Let Kenya’s empire-builders step forward

In 2009, I wrote a fortnightly column for this newspaper. It was a series of profiles of Kenyans who were living and working abroad and it was truly eye-opening.

Lasting around nine months, it featured such luminaries as Ory Okolloh, Kanini Mutooni Hinrichs and Deo Onyango.

The series had gotten a devoted following over the months it was published, but it ended up being put on ice. And part of the reason is symptomatic of one of the things that ails Kenya and our quest to be global leaders.

I hinted at this a few weeks ago, when I wrote of my intention to buy CNN (Rupert Murdoch pulled out of that deal, by the way, which means that the television station is off the market, which in turn means that the Nation Media Group gets to keep my services for the next few years).

The notion that Kenyans are uncommonly shy to declare themselves the best in the world in corporate life is one that is proven daily, and they led to the stopping of what was a promising franchise.

The diaspora columns stopped for a simple reason. Almost every person I would be introduced to, regardless of their accomplishments and stations in life, would demur from being featured, claiming that they were ‘not ready yet’, or were not high enough in their careers to be featured in a national column (international, if you consider how widely it was read on the Internet).

I reached these people through referrals. The reticence of many was depressingly familiar.

As a people, we have an old British-style reserve to celebrating wealth, success and making it in life. And it is not a matter of juvenile showing off of baubles and trinkets.

There is a social function to celebration of success, and we had better figure out a way of showing it. It is almost impossible in Kenya to come up with a comprehensive, believable rich list.

Internationally, these lists, which drive sales of the Sunday Times in the UK and, especially, of Forbes magazine, are based on calculations of ownership of companies.

These typically tend to be owners of public companies, and wealthy owners of private businesses examined through comparative analysis.

In Kenya, this is an impossible task. For us, obviously, a large part of our rich list would be composed of people who probably made their fortunes through such dubious means as to both make the list ethically meaningless, and to also put tax authorities and criminal investigators on their trail.

But even when wealth was made in a largely clean way, there are such dense webs of proxy ownership that are difficult to cut through.

For those in corporate life, it is only recently that heavy hitters were happy to be publicly known as such. Even when people made it to the very top, the material rewards of such success were something to be kept hidden. Even now, stories of income made from share sales is frowned upon.

The net effect of this is that the people whose achievements (often of suspicious provenance) we can look at and emulate are politicians and no-talent celebrities.

Ambitious young people cannot clearly see the rewards of being a good engineer, chief executive or banker, and thus only look up to and mimic the antics of a dubious set of people.

Exciting stories

And it is not only about wealth. The exciting stories of ambition that lead to audacious takeover bids, and mergers and acquisitions that show outsize egos, are nowhere to be found in the Kenyan corporate story, which lead many to assume that corporate life in Kenya is dull, and that the action is only to be found on the political stage, or in amateurish tiffs between impecunious artistes.

If Kenyans stopped being so shy and reticent — if we were proud to hold our achievements up to examination and emulation, then maybe we would produce a generation that is keen on going into the corporate world, and not just to ‘do deals’.

If we could celebrate the empire-builders among us, and people who have built franchises and legacies, then maybe the false promise of greed would be that much less appealing.

If, instead of faraway corporate heroes and heroines, and companies that have little relevance to us, we could point to corporate stars closer home, then we would see people rushing off to get their accounting and business qualifications.

If we celebrated our young business people with as much vigour and gusto as we celebrate our suspicious young politicians, then their distasteful bling would not shine quite so bright. And then, maybe, my long-hibernating column would be resurrected.

@wgkantai