Striking gold abroad

What do Benjamin Ndolo, John Njoroge, Mabel Marks, Gabriel Gatheru and David Karangu have in common? They are dollar millionaires outside Kenya and have been talking to JOHN KOIGI [[email protected]]Any talk of Kenyan excellence abroad invariably refers to long distance runners. However, the athletes’ earnings pale to the status of loose change compared with what their compatriots in real estate in the UK and car franchise holding in the US make — entrepreneurs who have attained success in a culture where self-made millionaires are more respected than Nobel laureates.

The tycoons were once ordinary folks who went abroad and, after painfully saving their meagre incomes from washing toilets, looking after the aged or tending flower gardens, made it in spite of rampant discrimination.
After two months of research, numerous international telephone calls and hundreds of e-mail exchanges, we pieced together the tale of Kenyans who have taken the capitalist challenge to the capitalists.
Meet the members of the forward ever, backward never league.
David Karangu
He has been interviewed on CNN as one of the most prominent black businessmen in the US car market.
David Karangu, 38, owns Kenya Auto Enterprises, an Augusta-based company which holds the Mercedes Benz franchise. Augusta is the second-largest luxury car market in the state of Georgia after state capital Atlanta.
Karangu's franchise operates under the name Kenya Auto Enterprises and employs over 100 people. Annual sales exceed $66 million (about Sh5 billion). His dealership is ranked 41 out of 100 in the US in a survey by Black Enterprise magazine. Kenya Auto Enterprises is also quoted in the Augusta Chronicle.
Growing up in Kenya in the 1970s, Karangu believed a Mercedes-Benz was the ultimate as far as cars go. Just how did he come to own an entire dealership?
It can be traced back to his days at Morgan State University, Baltimore, in the 1980s when General Motors came scouting for talent and he Ford as a manager. In 1997, a Ford dealership was offered for sale and Karangu, then only 30, seized the opportunity.
The dealership was earning approximately $10 million (Sh740 million) in sales annually. By 2003, reports Black Enterprise magazine, earnings had shot up to around $72 million.
Last July, Karangu bought the Mercedes dealership from Rader Inc., making it possible for him to sell the cars he had long adored. The dealership stocks between 120 and 150 brand new Mercedes Benz cars.
"Owning a Mercedes is like owning gold in Kenya, that's why it means so much to me," reports the Augusta Chronicle.
Born in Atlanta in 1967, Karangu came to Kenya when he was about five, but went back to the US when he was 17. He enrolled for a marketing course at Morgan University where his father was teaching.
John Njoroge
JP to his friends and business associates, John Njoroge became the talk of town after his company, JNP Properties, was granted a $7.1 million (Sh5 billion) loan by the Overseas Private Investment Corporation to put up 400 houses in Embakasi, Nairobi. The project is yet to begin.
Njoroge’s Texas-based company is valued at $450 million (Sh33 billion) and has an annual turnover of $27 million (Sh2 billion). JNP also has houses in Oklahoma, Georgia, Florida and Louisiana.
Njoroge went to the US in 1990 to study computer science at the University of Texas, and Thomas College in Maine. Fifteen years later, he boasts of a personal jet and a ranch.
Three years into college, he started the company, mainly buying and renovating apartments. It was a giant step toward fulfilling a lifelong dream sowed while he was a 19-year-old -student at the Kenya Power & Lighting Training School in Ruaraka on the outskirts of Nairobi.
JP first put Sh6,000 of his personal savings in a six room mud-house in Mathare Valley, which he rented out.
"I remember my closest friends, including one who is now an MP, referring to me as a slum-lord every time I took the monthly dip to the valley to collect the Sh150 a unit rent from my tenants." His thirst for more saw Njoroge buy his next property in Ruiru, when he was just 21.
In America, JP's first big break came in 1994, when he bought and renovated a 160-unit apartment valued at $14 million (Sh1 billion). But the going was tough at first. He had only $500,000 (Sh37 million) and needed a huge loan. Most of the banks he approached dismissed him. "But at the 15th stop, the Bank of Boston did listen," he recalls.
He named the property Henna Town Homes after an older sister who had helped pay his school fees. Njoroge, the son of a pastor and a housewife mother, grew up in Wangige, on the outskirts of Nairobi.
The essence of struggle was implanted early in his life, and he remembers selling eggs in the city centre to raise his high school fees at age16.
To connect with his motherland and provide a constant reminder of his roots, JP gives his properties Kenyan names such as Redhill, Outspan, Spring Valley, Tigoni Villas and Loresho.
Benjamin Ndolo
When he left Nairobi for Chicago, US, on New Year's eve, 1995, Ndolo had exhausted his options here.
Selling cars, brokering tenders, clearing imports and marketing the Nairobi Law Monthly had not worked.
His quest in the US was education but he set up The Benjamins Group. As he notes in his website (www.trendyinvesting.com), the company is "synonymous
with monetary success."
"I left for the States in search of greener pastures," he says. The Benjamins Group is said to be one of the fastest growing property business companies in Atlanta, with numerous residential and commercial units.
It's been a long walk to prosperity for this former Moi Forces Academy and St Mary’s student since he arrived in the US to "zero degree weather and lots of snow".
