Six pioneers whose dreams gave Kenya a stock market

An investor monitors trade at the Nairobi Securities Exchange. FILE

By  Victor Juma and evelyn situma


IN SUMMARY
Limited education, humble beginnings and tough climbs did not kill their dream.


The late Francis Mwangi Thuo, Kenya’s first indigenous stockbroker, rose from a mere taxi driver to become synonymous with the Nairobi Stock Exchange — as it was earlier known.

Although he became one of the big names in the stock market, Mr Thuo had only two years of secondary school education because his parents could not afford fees.

Fate pushed him to Nairobi where he started running a taxi business while doing an accounting course by correspondence from a South African college.

Privately, he also pursued his secondary education which was disrupted again by the Mau Mau war of Independence which climaxed in 1953.

In 1955, Mr Thuo got an internship with an accounting firm before he was employed by a stock-broker. Here, his fascination with the stock market began and enrolled for a course at Makerere University College’s Extra-Mural Studies department in Nairobi.

“I even pinched files off the boss’ desk, read them at night, and returned them early in the morning,” he would years later admit.

Shortly after Independence, Mr Thuo plunged into stocks, becoming the first African to open a brokerage firm. “I thought my fellow Kenyans might feel freer to come to me.”

When he died in November 2006, former Cabinet minister Kenneth Matiba eulogised Mr Thuo as a person who helped him understand the intricacies of the stock market.

At the NSE, Mr Thuo’s firm was given a seat and joined some four other brokerage firms. They had no common floor and met for half an hour each day to review the 30 active stocks at The Stanley’s Exchange bar.

The stock market was born here in the 1950s when the NSE was registered under the Societies Act in 1954.

He advised big investors to spread out their investments through a number of stocks and small investors to put their money in big companies, what would be akin to insider trading today.

In 1983, Mr Thuo was elected the MP for Kigumo and served for two terms. As Thuo started ailing, things went awfully wrong at his firm. Some rogue employees took advantage to illegally sell clients’ stocks.

The company was suspended in 2007 and remained dormant until it was fully acquired by Equity Bank for an estimated Sh150 million.

Ngenye Kariuki

The story of Kenya’s vibrant stock market whose value has hit Sh1.9 trillion cannot be told without mentioning Ngenye Kariuki.