Jeremiah Kiereini: The Incomplete Autobiography

The other day, I was sitting in the office when a rather interesting phone call came through. The lady on the other end of the line was from East African Education Publishers, and she wanted to know whether I would be interested in receiving a copy of Jeremiah Kiereini’s autobiography. Of course I would love to have the book, I told her. The next day, a little wrapped package duly arrived.

I know you have heard the saying before, but this really is like waiting for a bus – you spend hours waiting for one, and suddenly four materialise at once. For decades, we complained that the old generation of Kenyan leaders was passing away before they could put their memoirs down, and a whole body of knowledge was literally dying before us. Now, however, there is a shelfload of books being written, which are helping to shed light on Kenya’s early years, and the varied personalities that populated the higher echelons of power. The quality of these books has been all over the place, with some of the early editions having been no more than glorified pamphlets. Now, however, we are starting to see some page-turners, and one hopes that the second, and even current, generation of leaders is keeping detailed diaries that will yield up historically useful tomes in the years to come.

Kiereini occupies an interesting place in the Kenyan pantheon. He has been a prominent presence in Kenya’s public and business life, yet is not quite part of the first-tier cohort occupied by such legendary names as Njonjo, Moi, Nyachae and Koinange. Younger readers, or those whose memories are beginning to fade, may only remember him for his board roles at CMC (the vehicle distributor) and EABL (the drinks company). He served both as chairman, but this only came after a near thirty-year career in the civil service, at the end of which he served as its boss.

I need to make two disclosures here, by the way. Kiereini and I share a middle name – Gitau (which does not necessarily mean that I will head the civil service or be in the business elite, but who knows?). Also, his granddaughter Njeri and I were members of the greatest school choir in Kenya’s history – the Lenana/ Precious Blood choir of 1992/93 (this is my column, so I have authorial rights to make such claims). She and I remain friends to this day.

Kiereini was among the class of Kenya’s leaders who progressively – and eventually simultaneously – occupied top positions in the civil service, business elite, and political life. This set, which included Kenneth Matiba, Charles Njonjo, John Michuki, Simeon Nyachae and many others, have settled into their positions as the ‘old money’ in Kenya, which is now becoming multi-generational, and which gives Kenyan capitalism some of its more interesting characteristics.

It is thus quite a disappointment that Kiereini’s memoirs (which he co-wrote with Mutu wa Gethoi) do not look more closely at this phenomenon. While he writes with a great deal of detail about his career in the civil service – especially the early years when Africans were replacing colonialists – he treats his business years very briefly, almost perfunctorily. We are treated to homilies that one would find in any management science book, which are not only colourless, but serve little purpose in helping us understand the way in which Kenyan business has changed over the decades.

An issue that would have benefitted from a lot more detail would have been Heri Limited, an investment vehicle founded by top civil servants in the mid-1970s to invest in multiple businesses. While Kiereini gives it short shrift, more details can be found in Charles Hornsby’s seminal ‘Kenya: A History Since Independence’. Heri, it turns out, counted among its investors Kiereini, Njonjo, Julius Gecau (who was, at the time, head of KPLC), Philip Ndegwa and Geoffrey Kariithi. Hornsby characterises Heri and companies such as the African Liaison and Consulting Services (Ben Gethi, James Kanyotu, Bruce McKenzie and Gecau, alongside Moi and Mwai Kibaki) as Kenya’s ‘security-political-executive complex’. That characteristic of Kenya’s corporate life continued into the Moi years, and to the present day, and by the 1980s, had become crony capitalism. Some argue that it stifles corporate development in Kenya and sometimes serves as a vehicle for corruption. An exploration of this, by one of its leading practitioners, would have been a very useful addition to the Kenyan canon.

But this book’s biggest failing is Kiereini’s almost total lack of exploration of the CMC crisis from two years ago. Apart from a ‘public statement’ appended to the back of the book (and which seems to have been drafted with significant input from lawyers), the saga is not explored at all in the book. It was momentous to his career, since it saw Kiereini at one point banned by the Capital Markets Authority from holding any board position in public companies. The cursory, almost absent way Kiereini treats this chapter of his life is one that will mean his memoirs are incomplete.

It is, despite these shortcomings, quite a gripping read, and one hopes that the big one – Charles Njonjo’s – is the next one on our shelves. That one would be a rip-roaring tome, and, one hopes, it will embrace all the warts. Including the CMC one.

Also published in the Business Daily on 26 August 2014, at http://www.businessdailyafrica.com/Opinion-and-Analysis/The-autobiography-of-Jeremiah-Kiereini/-/539548/2430326/-/3hdfq5z/-/index.html