‘Handshake’ lowered temperature but a year later Kenya is still ailing

When Nakumatt Supermarkets started wobbling, a friend reminded me of our History class in ‘A’ Levels on France, the gladiator imperialist empire and its insatiable Emperor Napoleon Bonaparte. Emperor Bonaparte was a former commoner who rose to be a military leader of all time, but whose greed for expansion, to the point he spread himself and his armies too thin, stirred the turn-around of the phrase from grass to grace, then grass.

As his star started dimming with the 1815 battle of Waterloo that would leave him vanquished and disgraced, the symptoms of his blind rage and unbridled ambition came to be sardonically referred to as, ‘Napoleonic expansion’. That is partly what Nakumatt suffered besides, of course, the widely-held suspicion it was a money-laundering outfit.