Maina Gikonyo does not stand out in a crowd, but when the top management at Kenya Breweries Limited meets him, they treat him with a certain measure of respect, even reverence.

They have very good reasons to pay attention to the grey-haired man. He is the Managing Director of Rwathia Distributors, the oldest and one of the biggest alcohol beverage distributors in Kenya.

For the last 15 years, Maina has led the operations of the distributor serving bars, restaurants and hotels within Nairobi’s Central Business District and the area around Pumwani, Kariokor and Ngara.

Rwathia Distributors is based in a large compound on Quarry Road in Pumwani, a few metres from the Kariokor Muslim Cemetery. The warehouses were built with beer in mind: the columns are shaped like beer bottles with the cornices on the pillars shaped like bottle tops.

Maina serves at the behest of a Board of Directors whose chairman is Gerald Gikonyo Kanyuira, his father, who clocked a century this year. Gerald is a sort of an eccentric, snuff-taking old man who operates from a hotel in the CBD, one of many properties owned by the Rwathia Group, and has lived on the firm belief that he did not need a house in the leafy suburbs as long as he had property in the city.

Gerald is the last of a group of men who came to Nairobi from Rwathia, a location in Kangema, Murang’a, right before Independence looking to make money. They started by establishing businesses in the African locations of the city – Eastlands and Pumwani hawking vegetables in the Asian quarters.

From hawking, they went into retail shops and then restaurants and when opportunities to do commerce in the emerging Central Business District opened up after Independence, built commercial buildings. The group now owns a number of notable buildings in the city centre: Magomano Hotel,   Hotel, Timboroa Hotel, Alfa Hotel and Rwathia Distributors, and a string of bars, restaurants and nightclubs.

Rwathia is a big location, and the investments were made by members of clans or families who would entrust a number of individuals with their money. “You’d find that a business like Rwathia Distributors has around 400 shareholders, but each group was brought by a certain person from their village who would be trusted to collect money, even from villagers, and as little as KShs50 or KShs100 to come and invest their money for them,” Maina explains.

Rwathia is not therefore, strictly speaking, a family business, but has been admired for the way the founders created a formidable range of enterprises that has stood firm without its tussles spilling over into the public.

Even as the founders grew old, says Maina, they brought their offspring into the businesses to learn by a form of apprenticeship how they were run. Maina himself joined the business in 1995 soon after coming back home from studies in the United States.

“When I came to Rwathia, I was the youngest director at the time. Most of them were our parents and they were quite advanced in age. Some of them have since passed on and only one is left, my father,” Maina says.

He is now the only one in the family who is in the upper echelons of management, along with his father, the chairman of the board. Maina landed at Rwathia almost by default as he had come back to Kenya in 1990, at a time the economy was on a downward trend, with economic growth at 2.2 percent and reducing, and an economic depression that had been brought on by a severe drought, high inflation and the suspension of foreign aid.

While he had hopes that things would improve with the imminent change of government with the advent of multi-party democracy, that was nearly a decade away, he was encouraged to seize any opportunities that came his way. “Jobs were not easy to come by. It was easy for me to become convinced to come into the existing businesses and try to help the older parents and directors as they aged,” says Maina.

Managing the relationships between the generations has been fairly easy as the fathers were more than willing to let their sons into the business and they recognized the shortcomings they had, chief of which was the lack of formal education.

“I can imagine that they saw something lacking in themselves, a void that we came and filled up. The younger generation has always felt appreciated when they came into the businesses and true to form, we have been able to instill a level of sophistication that was difficult for them,” says Maina.

At the beer distributor, this has been in the form of software to manage stocks better, among them a system developed with the help of East African Breweries Limited that helps with that aspect. The caliber of staff employed now are different from that at the time they started the business. One of the biggest successes over the years, Maina says, has been the use of systems and trained staff to run the business.

Before the modernization of the business, the salesmen were the truck drivers, and all they would do is drive to the bars and offload the products. Now, they go in, collect data and keep tabs on how the bars are doing.

Maina has also overseen the growth of the distributor’s territory from Kamukunji, Pumwani, Shauri Moyo and Eastleigh to the whole of the CBD and Upper and Lower Ngara. The number of trucks that ply the routes now stands at 14 from an original five in 1995.

Working with the manufacturer, the distributor also supports the businesses they serve with promotions, campaigns, staff training and sometimes getting banks to give them credit to finance growth.

While they have navigated other storms, the COVID-19 pandemic has hit the businesses the hardest as social distancing and restrictions on gatherings left bars and restaurants closed and hotels empty. Staff were laid off as the trucks that distribute to the 600 bars in Rwathia’s territory remained parked in the yard.

At the time of the interview, business had picked up somewhat, spurred by the emergence of the cash-and-carry model of sales as opposed to the traditional model of service in bars or restaurants, known in the industry as on-trade. The going was not yet good, though, as only 180 bars, less than a third of the 600 in their territory, had reopened.

COVID-19 aside, Rwathia Distributors’ future is dependent on a variety of factors, from Maina’s point of view, as it is part of an industry that is perpetually targeted for tax increases by the Treasury.

Currently, Excise Duty on alcoholic beverages increases every year, “and this will not change in a long time.” He also shares the concern of others in the alcoholic beverages sector who are worried about the impact of parallel import of high-end spirits without paying duty while riding on the advertising that others have invested in.

Maina hopes that just like those of his generation who joined the business, the third generation of the Rwathia group of companies will join them and bring in new ideas and ways of running the enterprise.

The Rwathia group has also deemed it fit to go beyond the original investment direction, Maina says. “We have realized that in this business, we probably cannot depend on the alcohol trade for a very long time. We have started diversifying so that we don’t put all our eggs in one basket,” he says.

They now supply the Kenya Defence Forces, have contracts in six counties for the Last Mile electricity connection project, and a project to install smart meters for the Nairobi City Water and Sewerage Company.

Given the large number of original investors and the fact that some of them were polygamous, some of the third generation Rwathia investors are people his age while others are much younger. It might be difficult to predict with any accuracy how the Rwathia Group will go but theirs will certainly be one of the most notable stories in the history of Nairobi.