Nostalgia is a ruthless temptress, and David Kimani, Naivas’s managing director, yields to her without resistance. From his Nairobi's Industrial Area office, he retraces the unlikely path from a small shop in Rongai, Nakuru—his uncle’s shop, where he was just a young man with no blueprint for empire, no two pennies to rub together.
The dream was never to build a business turning over close to Sh100 billion or employing over 12,000 people. That blueprint was unimaginable. The dream was survival, to outrun poverty. That was also the ambition.
