Follow
Follow

A Personal Confession: My Last Business Was a Lie. It Helped Kill My Father.

From the desk of Lusabara Dar es Salaam, Tanzania.

Dear Friend,

Before the sun goes down today, 68 people in Tanzania will die from diabetes.

Tomorrow, another 68.

The day after that… another 68.

That’s 24,955 funerals every single year.

A sold-out stadium, full of mothers, brothers, and fathers, wiped off the face of the earth every 12 months.

Most people see that number and their eyes glaze over. It’s just another statistic. Another sad headline.

But for me, it’s a roll call of the damned.

It’s my aunt, dead in March 2022. It’s my younger uncle, dead in July 2023. It’s my stepfather, dead in September 2024. It’s my father, dead on December 26, 2024. It’s another younger uncle, dead in August 2025.

All of them. Gone. Wiped out by the same invisible enemy. High blood pressure. Diabetes. Non-Communicable Diseases.

Call it whatever you want.

I call it a slaughter.

And the worst part? The part that keeps me awake at 3 AM, staring at the ceiling with my heart pounding in my chest?

This whole, bloody mess is completely avoidable.

And the second worst part?

For three years, my last business was actually part of the problem. I was helping restaurants sell the very poison that was killing my own family.

I was running a food delivery app.

And I was good at it.

But I was solving the wrong problem.

This is my confession. This is the story of my great failure, the personal hell my family endured, and the one, single thing I’m doing now to fight back.

If you have a family, or you eat food, or you live in Tanzania… you need to stop what you’re doing and read this letter. It may be the most important thing you read this year.

It could, quite literally, save your life.

The Big, Fat Lie We All Tell Ourselves
In Tanzania, we have a cultural belief.

We believe that “home-cooked food” is the best. It’s the safest. It’s prepared with love. It’s what separates us from the wazungu who are always ordering from restaurants.

We look down on restaurant food.

Culturally, the only people who eat from restaurants are travelers, office workers in a rush, or people stuck in a hospital.

The rest of us? We eat at home.

The street food scene is dominated by ‘mama ntilie’ (local food vendors) and stalls selling chipsi mayai (fries and eggs).

And it’s easy to point the finger at them, isn’t it?

It’s easy to say, “The problem is the mama ntilie! She’s using the cheapest, most disgusting cooking oil she can find. She’s reusing it until it’s black sludge. She’s trying to maximize her revenue by poisoning us!”

And you’d be right.

That is a problem. A big one.

But it is NOT the real problem.

The real problem is much closer to home.

The real problem is sitting at your own dinner table.

The real problem is that the food being cooked with “love” in our own kitchens is a ticking time bomb.

Why?

Because the person cooking it—your mother, your wife, your sister, your maid—has zero training in nutrition.

They are cooking the same high-calorie, high-fat, high-sugar meals their grandmothers taught them to cook.

They are showing their love with portion sizes that are dangerously large.

They don’t know what a “glycemic index” is. They don’t understand how a specific food impacts your metabolic system. They don’t know how to cook for a person with a compromised body.

It is NOT their fault.

They are doing their best. But they are flying blind in a hurricane.

And this is where the system completely, and fatally, collapses.

My Father’s Story: Death by a Thousand “Harmless” Meals
My father was a strong man. Over 90 kilograms.

Then, the diagnosis. Diabetes. High Blood Pressure. The daily double. The classic calling card of the modern Tanzanian diet.

The doctor, overworked and with 50 other patients in the waiting room, gave us the same useless advice they give everyone.

“He needs to change his lifestyle.” “He must exercise.” “He must get enough sleep.” “He needs to eat medically-precise meals.”

Okay. Fine.

Exercise? We can do that. Sleep? We can manage that.

But what about “medically-precise meals”?

What the hell does that even mean?

The doctor hands us a pamphlet with a list: “Avoid this. Eat that.”

So we take the pamphlet home. And who do we give it to?

We give it to the same loving hands that have been preparing his food his entire life.

Do you see the insanity?

