Mugo Mungai, the pioneer indigenous banker who inspired many other Kenyan entrepreneurs, is dead.
Mungai, 81, died while still fighting to recover his two banks and assets worth billions of shillings that the State seized during former President Daniel Moi’s Kanu regime.
"Mzee has rested after ailing for two weeks," his son, Mungai Mugo, confirmed, disclosing that he was admitted to a Nairobi hospital after developing diabetes and heart complications.
Mungai owned two financial institutions; Capital Finance Limited and Pioneer Building Society, which he founded at 36. He also owned Pioneer Estate, which had 259 maisonettes in Nairobi and Capital House in the City centre.
Besides that, Mungai owned 50 half-acre plots in the up-market Gigiri, near Unep, Nairobi. At the current market rate, Mungai’s assets would be worth more than Sh8 billion.
However, all his properties were taken together with the financial institutions that he had built as President Moi’s government seized most indigenous banks.
“My bank was never in trouble,” Mungai told this writer a few years ago.
But he found them locked on the morning of November 13, 1986. As he told the court in the long-delayed search for justice, the banks “were solid institutions with no financial problems.”
Had his properties not been taken, he also told the court a few years ago they could be valued at Sh7 billion, turning him into one of the wealthiest Kenyans.
Born in Kanyariri in Kabete, Mugo had first trained in shorthand and worked as a stenographer. His first job in 1959 was as a secretary to Kimani Ngumba, who would later rise to become Nairobi Mayor and a banker.
“Before I registered Pioneer Building Society in 1978, my only competitor was the East African Building Society. There was no other operating at that time,” he says as a matter of fact. East African Building Society was founded by the late Kenyan billionaire Lalit Pandit in 1959 under the Building Societies Act of 1956.
Mungai’s death leaves a bitter taste of injustice, given that he died before the battle for his vast estate was resolved.
PAYE Tax Calculator
Note: The results are not exact but very close to the actual.
