For a man who had accustomed Kenyans to a jet setting lifestyle, a bevy of routinely changed beautiful socialites as girlfriends and a larger-than-life persona on social media, life must have come full circle for flamboyant businessman Khalif Kairo.
As he tries to re-establish himself following a string of arrests earlier in the year for not delivering vehicles to clients who had paid him millions of shillings, Kairo’s quick rise to the top and fall is set to be one of the most classic lessons on how not to do business.
In a span of less than two years, the 29-year-old car salesman who rose to fame by accusing his partners of robbing him a lucrative business before starting a widely successful similar venture, Kairo has gone back to a worse position than where started before he became a house hold name on X.
Since December 2024, Kairo has found himself in and out of police custody and now in a prison at least four times.
While he insists he’s the victim of economic headwinds and ruthless business rivals trying to bring him down, the growing stack of complaints against him point at more serious cracks in his business dealings or the used vehicle sales industry as a whole.
Economic term
A deeper look at Kairo’s social media posts however shows that he could have been caught up in the ‘Like Economy’ where young people constantly seek validation on social media, a dangerous and addictive behaviour.
Though it is still not yet widely recognised as an economic term, the ‘like economy’ refers to the impact of social media and online platforms on youth, particularly the pressure to constantly seek validation through likes, shares, and follows.
While these platforms can offer valuable opportunities for connection, skill development and even income generation, they can also contribute to negative mental health outcomes and unrealistic expectations for young people.
In today’s hyper-connected world, social media has become a digital stage where young people perform their lives for likes, shares, and comments in front of the whole world to see.
But behind the filters and flashy posts lies a growing crisis which perhaps explains why Kairo’s car sales business grew so fast before dying a quick death.
A billion shillings
As at now, it is impossible to know how well Kairo’s second hand car dealership ‘Kai and Karo’ was doing before its quick demise after it was accused of not delivering vehicles to clients after pocketing their money.
The showroom, which was located at the intersection between Kiambu road and the Northern Bypass in Nairobi, has since been shut down. When it was doing well, Kairo at one point widely claimed that they were making sales of over a billion shillings a year.
“Despite the problems last year, we still moved cars worth between Sh800 million to a billion. We delivered over 300 cars,” claimed Kairo when his legal issues began emerging.
“The issues you are seeing online is that we were unable to deliver like 15 cars last year. So out of the 300 people that gave us their money last year totaling to about a billion shillings were unable to deliver cars worth just about Sh20 million only. If I was a bad person I would have stolen Sh900 million,” he added.
With over 756,000 followers on all his personal social media handles and 400,000 followers for his company Kai and Karo, Kairo was living the life that any one who is in the business of selling vehicles could only dream of in terms of free publicity.
For comparison, Khushi Motors, one of the largest used car dealerships in East Africa with operations in Kenya, Uganda and Tanzania has only 53,000 followers on its Facebook page.
Clearly, Kairo mastered the art of beating social media algorithms in order to build such a huge following.
By constantly displaying an over-the-top lifestyle, Kairo transformed his social media pages into an eyeballs magnet which turned into orders for vehicles.
And although it may be easy to blame him now for living life on the first lane for likes, shares, comments and vehicle orders, Kairo, born Joseph Wambui, built his entire career on social media.
As his agemates were sweating their way through college in the hope of getting a boring job behind a desk and a computer upon graduation in 2016, Kairo then aged just 20 had started a Facebook page ‘Imports by Kairo’ for marketing other people’s cars for sale.
A second born of three children born to a single mother at Congo in Kawangware, Kairo knew he wanted to sell cars immediately after completing high school in 2014. As a child of a single mother who grew up in a slum, the businessman had a very slim chance of succeeding in life as his mother did not have money to send him to college.
Despite growing up in a two roomed iron sheet house that doubled up as his mother’s shop, Kairo first realised how badly off they were doing as a family when he joined Kahuho Uhuru High School in 2011.
Got a culture shock
A well-wisher had offered to pay his school fees throughout his secondary school education as his struggling mother could not afford. The well-wisher would also give him a job at his bakery as an errand boy upon completion of his secondary education in 2014.
“When I went to high school I got a culture shock. My mum gave me Sh200 pocket money, and there were kids who were spending that kind of money in a day. I looked at these guys and suddenly realised that things were not good on our side,” he told YouTuber Lynn Ngugi in an interview in 2023.
During the first visiting day while in Form One, as his mother brought him some chapatis and stew, his wealthier classmates were visited in high end SUV’s with tents and camping seats. It is this time that his love for cars started developing.
After high school, Kairo first got a job at a bakery within the neighbourhood in order to keep himself busy and earn a few coins. During his time at the bakery, he noticed one of the guys from the hood called Johnny come home with a different car almost every day.
Upon asking Johnny what he did for a living, he told him that he sold cars.
“From that day, I knew I wanted to sell cars. I told myself that if I wanted to live the life Johnny is living, I have to sell cars,” Kairo said in an interview in 2023.
He quit his job at the bakery and started to look for a job as a car salesman along Ngong road.
