beautiful than the one which yesterday was knocked over completely.
For then we will be the team that lived through that together and made it anyway: a stronger team than ever before.
So good luck Kara. We all can find the strength to do what we believe in, if only we never say we’re beaten, and keep building.
AllAfrica – All the Time