You can’t expect the very person whose cooking—done with love and the best of intentions—contributed to a family member’s diabetes to suddenly, overnight, become a clinical nutritionist.

With what skills? With what tools? With what knowledge of how food actually works in a sick body?

It’s a fool’s errand. It’s a death sentence.

We tried. God, we tried.

We took away the foods he loved. We banned this, we forbade that.

And the result?

My father began to waste away.

He became a ghost of himself. The man who was once over 90 kilos shriveled. He became so thin, so frail, that the doctor’s sphygmomanometer—the blood pressure cuff—wouldn’t even grip his arm.

Read that again.

A blood pressure machine could not even work on him because his arm was too small.

He was, quite literally, starving to death in a house full of food.

We were caught in a trap.

The food he used to eat was killing him with poison. The “healthy” food we tried to make was killing him with starvation.

We were amateurs, lost in a jungle, trying to perform brain surgery.

The Hospital: The Place We Go to Die
Then, he was admitted to the hospital.

And this is where the nightmare truly began.

If you’ve ever had a sick relative in a Tanzanian hospital, you know exactly what I’m talking about.

You are struggling with the stress of the illness. You are fighting with nurses, trying to find doctors, scraping together money for medicine.

And on top of ALL of that… you have to solve the food problem.

Because the hospitals? They don’t have a solution.

You can’t be serious, right? The one place that is supposed to heal you has NO SYSTEM for therapeutic food.

The food vendors and restaurants around the hospital are even worse. They are preying on desperate families. They are selling the same high-fat, high-sugar, high-calorie junk as every other vendor.

It was madness.

We were at a hospital far from home. We were forced to bring a dedicated person with us whose only job was to try and prepare food for my father.

Her level of nutritional expertise?

Don’t even ask me. I don’t have an answer. She was just another person, doing her best, completely in the dark.

It was stress on top of stress on top of stress.

You’re trying to manage his medicine. You’re trying to manage your own grief and fear. And you’re spending half your day in a logistical nightmare, just trying to figure out what he can safely put in his mouth.

We all know the truth.

Medicine manages the disease. Food controls it.

But the entire system—the doctors, the hospitals, the culture—leaves the most important part of the equation up to pure, blind, dumb luck.

On December 26, 2024, our luck ran out.

My father passed away.

He died in a period where we were just… finally… getting to know him. Like many African men of his generation, he was always a bit distant. A provider. Not a friend.

But in those last few years, that was changing.

We were building a new relationship. A closeness we never had as children. We were finally receiving the one thing we had missed our entire lives: a friendship with our dad.

And then he was gone.

Stolen. Not just by a disease, but by a system that is fundamentally broken. Stolen by a lack of knowledge. Stolen by a system that has no answer to the simplest, most important question:

“What should he eat, and who the hell is going to make it?”

My Great Failure: Confessions of a Food Delivery CEO
This is the hardest part to write.

Because while all of this was happening… I was a “successful” founder in the food industry.

In 2020, I launched Agiza24.

We were a food delivery app. We had over 17,000 registered users. We were connecting hungry customers with restaurants, quick and easy.

We streamlined ordering. We streamlined payment. We handled the logistics.

We were solving a problem.

The problem we solved was CONVENIENCE.

If you were hungry and you were lazy, we were your guys.

But as I sat in that hospital, watching my father fade away, a disgusting, horrifying realization washed over me.

My business was a lie.

It was built on a foundation of sand.

Here I was, a “food-tech” entrepreneur, and I couldn’t even solve the food crisis in my own family. My company was totally, completely useless in the face of a real problem.

In July 2023, even before my father passed, we decided to close Agiza24.

Ostensibly, the reason was business. We were running at a loss. We were a tiny boat in an ocean of giant MNOs (Mobile Network Operators) and restaurants who were taking all the margin. We were a glorified, loss-making middle-man.

But that was just the business reason.

The real reason, the one I’m telling you now, is that my heart was no longer in it.