He was very fresh out of high school and most showrooms did not think that an 18-year-old had what it takes to sell cars.
Ocean Cross Motors in Valley Arcade however took a shot with Kairo. He worked there for the next one year honing his skills in the cut throat used vehicle sales business. During this time, he realised that he could sell cars faster if he advertised them on the now defunct website ‘OLX.’
As enquiries on the vehicles he was trying to sell on behalf of Ocean Cross grew, Kairo realised he could turn his social media skills into an asset if he sold the cars directly on his own Facebook page instead of using OLX where all manner of things were being sold.
‘Imports by Kairo’ was born as a Facebook page at the beginning of 2017. Apart from just posting specifics about the cars he was selling, Kairo did more. He got himself a good phone and started doing vehicle review videos.
The page grew like wild fire. Kairo quit his job at Ocean Cross and decided to concentrate on his Facebook Page selling vehicles on behalf of other showrooms for a commission.
During this time, he met Jesse Waithaka, the owner of Ocean Cross Motors along Kiambu road.
Working for someone
Jesse taught Kairo another aspect of the vehicle import business, how to import cars from Singapore or Japan to Kenya. As he worked for Jesse, Kairo realised he could make more money if he imported vehicles himself instead of working for someone.
There was one major problem though, he did not have the required capital. He dug deep in his contacts and found Clement Kinuthia, who was already low key in the vehicle selling business.
Clement used to import cars from Singapore. He would put them in other people’s showrooms where they would be sold for commission. Kairo’s Facebook page ‘Imports by Kairo’ was one of the platforms that Clement used to push his car sales, since he was staying in Nyeri and would only come to Nairobi once in a while.
Clement’s business model, where he was giving people cars to sell on his behalf was however prone to problems. His vehicles were constantly being misused in the showrooms that they had been stored. Kairo too was having his own problems with his employer Urban Drive.
The two sought out their mutual friend Ibrahim Karanja and decided to start their own gig.
They founded ‘Imports by Kairo’ as a company in 2019. The process they used to start the company is now a legal matter and their well-publicized fall out is what catapulted Kairo to fame.
According to Clement, him and Ibrahim left all management of ‘Imports by Kairo’ to Kairo.
Their role was to supply cars and Kairo was to sell them. And since his social media following was already considerably huge, they agreed to use his name in the company identity as a strategic marketing decision.
“It was Kairo who suggested that since his social media pages were already known, it would be easier to market the company using his brand,” said Clement.
Clement says that after doing due diligence, he agreed with Kairo’s idea and all of them got a 30 percent shareholding with an agreement of splitting profits equally after deducting all the expenses.
Clement says that together with Ibrahim, they sunk in like Sh1.4 million in putting up the office. They also put in another Sh40 million in terms of stock and left the vehicles for Kairo to sell.
Everything went on smoothly for about a year, until according to Clement, complaints about Kairo started emerging from clients.
“One day, I would hear that Kairo is never in the office, the next it was complaints from clients that he was not picking calls or he was over promising,” said Clement.
“Our bills were also piling up in garages. I had to come to Nairobi to fix the issues only to discover that the problems were bigger than imagined,” he said.
Gossip websites
Fed up with what was happening, Ibrahim was the first to bolt out of the company when his problems with Kairo became too much that they could not see eye to eye.
The problems between Kairo and Clement however kept coming until the company’s remaining directors fell out.
Their fall out however became fodder for all gossip websites after Kairo fired a tweet on his X account claiming Clement and Ibrahim conspired to kick him out of a company he founded.
Clement on the other hand made a statement claiming that Kairo was just an employee at the company.
Kenyans on social media however sided with Kairo as he appeared like an underdog in the dispute.
Menacingly, Kairo took the opportunity to rebrand himself, shrugging off the business coup he had just undergone and used his new found fame to spring one of the biggest business comebacks ever witnessed on Kenya’s social media.
Within months, Kai and Karo, Kairo’s new company was operating from a brand-new showroom. Kenyans who wanted to sell or buy new cars flocked the showroom in droves and Kairo’s social media popularity shot to stardom levels.
Kairo was not only young, but he was the owner of the hottest showroom in Nairobi where he was also the star salesman with a huge following on social media. Ever the flashy car dealer with a magnetic charm and a silver tongue, Kairo’s social media timeline had everyone on chokehold.
However, as months went by, Kairo’s social media pages morphed from being about his car sales business to his personal life. If you wanted to know what he had eaten for breakfast, who he had met, what deal he had made or have a sense of what Kairo was thinking, you only needed to go to his X handle.
When he was not cutting business deals, he was either travelling first class just to dance at a night club in Jamaica, visiting the Taj Mahal in India, riding expensive motor bikes or randomly flying planes as a pilot.
Kairo had arrived. With his newly found wealth and fame, beautiful women quickly found their way into his circle. And they were not just women, they were Nairobi’s most famous socialites inclulding Cera Imani and former Miss Kenya, Wavinya Maria.
Imani’s relationship with Kairo which was first announced to the world through a trip on a private Cessna Citation jet to the famous Mt Kenya Safari Club on Valentines Day, came with its own controversies.
