Michuki made his mark in business

By any yardstick, John Michuki was a tycoon. The flagship of the business empire he has left behind is the exclusive and victoria-style Windsor Golf Club.

With most of his wealth under the private investment firm — Fairview Investments Ltd — calculating his net worth is not easy.

But he is easily one of the biggest land owners in Nairobi. The land which he owns around the location of Windsor Golf Club alone is estimated to be 500 acres.

Property development

Fairview Investments — which owns Cargen House in Nairobi’s central business district — is also involved in property development.

With the on-going rehabilitation and expansion of Thika Road, property prices in the area have hit the roof.

Clearly, Michuki’s net worth is in the billions of shillings. So how did he manage to acquire so much wealth?

Mr Michuki belongs to the generation of educated Kenyans who left school and took up big jobs in the civil service.

He became permanent secretary to the Treasury in 1964, one of the first Africans to hold this influential position.

A pampered lot of Kenyans, Michuki — like his peers, among them Mr Kenneth Matiba — became permanent secretaries at a tender age.

He became permanent secretary at the age of 32. In those days, the office of the permanent secretary to the Treasury had wide discretionary powers.

Access to rent-seeking opportunities came from power and influence over administration of price control regime, import licensing and rationing, and the foreign exchange allocation committee.

Indeed, holding a top job in the public sector was a very lucrative thing in the immediate post-independence period.

As permanent secretary for Finance, you sat on boards of several key parastatals.

In the name of the policy of Africanisation, several development financial institutions were created to nurture the entry of locals into big business through subsidised credit.

Michuki also served as the chief executive of the Kenya Commercial Bank.

State controlled institutions extended cheap credit to top civil servants and the political elite of the day to buy property left behind by Kenya Asians leaving the country after being given quit notices.

The regime of President Jomo Kenyatta presided over an extensive spoils system, allocating land and coffee farms formerly belonging to white settlers to top civil servants and cronies of the President, excising public forests and giving it away on the basis of loyalty.