@Hardwood..Pole sana to your sis...From your previous description of how your siblings rolls home during family get together, i would expect your combined affluence to sort small sis chap chap!!

True, it's not easy. But you have two choices when you are retrenched, (1) look for another job and restart the cycle or (2) go into business. After your retrenchment experience, you already know that option 1 is unsustainable and it's still has that bitter pill taste and you will never be satisfied, so why not try out option 2? You may fail but what if you don't? I'll tell you this from experience, most of the times what you set out to do will not be what you'll end up doing best in business, you'll discover something else much stronger and unique when you keep going.
Rental house: Who said they must be concrete?

Nimekuwa jua kali miaka kumi na saba. Hii maneno ya kulia juu ya retrenchment does not make much sense. Markets are dynamic. An organization and/or Individual must be alive to that fact - markets are dynamic.

One area I have dealt in is I.T.

Year 2001-2004: Lucrative job was assembling comps. Today that is long forgotten unless you are designing a main-frame server for IEBC.

Year 2001-2007: Software installation, repair and maintenance. Today these jobs are done by college interns and those whose charge is 500/= ya chai.

Year 2005- 2010: Networking offices and Internet provision. Still is but supply is more than demand. Today you think of joining construction guys and do internet ready buildings. On internet provision many have been swept under the carpet...Flash Telecom.

Year 2005-2010: Lucrative job was domain registration and web design. This is still ongoing but competition is very stiff. Worse rates have come done. A website that one could charge 75k to design today is 25k. Take it or leave it.

Year 2011-2017: Lucrative job is social media marketing. Here innovation is what is matters.

Have I left out something? Yes. Software or App Develoment. These guys have been in business since the 70s.

What am I saying? One ought to be innovative and upgrade skills as per market demands. Let the telephone operators at Telkom Kenya train in mobile-phone repair. And the guys who used to do paging services source mobile phones from China.

That is one sector I have witnessed change so dramatically.

Now think about farming - Agribusiness is where money is not just doing potatoes in Kinangop blindly.
Think real estate - gated community is where money is not just selling buroti.

Professionals who don't add skills are the first to be shown the door. Today you will find CPAs/Finance studying Law. HR hao law school pia.

Personally, I have had to find my way back to class - continuously.

Uliacha kuuza asprin za amiran?

Good stuff this ...however in IT (and telecomms), wachana na hardware side of things. In hardware, component technology is getting advanced (where small boxes encapsulating myriad technologies -for instance, microsites and node bs are just small boxes you plug into standard interfaces...they break you just buy and plug in new ones) ...obsolescence is very rapid.
There was a time in the very recent past (circa 2007, 2008 there were only 3 CCIEs in Kenya). Diminishing returns.
Instead, go to Applications/Software side. There is a human element to it (stupidity of end users) that unduly complicates Software and makes it less prone to upheaval for established pros...just keep your skills up-to-date and your daily bread will be regular.

So all along... even your subconscious knows it's you and your family, not Uhuru, you and your family. I then really wonder why you have us all here engaged in futile, cyclic, irrelevant arguments of back and forth.

No one who succeeds in life would even dare reason like you have because that kind or reasoning and trail of thought is definitely setting you, your family and loved ones up for utter pitiful failure!

Look, are you guys complaining about there being laws that guarantee employment but the executive has failed to execute them?

Good question. Sio lazima iwe ni groundbreaking-uncharted territory àla cold fusion kind of thing. 100K (or a little bit more) will get a good Mpesa Agent (or Equity, KCB, Airtel) thing going...a bit later on complement that with printing, photocopying and typesetting, add some Photoshop skills as you go along for airbrushing chic profiles for Facebook/Snapchat/Pinterest ....after that ongeza photo studio ...and so on.
Hiyo ni example moja.

Sasa hata mimi nasadiki @kusadikika.You are on point.