I have sat with enough families to tell you a secret about the estate conversation: everyone in the room wants it to happen, and everyone is waiting for someone else to start it. The parents stay silent to avoid seeming morbid. The children stay silent to avoid seeming greedy. And so one of the most loving conversations a family can have gets postponed by mutual politeness, sometimes until a hospital corridor forces the issue on the worst possible day.
Kenya’s courts are full of what that silence costs. Succession disputes that outlive the people who caused them, land that cannot be sold because a title never moved, businesses that die with their founders because nobody was ever told the banking passwords, let alone the plan. Silence is an estate plan too. It is simply the worst one available, and it is the default you hold until you replace it.
An inheritance is instructions plus assets. Assets alone are an argument waiting to happen.
Starting it without starting a war
The opening matters more than people think, so I give my clients an actual script. You are calling a meeting about continuity, and you say so plainly: this is about making sure what we have built survives us, serves the people we love, and never becomes the thing that divides them. Held that way, the conversation stops being about death and becomes what it truly is, which is stewardship. In my experience the mood in the room changes within ten minutes, usually into relief.
Come to that meeting prepared, because vagueness is where these talks go to die. Before you gather anyone, assemble four things:
- A written list of what exists: accounts, titles, businesses, policies, debts, and where the documents live.
- The names attached to everything, checked against reality, because beneficiaries and titles drift out of date quietly.
- Your actual wishes, written in your own words before any lawyer translates them.
- The one person outside the family, an advocate or trusted professional, who will know where everything is.
What I do in the room
My role is preparation and translation. The legal instruments, the wills, the trusts, the transfers, belong with advocates, and I will tell you plainly when you need one. What I bring is the work before the lawyer: the full map of what you own, the honest conversation about who should carry what, and the discipline of turning intentions into a document your family can actually follow.
<div class=”takeaway”><p>One meeting will never finish this work, and it does not need to. It only needs to start it, because a family that has begun talking is already safer than one still being polite.</p></div>
My name, Mwikali, belongs to the one who stays. I have come to believe wealth should aspire to the same thing, and the estate conversation is where staying begins. Start yours this month; the relief on the other side is worth the awkward first sentence.