Local investors: The builders Kenya cannot afford to lose

There is an old proverb that says a village that burns its own granary will go hungry regardless of how good the harvest was.

Kenya is enacting that proverb in real time. The granary, in this case, is the domestic private capital that is quietly financing roads, stadiums, military homes, farms, and hotel beds that hold this economy together. And the fire is the narrative we keep setting around the people who built it.

This week, business headlines were dominated by another story connecting a Kenyan entrepreneur to state infrastructure contracts, framed through the familiar lens of political proximity and the geometry of accumulated enterprise. The implication, as always, was clear: if a Kenyan builds something large, something must be wrong. 

Meanwhile, a Chinese firm completed another road. A French consortium was shortlisted for an energy project. A British-linked fund quietly received an advisory role on a national asset.

Nobody ran the shareholding charts. Nobody mapped the political connections. Nobody asked who knew whom in Beijing, Paris, or London. We reserved that scrutiny, as we always do, for our own. We do it with a thoroughness we have never once applied to foreign capital operating on the same soil under the same legal framework. 

Kenya’s infrastructure financing gap is not a secret. The government’s own medium-term debt management strategy acknowledges that public financing alone cannot deliver the infrastructure this country needs at the pace it needs it. The World Bank estimates Kenya’s annual infrastructure deficit in the billions of dollars.

The only viable bridge is private capital, specifically patient, long-horizon, risk-tolerant private capital that does not exit at the first sign of turbulence. The Kenyan-owned enterprises being scrutinised this week are not paper companies assembled for a single contract.

They span agri-business, hospitality, logistics, media, floriculture, insurance, manufacturing, and financial services. Remember, these enterprises hold land; they operate farms that feed thousands of Kenyan families directly and indirectly through the value chain.

The employment creation is immense. They run hotels that train Kenyan professionals. They move goods through supply chains that employ Kenyan drivers, clerks, and warehouse managers.

They run Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) initiatives that are changing the lives of the communities they operate in. They participate in environmental conservation through tree planting exercises.

They are among Kenya’s largest private sector employers, with a combined payroll that remits Pay As You Earn (PAYE), Social Health Authority (SHA), National Social Security Fund (NSSF), and pension contributions across multiple counties every single month without interruption.  When enterprises of this scale invest in a national stadium or a military housing programme, the returns stay in Kenya. The jobs go to Kenyans. The taxes go to the Exchequer.

The supply chains feed Kenyan businesses up and down the value chain. That is not a scandal. That is precisely what a developmental private sector is supposed to look like, and it is exactly what Kenya’s Public-Private Partnerships (PPPs) framework was designed to catalyse. 

The framework exists precisely to mobilise private capital for national infrastructure that the government cannot finance alone. The PPP Act and its 2021 amendments created the legal architecture to make this work.

The National Treasury’s PPP Directorate carries oversight responsibility. Projects of the scale being discussed this week have moved through those legal and regulatory structures. 

Policymakers face a choice that cannot be deferred indefinitely. Either Kenya deliberately builds a domestic capital class large enough and confident enough to finance its own development, or it remains permanently dependent on external financing, external expertise, and external ownership of its most critical national assets.

Those two futures are not compatible. You cannot celebrate foreign direct investment on Monday and question domestic private investment on Tuesday and expect either to keep showing up at the table with serious money and serious commitment. 

The right accountability question is never who owns the enterprise. It is whether procurement was followed, whether the project is being delivered, and whether Kenyan workers are employed. On all three counts, the public record on the projects in question points in one direction. 

Here is what never makes the front page. These same enterprises run corporate social responsibility programmes across every country where they operate. They fund classroom construction and school infrastructure in rural communities.

They support smallholder farmers through training, market access, and agricultural extension work that no government programme has reached consistently. They build the next generation of Kenyan professionals in hospitality management, logistics operations, and financial services.

Their community investment is not a branding exercise. It is the sustained, unglamorous work of enterprises that understand their commercial licence to operate is inseparable from the well-being of the communities that surround them.  Behind every conglomerate is a payroll.

Thousands of Kenyans are in hotel kitchens, on working farms, in logistics depots, and in corporate offices. These are not abstractions. They are school fees paid on time, rent met at the end of the month, and retirement contributions building quietly toward a dignified old age.

When the narrative around an enterprise becomes toxic enough, lenders grow cautious, partners renegotiate, and the people who pay the price are not the executives in the boardroom. They are the workers at the gate who had no role in any of it. 

Scrutiny must be applied with consistency to mean anything at all. A framework that reserves its sharpest questions exclusively for Kenyan-owned enterprises while extending comfortable silence to foreign capital doing the same work under the same laws is not accountability. It is a competitive disadvantage to wear the costume of public interest journalism. 

Kenya will not be built by foreign capital, waiting for this country to prove itself. It will be built by local capital that provides the proof. The honest question worth sitting with is whether we are willing to protect that capital with the same conviction we bring to scrutinising it.

Media houses should be advocating for such great enterprises to access things like the introduction of tax incentives for resource-efficient protein production, sufficient support for agribusiness, and market incentives for eco-friendly practices.

It’s time we move away from the tactical hell of attacking our local enterprises and instead operate from a position of strategic heaven. 

A nation that marginalises its domestic builders and talent suppresses internal leadership and inevitably compromises its sovereign state. Becoming dependent on foreign governance while gradually normalising its own loss of self-determination.

- The writer is a human-centred strategist and leadership columnist