BETHWEL Mareka Gecaga, who has died aged 96, was the ultimate boardroom operative of his generation in this country, and will long be remembered as one of the foremost icons of the Kenyan corporate sector. His family and corporate connections and networks were of the first water.
When it comes to combining the pursuit of education and excellence, the immediate and extended family of which BM Gecaga is the patriarch has few peers in all Kenyan communities.
He was of the same age as that other nonagenarian and anglophile, Charles Mugane Njonjo, Kenya’s first African Attorney General, who bestrode both the political and corporate worlds. But Gecaga never relished the public limelight, preferring to be a behind-closed-doors boardroom operative for much of his long life.
The son of a pioneer teacher, the late John Mareka Gecaga 1879-1979, BM Gecaga headed the University of Nairobi Governing Council for 16 years 1970-1996.
In 1960 he published ‘A Short Kikuyu Grammar’ with William Hay Kirkaldy-Willis. Dr Kirkaldy-Willis was a self-taught orthopaedic surgeon who went on to become the head of orthopaedics at the University Hospital of Saskatchewan in Alberta, Canada.
Gecaga was an alumnus of the Alliance High School ( 1937 ), Makerere, and the Inns of Court (Middle Temple), where he was called to the English Bar as a barrister in 1956.
After Independence, Gecaga, who had married Jemimah, a sister of Dr Njoroge Mungai, Mzee Jomo Kenyatta’s relative and physician, in the 1940s, came to head both BAT and the Nation Media Group for three decades. He was General Manager and later Chairman of BAT in the period 1967 to 1995. At the Nation, he served as chairman of the full Board until 2000. He was succeeded by Hannington Awori.
Gecaga also headed the boards of the Industrial Development Bank, Commercial Bank of Africa and Kenya Airways. He had many top club memberships for many decades, including in the United Kenya Club as long ago as 1951, on the eve of the State of Emergency in the racially segregated Kenya Colony.
In his own quiet style, without going to the forests, the barricades or prison, Gecaga contributed to the struggle for Independence. The UKC had a multiracial constitution and membership even before the State of Emergency.
As Julius Simiyu Nabende noted in his 1990 MA thesis ‘The History of the United Kenya Club, 1946 to 1963 (UoN)’: “Although the objectives of the club were socio-cultural and recreational, the club participated in the politics of decolonization from 1946 to 1963. The club was challenging the colour bar and racial prejudice by virtual of its multiracial constitution. It also hosted politics of racial bargaining for power among the three races [European, Asian and African].”
Gecaga has died the patriarch of a family of high achievers and corporate leaders. His son Udi Mareka Gecaga, an alumna of Alliance, Princeton, Oxford and the Sorbonne, became Chairman of Lonrho Africa in the period 1973-80. The British multinational was founded and headed by Rowland Tiny Rowland, who was anything but “tiny”, and the friend of African presidents across the continent, including President Jomo Kenyatta.
The towering Tiny had a habit of asking African presidents to nominate the chairmen of his conglomerate’s branches in their own territories. But even without State House endorsement, Udi was outstandingly qualified. He was succeeded by Mark Too, President Daniel arap Moi’s ‘Mr Fix-it”, for head of the Nairobi-based Lonrho East Africa, after the change of guard at State House following Mzee’s death.
Udi was married to Jeni Wambui, a daughter of Mzee Kenyatta’s. Udi and Jeni are the parents of President Uhuru Kenyatta’s Private Secretary Jomo Gecaga, an Old Etonian, and his two sisters Soiya and Nana. The late Gecaga is their grandfather.
Soia is an alumna of the Phillips Academy of Andover Massachusetts, the University of St Andrews Scotland and the College of Law London. She is the founder of the We Are the Change Foundation. Nana, the currently the CEO of the Kenyatta International Convention Centre, is an alumna of the Cushing Academy of the US and runs her own PR firm, Bora Ubora.
Their grandmother Jemimah, who died in 1979 at age 59, was twice a nominated legislator in two very different decades and administrations – she was the first African woman nominee to the Legislative Council (the LegCo, 1907-1963 in 1958, making her Kenya’s first woman MP. She was also a founder member of the Maendeleo ya Wanawake Organisation.
When Jemimah’s brother, the then Foreign minister and Presidential physician- confidant, Dr Njotoge Mungai, lost his Dagoretti South parliamentary seat to Dr Johnstone Muthiora at the Third General Election in 1974, she became a nominated MP in 1975, a seat she vacated for him two years later.
BM Gecaga was well connected throughout his long and illustrious life and his close association with Jomo Kenyatta endured so long that he lived to see his grandson Jomo become Private Secretary to the Fourth President, Mzee Kenyatta’s son Uhuru.
This pioneering corporate icon and top member of Kenyan high society’s funeral will be a gathering of the Central Kenya, and other regional, elites of several generations – including at least one generation that, outside the Kenyatta and Gecaga families, has no recollection whatever of the patriarch.
Read: Uhuru eulogises businessman Bethuel Gecaga as true patriot