I had discovered a terrible truth:

Solving “convenience” is a joke. It’s a luxury. It doesn’t matter.

It doesn’t matter how fast you can get food to someone if the food itself is killing them.

We weren’t solving the fundamental, life-saving problem.

We were just the delivery boys for the poison. We were just helping restaurants sell the same cheap-ingredient, high-profit-margin junk that was putting people like my father in the hospital in the first place.

I wasn’t a solution-provider. I was an accomplice.

The experience and the pain my family went through… I wouldn’t wish it on my worst enemy.

And the fact that my own business was part of that same broken, uncaring system?

It was a failure I will carry with me for the rest of my life.

From the Ashes: The Mission That Became My Life
After the funeral, I was a wreck.

I was angry. I was grieving. And I was consumed by a single, burning question:

How did this happen?

How, in a country of millions, with 2.9 million people known to have diabetes (and another 53% undiagnosed!), is there NOBODY solving this?

How is it possible that you can search online for the Glycemic Index (GI) or Glycemic Load (GL) of local Tanzanian foods and find… nothing?

How can restaurants be so completely, utterly clueless about the health goals of their customers?

I was lost.

And then, I got to work.

Starting in January 2025, I locked myself in a room. I put my grief and my anger to work.

I wasn’t alone.

I reached out to my co-founder, Dr. Joseph. He’s a medical doctor. He’s seen this tragedy from the other side. He’s the one who has to look families in the eye and tell them the bad news. He’s seen the failure of the medical system to address the food problem firsthand.

He was as angry as I was.

Together, we tore the entire problem down to its studs.

We analyzed the ‘mama ntilie’. We analyzed the home kitchen. We analyzed the hospitals. We analyzed the restaurants.

And we confirmed the one, terrifying truth:

Everyone is failing.

The entire system is a chain of failure, and the person who pays the price is the patient. The father. The mother.

So, we decided to build the solution.

Not another delivery app. Not another “convenience” toy.

We decided to build the one thing that could have saved my father.

The one thing that could have given my family peace of mind.

We are building a “Food as Medicine” company.

Our mission is simple, but it is revolutionary:

We are creating and delivering meals that heal.

We are starting with the 2.9 million Tanzanians with diabetes. The people who are, right now, struggling every single day to figure out what to eat.

We are taking the guesswork, the fear, and the confusion out of the equation.

No more “What should I cook?” No more “Is this safe for me?” No more starving to death while trying to “eat healthy.”

We are building a system that provides clinically-precise, nutritionally-sound, therapeutic meals, designed by doctors and chefs, and delivered directly to the people who need them.

This isn’t a “nice to have.”

This is a life-saving intervention.

Is It Worth It? You Better Believe It Is.
Some people, the “business” types, will ask me about the market.

“Is this a viable business?” they’ll ask, looking at their spreadsheets.

I’ll tell you what I tell them.

We are talking about Africa’s $2.8 BILLION diabetes market.

We are talking about a problem that is not getting smaller. The International Diabetes Federation (IDF) estimates a 142% INCREASE in diabetes in Africa by 2050.

7.6 MILLION Tanzanians will be caught in this trap.

So yes, it’s a “viable market.”

But frankly, I don’t give a damn about that.

This isn’t about spreadsheets. This isn’t about “market share.”

This is a mission.

This is a vendetta.

This is a promise I made to myself over my father’s grave.

We will not let another family go through the hell that mine did.

We will not stand by while 68 of our brothers and sisters are buried every single day because of a problem that is 100% solvable.

My last business was a lie because it ignored the one problem that mattered.

This new company is my truth.

It’s the only thing that matters.

We are going to change the way this country eats, and we are going to save lives.

Period.

To my father: I’m sorry I didn’t figure this out sooner. But I’m going to fix it.

Watch me.

Comments
Join the Discussion and Share Your Opinion
View Comments (3)

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Newsletter
Join Design Community
Get the latest updates, creative tips, and exclusive resources straight to your inbox. Let’s explore the future of design and innovation together.