Jeff Koinange made for BDAfrica.com’s most read profile of the year. PHOTO | FILE
Who were the ten people whose life stories on BDAfrica.com captured your imagination most this year?
The answer to that question, we found, includes a few surprises among the names we expected to see. To inspire your choices and actions in the new year, here are our ten most-read profiles of 2014:
10 Christian Turner
You expect a suited, robotic diplomat. Instead you get Dr Christian Turner’s open-collared ease (“No diplomat should ever travel without a disco ball.”). The 41-year-old former documentary maker had plenty to say about… plenty.
We have never drilled boreholes, says the man that has been at the helm of Davis & Shirtliff for a decade and a half. Oddly, many people think that’s what they do. Alec Davis, 64, set us right on this and on the secrets to a happy marriage and satisfaction in life.
After more than 20 years abroad, this former “village boy” and Alliance High School alumnus returned to Kenya as NIC Bank’s top man. He’s an MIT-trained engineer and the first indigenous Kenyan to be a Wall Street MD. He chats with us about getting there from the humble rural village of Gatamaiyu.
This farmer from Nyeri county built her first ‘jua kali’ greenhouse for just Sh16,000 (less than $200) using cheap materials. Now she is raking in big money as a farm produce supplier.
Here’s someone hacking it in the tough world of private equity. He managed a Sh31 billion portfolio in one company and raised Sh4.3 billion in 18 months for another. But David Owino says the secret is not the money at all.
While others have called him the African Warren Buffet, billionaire Jimnah Mbaru chooses to define himself as a true entrepreneur who invests in opportunities that he sees in the financial sector.
Here’s the second MIT-trained Alliance High School alumnus on the list: Ayisi Makatiani’s meteoric rise started with Africa Online in 1994 before he found his way into the private equity arena.
Publisher. Newspaper columnist. Tough advocate. Husband. Businessman. Father. Clothes horse. Hell-raiser. Arsenal FC aficionado. The Grand Mullah.
Feel free to wedge any of these hats on Ahmednasir Abdullahi’s head. It will fit. Let's hear what he had to say in our second-most-read profile of the year.
The dramatic, controversy-ridden life of talk-show host, award-winning journalist, cigar-and-whisky enthusiast and author, Jeff Koinange made for BDAfrica.com’s most read profile of the year.
We plan to have more interesting conversations with similar individuals in the coming year, so do keep coming back. And be sure to let us know if there is someone you think we need to sit down with. Happy New Year.