Shut down trolls
Social media users were quick to point out Imani had been spotted before with other famous men who had supposedly dated her before. Kairo was trolled for over a day on X over his decision to date her. In order to shut down trolls, Kairo threw money at the problem in the most ludicrous manner ever attempted on Kenya’s social media streets.
“The person who quotes this tweet, writes the most beautiful poem, praising my girlfriend and gets the most likes from the time line will win this Volkswagen Golf,” he tweeted on April 24.
“In tweets, they troll, in shadows, they hide, but Kairo’s heart is a vast, open tide. With Cera (Imani) beside him, he stands firm and proud, their future a canvas, unmarred by the crowd,” X user @Kafangi wrote in the winning poem.
The poem was read by 433,000 people. True to his word, Kairo gifted the car to @Kafangi the next day.
As ludicrous as the poem idea was, it catapulted Kairo to the social media stratosphere. For the next few days, everyone spoke about him and this translated to sales.
With more cash at his disposal, Kairo started a new company ‘Jetman Global’ for aircraft rentals and sales. He leased an office for the new company at the upmarket Westlands Business Park.
He then had a Sh700 million Bombadier Challenger 604 private jet flown to Nairobi for viewing to prove that he was really serious about selling aircraft.
The new found money was also used to lease a second office for his car sales company ‘Kai and Karo’ at the same spot where ‘Imports by Kairo,’ the company he had earlier claimed to have been kicked out off at the Daimond Plaza in Parkland’s Nairobi.
Imports By Kairo had by then run bankrupt and ceased operations. Kairo saw this as a chance to bury his old company forever and show that he had won the beef with his former partner Clement.
He drove his Porche to Import’s by Kairo’s former office and recorded himself demolishing the company’s signage before posting the video on social media. His ratings on media skyrocketed.
From then on, hardly a week passed before Kairo’s name trended on X. Although things appeared very rosy from the outside, Kairo’s rapid business expansion and social media escapades were burning serious loads of money and already taking a toll on Kai and Karo’s cash flow.
No one yet, apart from his clients who were not getting cars that they had paid for knew what was happening, at least from police records and fraud cases filed in court against Kairo.
As early as June last year, Kairo’s company was already delaying the delivery of vehicles which had already been paid for by clients.
Meanwhile on social media, the party went on. Kairo’s relationship with Imani got approval from ‘social media in-laws’ as Kenyans on the internet are famously referred to.
The two immediately became fodder for gossip blogs and podcasts. They even started receiving celebrity treatment, being invited to product launches and appearances in almost every showbiz event.
Fierce response
Kairo was now not only a car salesman but also a celebrity. He was also dating one of Nairobi’s most sought girls. With such a woman by his side, Kairo took his dating game to a whole new level.
As his fellow Gen-Z were shouting about the Finance Bill on social media, Kairo was flying with Imani to South Africa just for a date, the next week to India to visit the Taj Mahal and the other New York.
Infact one day he menacingly tweeted, “Wacha nikimbie hapa Asia kidogo, kuna shida kidogo nafaa kutatua...” as he was on a first-class flight with Imani to India.
With his fame clearly cemented as a top-level celebrity, Kairo mutated into a know it all.
He began dishing out lectures on everything that was happening in the country.
To him, you were either praising him or a hater consumed with a desire to see him fall. Anyone who dared to criticise him was immediately met with a fierce response reminding them on how poor they are.
“You are a washed-up rugby star who spends his days impressing his wife, washing dishes, and begging for an allowance increase,” Kairo told celebrity chef and Kenyan rugby star Dennis Ombachi in April 2024, when the former Olympian asked him to treat people with respect on X.
When protests about the 2024 Finance Bill spilled from social media to the streets in June 2024, Kairo too joined the fray. But while his brief flirtation with Kenya’s anti-government protests began with a bang, his short-lived activism ended in a confusing, controversial whimper.
Initially seen as a bold voice for the disgruntled youth, he gradually began urging his followers to back off. First, he warned against storming State House. Then, he advised a complete shift in strategy – abandon the streets.
“Continue destroying your country then. Those of us with strong international connections can always move and go build other countries,” he warned the youth reminding them that his mother lives in New York.
A few months after the protests, whispers about Kairo’s shady businesses began making rounds on social media. As weeks went by, the whispers snowballed into fully blown demands by clients saying they had been defrauded millions of shillings for vehicles that were never delivered.
“Every big entrepreneur, at one point, must face litigation or money problems, especially when God is taking them to higher levels. To the ones reaching out, I am 100 percent okay, and I will overcome,” Kairo wrote on December 3 last year.
Negatively affect the youth
A few days later, Kairo was arrested for not delivering a Range Rover. It was just the first of his many problems with the state, which to date have not stopped rolling in as more and more people report him to the police for defrauding them.
On April 7 this year, the courts reduced Kairo’s bail to Sh2 million. By then he had already spent more than two weeks at the Industrial Area Remand Prison. Whether he will make a comeback after being released, only time will tell.
What is clear however is that Kairo’s rise and fall has definitely added to statistics on how addictive use of social media can negatively affect the youth.