Twiga Foods founder and long-serving CEO Peter Njonjo has quit the firm’s board a month after he resigned as its chief executive in a dramatic exit after a decade at the helm of one of Kenya’s biggest agritech firms.
His exit now hands full control of the company, which has grown into a major household items wholesaler and food distributor for retail shops in Nairobi and its environs, to foreign shareholders.
It comes at a time when Twiga has come out of a protracted chain of operational headwinds, ranging from staff layoffs to deferred payments owed to suppliers, as well as delayed salaries for workers, which saw it announce a 40 percent cut on its headcount last year.
Twiga first made public the exit of Mr Njonjo on December 14 when it announced that its long-serving CEO had taken a six-month leave just after he steered it to close a new round of funding estimated to the tune of $35 million (Sh5.5 billion), adding onto the $160 million (Sh25.1 billion at current exchange rates) cumulative capital raised since inception.
In the announcement, Mr Njonjo said on the request of the board he would stay on for a six-month transition to allow the company time to recruit a substantive CEO.
But in a fresh twist, the Business Daily has established that Mr Njonjo cut short his sabbatical and shook the board with a terse resignation letter in which he says, after deep reflection, he thinks “there is little value he can add to its current transition”, pointing to a potential fallout at the company.
“At the request of the board after my resignation, I agreed to stay on the Twiga Board and work through a six-month transition that allowed for the recruitment of a new CEO. Currently, the strategic direction and daily operations are now firmly in the hands of Juven and Creadev and there is little value I can add from this point on,” Mr Njonjo says in the resignation letter dated January 4, 2024. “In this regard, I would like to resign as a Director of Twiga Holdings. As a Founder, I will remain a committed shareholder of Twiga.”
The letter is addressed to Mr Hein Pretorius, the Twiga Holdings board chairman, and copied to dozens of Twiga shareholders.
Reached for comment on the development, Mr Njonjo said he had opted to transition from a chief executive to a shareholder to allow the company pursue its next phase of growth after a successful fundraising in which he was also a top investor.
“I have strong faith in the current board and the management team, and I have decided that at this point in the company’s journey, I would want to play the role of a supportive shareholder,” Mr Njonjo told the Business Daily in a text message as he dismissed claims that there was a boardroom coup at the company he founded.
On why he would invest in a company and resign from its board, Mr Njonjo said he was looking at other opportunities that would consume a lot of his time.
“I founded the company, so I will always have a strong interest in the success of the business. Twiga just closed a significant round of financing, which I also invested in, and coupled with its significant institutional capability, this puts the organisation in a very strong position. This also allows me to focus on other opportunities that will consume a significant amount of my time in the short to medium term,” he said.
Strategic growth
After he quit as CEO, the company tasked its chief operating officer Laurent Gouault and chief financial officer Zuber Momoniat with heading operational and commercial, and finance and legal functions respectively.
Mr Njonjo says he marked a 10-year milestone since he started Twiga in November 2013.
“During this time, there was a lot that we did right in our journey to make an impact on food security and there are also a few things we got wrong, but, during that time, Twiga made a mark, both locally and globally,” he says in the resignation letter.
Developments in the global macro scene in the first quarter of 2022 impacted the firm’s expansion plans, he explained.
“It took a while to get everyone on the same page in terms of where the company should head, but I’m glad that the strategy work I led, in close collaboration with the key shareholders and the Boston Consulting Group did lead to a strategy that we all felt recognised what had worked and what had not worked and what we needed to do to build a successful and sustainable business.”
Mr Njonjo says his strategy led to the latest round of funding the company closed in November last year.
“This also highlighted my commitment to the business, by being the third largest investor, after Creadev and Juven. It was against this backdrop that I decided to resign as CEO and Board member, on the 7th of December 2023, because now the Company was in a strong position, and we had revamped the capability of the management team.”
Mr Njonjo says as a founder he invested $1 million (Sh157 million) in August 2023 and has committed to pump in a similar amount in coming weeks if the company attains certain goals.
