About · Body of practice
I build the pathI never had.
Twelve years closing the same gap from every side of it: inside the operations centre, in front of a cohort, one-to-one with a mentee, and on the page. Here is the story, and the whole of the work.
The story
The most useful thing that happened to me in December 2013 was being humbled. I had just left JKUAT with a degree in information technology and the quiet certainty that four years of study had made me ready. Then I sat my first interview at Serianu, the sharpest security firm in the country at the time, and within a few questions that certainty was gone. I had a vocabulary. I did not yet have judgment, and no one had taught me the difference between the two.
What I felt in that room was not a shortage of talent. It was the distance between what I knew and what the work actually demanded, with no bridge across it. I have spent the years since building that bridge: leading security operations across Kenya and Botswana, mentoring hundreds of practitioners, and today serving as Country Director of Serianu Botswana.
Everywhere I look I see the same pattern. Africa does not have a talent problem. It has a legibility problem, and now a tidy skills-gap story being sold back to it by people who profit from the shortcut. My work, in every form, is about refusing that shortcut: building people on real fundamentals, and making their skill visible and trusted, so the continent’s talent can finally be seen for what it is.
The gap was never talent. It’s the path.
Six surfaces, one practice
They look like different jobs. They are one job.
Detection, teaching, mentoring, writing, advising, convening: each is a different angle on the same conviction. The gap in African cybersecurity was never talent. It is the absence of a path, and I build that path wherever I stand.
See how the coaching works →Inside the SOC
My work started, and still lives, in the operations centre: detection, response, threat monitoring and the operational discipline that keeps an organisation standing on its worst day.
Building the path
I built OCH's first cohort and the curriculum underneath it: drills, missions and the Schools of Thought that turn scattered learning into skill an employer can actually see.
The climb, made personal
Hundreds of professionals have climbed with me from first fundamentals to real judgment. Mentorship is where the path stops being a diagram and becomes someone's career.
Closing the gap in public
I write to think out loud: on the invisible expert, the AI-and-cyber skills gap, and what African security actually needs. The book is the argument in full.
Before you scale AI
I advise organisations on the fundamentals and the judgment that have to be in place before AI is bolted on: readiness that is honest about where a team really stands.
A door that stays open
Ongoza Cyber Hub is the community I founded so African talent has a path from day one: thousands on the same climb, free at the door, structure waiting inside.
Talks, appearances & press
Decision Assurance: Redefining Cyber Risk Oversight in the Age of AI
ISACA Harare
Securing the Digital Bank
World Financial Innovation Series
Board risk, breach economics and proactive defence
The Cyber Weekly ↗
Cybersecurity and digital policy across Africa
Int'l Institute of Communications ↗