He trained in Information Technology at Roosevelt University, Chicago, and Chattahoochee Tech, Atlanta, and got different jobs in this field with several US companies.
In 1999, he was offered a job as a data analyst at Bellsouth, a phone giant in the South East. His salary? The equivalent of Sh3,000 per hour.
Working for different companies, he says, taught him a lot and gave him confidence to venture out on his own. Notable among these was Community Partnership Inc., a real estate development firm.
The biggest challenge Kenyans abroad face, he says, is gaining a sound financial starting point. "But with determination, hard work and the right decisions, anybody
can make it."
Gabriel Rwamba
Among the Kenya business people in the United Kingdom, he is revered for his entrepreneurial spirit. A former accountant with Coopers & Lybrand, Rwamba is the proprietor of Eulink Recruitment, a social care and nursing company with an annual turnover of more than £8 million (Sh1.12bn).
Rwamba 39, arrived at the UK in 1998 with £98 in his wallet.
I faced the usual problems other immigrants face. I couldn’t use my professional papers due to restrictions, which meant I couldn’t get any office work," he says.
Most employers in Britain require people with British experience, which Rwamba didn't have. "I was forced to take whatever came along, and these were mainly menial jobs. It was very depressing."
At one time he worked as a cleaner at a bakery, but never lost hope of landing a "real job". Eventually, he was employed at the Heathrow-based United Cargo Handling as a book-keeper on a monthly salary of £12,000 (about Sh1.4 million).
"That was the turning point in my life," he recalls.
Rwamba was later promoted to finance director, where, in his owns words, he oversaw the company's turnover grow from £0.3 million to over £10 million by the time he left in mid 1999.
So why did he quit? “I hated being under someone’s control,” he says.
In December 2000, he founded Eulink. The going was very difficult at first. "I did not let the hurdles discourage me. I worked tirelessly, utilising every available opportunity."
The contacts he had made as finance director at UCH came in handy. Now Eulink has branches in Manchester, Bedford, Luton, Bournemouth, Slough, Essex, Reading and Bristol.
"I have learned that work is work. The main mistake immigrants make is to fail to fit in the system. Some expect to be bank managers and accountants like they were back home, but this is far from reality," he says.
“The thing is to start low and move up… a do-it yourself approach is the recipe for success.” A father of two (Wairimu, 12, and Rwamba, 5) Rwamba lives in Worsely, Manchester.
Born in Othaya, Nyeri, Rwamba attended Kagumo and Alliance high schools. He studied economics at the University of Nairobi and obtained a Masters degree in
finance from Thames Valley University, London, in the course of his entrepreneurial adventures.
Rwamba is also the co-founder of Ease Move Estates Agency, which deals in property. His partner is a former Alliance schoolmate, Steven Kimemia. Does he intend to come back home? "I will certainly, at some point in future."
Mabel Marks
During her days as a teacher in Kilifi, it never occurred to Mabel Marks that she would one day own houses in the UK. Her Kimberley Group Housing Limited offers accommodation to estranged youth in the UK, with the city authorities footing the bill.
The company owns properties valued at more than £15 million (about Sh2 billion) in the UK and US.
These include 60 houses in the UK, eight acres of land in Bedfordshire, England, 10 apartments in Florida, USA, and another seven and a half acres of land in the US. Quite an achievement for the Kakamega-born Mabel Marks (maiden name Lusanji Muruli).
Aged 43, she first went to the UK in the early 1990s, after quitting teaching at Kikambala Primary School in Kilifi. She studied assertive skills, information and technology communication and English at North West London and University of Brunnel.
Mark’s dream, then, she says, was to continue teaching in the UK. "With hindsight, that must have been the biggest joke of my life."
She charted a different career course, working as an immigration advisor. It was while advising students and asylum seekers that the capitalist bug bit her. Her job entailed assessing the conditions in which the asylum seekers lived.
"My heart bled every time I saw the pathetic situation these young people had to live in with while those accommodating them were paid handsomely," she says.
Marks decided to challenge this by providing humane accommodation, a chance for education, medical health and social orientation.
She sought contracts from the local authorities to provide these services, thus Kimberley Group was born. That was in 2000.
To provide accommodation, she needed houses, so with her meagre savings, she bought her first property on mortgage.
The houses would multiply as her contracts were extended. Now, she caters for over 260 youngsters and 50 families.
She says that she learnt that the world's 1,000 wealthiest people made their riches through buying property and "we had to follow in their footsteps”.
Marks has over the past six years made a considerable fortune. Is she living her dream?
"Not yet! My next step is to own an airline. I want to provide a stress free, cheap and friendly service, particularly to Kenyans."
It hasn't always been smooth-sailing, though. Since the Kimberly Group relies on government contracts, she has had her applications turned down on purely racial grounds.
"It's always a bitter experience but never daunting enough to pin me down."
When she made her first million pounds (Sh132 million), she went on a shopping spree, buying anything that appealed to her. One day, she blew £8,000 (Sh1.12 million) on clothes, shoes, handbags and perfumes. "But I have outgrown that now."
Marks lives near the famous Wembley Stadium, "because my husband (Tim Marks) loves football."
The couple has three daughters, Kimberley (9) (after whom the company is named), Eleanor (6) and Annie Marie (4).