We can't all be Ted or Kevin.

There are many Ted’s and Kevin’s in Kenya. They have chosen to buck the trend that our education system has tried to force down our collective throats which says that cramming, passing exams, going to university and looking for a job is the ultimate route to Canaan. ~ Carol Musyoka aka The Nitpicker (Youths Blazing Trail in creating jobs in ICT sector, Business Daily, 2nd March 2015).

Please don't knock the comfort zone that is salaried employment. While entrepreneurship is to be admired - these are indeed the trailblazers, pioneering spirits that see opportunities in every dark nook and smelly cranny - it is not suited to all persons and it is not all suited to all times. The Teds and Kevins of Kenya are coming of age at an exciting time: barriers to information have fallen, and barriers to useful information are being torn down before our very eyes.

The single most critical reason why more and more youth are staring ambition in the eye without flinching is because they know more than youth at any other time in Kenya's fifty one years. It is no longer necessary to follow your father's career trajectory that started with certificates of education and ended with the words "permanent and pensionable" stamped in ones personnel file. But this shouldn't blind us that there are still hundreds of thousands of Kenyan youth who do not dream of becoming Bill Gates, Warren Buffet, Steve Jobs, Oprah Winfrey or Jay Z, but are interested in "security" and "predictability" as they raise their five children and spend weekends "upcountry" cutting the fat with similarly inclined peers.

Drones play a crucial role to the success or failure of a bee colony; treating them with contempt may endanger the entire hive. The same is true of the drones disinterested in "making something of themselves" or "building something for posterity." These are the spanner boys who know the nuts and bolts of bureaucracies, who know the value of a well-placed phone-call and who for sure know when a tender has been priced out of reach by a well-placed brown envelope. (Though nowadays it's more about chickens than brown envelopes.)

It is drones who turn the visions of dreamers and risk-takers into reality by, sometimes, mindlessly repeating the same task over and over again until a pattern emerges that satisfies the dreamer. The impatience of the entrepreneur is tempered by the entrepreneurial sloth of the paycheque brigade. Without one the other surely wouldn't exist. It costs us nothing to acknowledge that just like in any other ecosystem, in a market-economy, there will be entrepreneurs and risk-takers and there will be drones and cheque-bandits, alpha males and followers. Not everyone can be an entrepreneur. And that is a good thing.