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Imagine building something from nothing, pouring your savings, your time, your entire vision into a small business, then stepping away for two weeks only to discover that the people you trusted were quietly dismantling everything you had created. That is exactly what happened to That Girl Boina, a popular Kenyan food creator who opened Waxaholic Studio, a waxing and hydrafacial parlour in Nairobi’s central business district, on 1 September 2024. She had hired a receptionist and two specialists, felt confident enough to take her first international trip of the year, and expected nothing but rest. What she got instead was a direct message on Instagram that would change everything.
“I was at your studio, I liked everything. The only problem was that I was asked to send money to a different number,” a customer wrote to her. That single message cracked open a reality Boina had never anticipated. Revenue had been falling since early 2025, a decline she had initially brushed off as a seasonal slump. It was not a slump. Someone was redirecting her clients’ payments to a personal number, right under her nose, while she was thousands of miles away in Europe.
Boina chose not to confront her employees. She put the studio up for sale that same weekend, found no buyer, sold off some equipment, and quietly closed Waxaholic Studio in October 2025. “I remember my friend taking me to a restaurant, and I started crying. We were both silent,” she recalls. The closure was not just a financial blow. It was the loss of something she had built to secure her future, and the grief of that loss was real and lasting.
Nearly a year later, she shared her story in a TikTok video, explaining she had needed time to heal before speaking publicly. The video was reposted on X, formerly Twitter, and gathered close to one million views. The response was overwhelming. Business owners from across Kenya flooded the comments with their own stories of payment diversion, stock theft, and the sale of expensive equipment by trusted employees. Boina’s story had touched a nerve because it was not unique. It was, for many African entrepreneurs, painfully familiar.
The scale of the problem is staggering. A 2022 PwC survey found that 63% of respondents in East Africa reported that their organisations had experienced economic crime, compared to a global average of 46%. Hipora Business Solutions East Africa, a loss-prevention firm operating across East and Southern Africa, estimates that employee theft accounts for more than 60% of losses recorded by small businesses in the region. These are not just numbers on a spreadsheet. They represent closed shops, fired workers, and shattered dreams.
The consequences have reached even Africa’s largest retailers. Tuskys, which at its peak employed over 6,000 people and ran more than 60 branches across Kenya and Uganda, was losing more than 100 million Kenya shillings, roughly £581,000 or $770,000, every single month to employee theft, according to a Business Daily report. Cashiers were pocketing money, manipulating till transactions, and colluding with suppliers. Nakumatt, another retail giant, saw more than $100 million worth of stock go unaccounted for before it collapsed. Both supermarkets are now gone, their falls driven by a combination of wider financial mismanagement and the slow, corrosive drain of internal fraud.
John Wanjohi, who leads Hipora, puts it bluntly: “Employees are like a cartel that colludes with clients and suppliers to perpetuate theft.” The forms this theft takes are not always obvious. At IKOJN, a Kenyan ready-to-wear fashion brand founded by Cris Njoki, the scheme was buried deep in the supply chain. A staff member was quietly asking suppliers to inflate their quotes for raw materials, then splitting the excess with the supplier after the company paid the invoice. Njoki investigated, confronted the employee with evidence, and watched them leave. Since then, she has centralised procurement and built a strict paper trail. “Finance speaks to the supplier and then makes payment,” she says. A small structural change. A massive difference.
In Accra, Ghana, Muftawu Nabila, a sports journalist at Joy News, has been running an electronics shop for four years alongside his media career. He has been robbed by three different employees in that time. The third came closest to collapsing the business entirely. While Nabila was in the United States covering the FIFA World Cup in June 2026, the attendant he left in charge was siphoning off up to $30 a day from daily sales of around $200. The theft ran for two months before Nabila noticed the money coming in was no longer enough to restock his shelves. He started counting inventory every morning. When he confronted the employee, she denied everything, but a stock count she conducted herself revealed the gap. “I just told her: ‘If you go home today, don’t come back,'” he says. His journalism salary kept the shop alive while he rebuilt.
What makes employee theft so devastating for African small businesses is not just the act itself but the context in which it happens. Most small enterprises on the continent operate on razor-thin margins, face high borrowing costs, have limited access to formal finance, and exist in unpredictable tax environments. Purchasing power is lower across many African markets, which means businesses cannot simply raise prices to recover losses. In a continent where the informal economy drives a massive share of employment and economic activity, a business without a financial cushion can be pushed into closure by losses that a larger company would absorb without blinking.
Wanjohi has seen this dynamic play out repeatedly. At one struggling pharmacy branch, his team tightened controls over cash handling, stock movements, and cashier operations. Daily sales jumped from 80,000 Kenya shillings to 200,000 after the changes. The revenue was always there. It was just being stolen. The tragedy is that most small business owners only call in specialists like Wanjohi after the damage is already severe, when prevention would have cost far less than recovery.
There is also a legal dimension that business owners often overlook in the heat of the moment. Judith Guserwa, an advocate, emphasises that employers must investigate suspected theft properly, gather solid evidence, and give employees the opportunity to respond before taking disciplinary action. If an employee admits to theft and agrees to repay, that agreement must be in writing. If they refuse, termination with a valid reason and formal charges are the appropriate path. Cutting corners in the process can expose employers to legal liability, adding yet another layer of complexity to an already painful situation.
Boina has not recovered financially from the closure of Waxaholic Studio. “Although I have recovered emotionally, I am yet to recoup the money I invested in setting up and running the studio,” she says. But she has changed the way she thinks about hiring. She will move slowly when bringing people in and quickly when something feels wrong. And she has distilled the entire painful experience into one sentence that says everything a business school curriculum cannot: “I cannot teach you integrity.”
