In the boardrooms of Nairobi’s corporate giants, a silent killer is strangling growth. It is not inflation, nor is it taxation. It is the sluggish, bureaucratic inertia that traps capital in approval queues, turning potential value into dead weight.

The old adage "cash is king" is dead. In the hyper-accelerated economy of 2026, cash is only king if it moves. Victor Chesang’s analysis strikes a nerve because it exposes the uncomfortable truth about modern organizational failure: we are drowning in resources but starving for agility. The organizations that are winning today are not those with the deepest pockets; they are the ones with the fastest metabolic rate. They treat capital not as a static asset to be guarded, but as a high-velocity fuel to be burned efficiently.

The Cost of the "Approval Queue"

Every finance director knows the feeling. A wire transfer clears, the funds are available, and then... silence. The money sits. It waits for a committee meeting. It waits for a signature from a director who is on leave. It waits for a "strategic review." Meanwhile, the market shifts. The opportunity cost rises by the hour. This is "dead money."

The velocity of capital is the speed at which a dollar is deployed to create value. When that velocity slows, the return on investment plummets. A million shillings deployed today to fix a supply chain bottleneck is worth far more than a million shillings deployed next month after the customers have already defected to a competitor. Speed is a function of risk appetite, and too many Kenyan companies are paralyzed by a fear of making mistakes, unaware that the biggest mistake is standing still.

• The Agility Gap: Look at the startups disrupting the banking and logistics sectors. They don’t have more money than the incumbents; they just have shorter decision loops. They fail fast, learn faster, and redeploy capital instantly.
• The Leadership Mandate: This is not a finance problem; it is a leadership problem. CEOs must dismantle the layers of approval that serve only to dilute responsibility. If a manager is trusted to run a department, they must be trusted to deploy the budget.

Flow Over Hoarding

The psychological shift required is profound. We have been conditioned to view the accumulation of capital as the goal. But capital that gathers dust is a liability. It is vulnerable to inflation, to currency devaluation, and to irrelevance. The goal must be flow. Resources must flow toward value, continuously and relentlessly.

As we navigate a volatile economic landscape, the lesson is clear: having capital is no longer a competitive advantage. Everyone has access to capital if the idea is good enough. The advantage lies in the velocity. The winners of tomorrow will be the ones who can move a shilling from the bank account to the front line before the ink on the check is dry.