To one of the dominant political figures of 20th Century Britain and the country’s late female Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher, “there was no such thing as society”.
To the inspirational Jacqueline Novogratz, founder and CEO of non-profit venture capital fund, Acumen, who I recently saw at a Capital Club event in conversation with Safaricom supremo, Bob Collymore, and is helping to create lasting change, from the slums of Mumbai to the ramshackle huts of Nairobi, tackling poverty through instilling belief in the disbelieving, helping the helpless, collective prosperity means: “A sustainable world…working together to create prosperity for all.”
Novogratz’s thought-provoking comments got me thinking closer to home and an old Swahili proverb came to mind: “Unity is strength, division is weakness…”
Growing up as a young man in Nairobi, the values and importance of togetherness was always instilled in me. I didn’t just belong to the Macharia family, of our capital city via Nyeri, but I was a child of the Kenyan community at large.
Now, not unlike Thatcher’s mantra that divided millions in our old coloniser’s home country, we – Kenyans – have collectively held our hands up and said: “It’s not my problem.” For community-minded individuals, this is deeply worrying, as it means a spirit of individual achievement over collective prosperity.
As African business people, it is vital that we eradicate the tunnel vision that has the potential to create a glass ceiling for our accomplishments, such that they are limited to individual success. For, if all we aim for is solo endeavour that has no lasting impact on society, then we will never achieve true greatness. This has to be rooted in living a people-oriented life.
From our achievements to our relationships, from our emotions to our engagement with people, we have to choose to see things beyond Kenya. I may be the CEO of a pan-African ICT solutions company, called Seven Seas Technologies (SST) Group, but I am much more than that because I am engaged in Kenya’s challenges.
A case in point: I was humbled to chair a dynamic group of Kenyans as part of the Strategic Advisory Committee ahead of Kenya’s first ICT Innovation Forum recently, which has paved the way for the birth of Enterprise Kenya – an entity that will in the future create lasting impact. Together with some of the greatest minds from Kenya’s ICT sector and many others, we worked late nights and early mornings because I knew other people would benefit. The upshot is the Government has pledged to buy more local tech products and allocate funds to an entity that will help future generations.
My thinking dovetails with famous English poet John Dunne’s line: “no man is an island”. Those words, penned in the 17th Century, are just as true today as they were then.
Some of these ideas go a long way to answering centuries-old conundrums, such as: what is the meaning of life? Whatever the answers to such questions, surely love, and living a people-oriented life, are involved. This is the heartbeat of collective prosperity; after all, we are all living in the same ecosystem.
As a modern business leader, I have never perceived myself as a Kenyan entrepreneur, but an outward-looking, African one. Like I have distilled before, Kenya’s problems are Africa’s problems – power shortages, public health delivery, congested roads, unemployment, corruption and gut-wrenching poverty, all of these Big problems with a capital ‘B’ – and, if we can create solutions to these problems, then they become Africa’s solutions.
These are collective problems that we should all feel intensely.
You can see the mindset of collective prosperity when some of the world’s biggest nations do business overseas. When Chinese and Indian families go abroad, they go together. From the hugely successful Indian family businesses across the globe to China’s ever-growing tentacles in Africa, a bond, togetherness and solidarity are the cornerstones of their success. It is not just these major nations who live with this attitude; the same applies to Western companies, Governments and conglomerates.
Kenyans, and Africans more widely, could learn a thing or two from this philosophy; we need to embrace this style of doing business, this style of living, now.
Technology will play an instrumental role, too. One of my – and SST’s – mantras, is ICT: transforming lives, changing communities. It is happening slowly in Kenya. With a collective change in our mindsets, it will happen more quickly.
Sometimes, as human beings, we perceive an ‘otherness’ in people: like the child on-the-street, sniffing glue, has nothing to do with us; the woman who prostitutes herself because she sees no other viable avenue, is some otherworldy thing, whose grief is unimaginable.
I don’t know enough about their problems, their scarcity, because I am not a part of their world. But these people – and their fears and hopes and aspirations – are a part of my world. With a mindset that is driven towards collective prosperity, this can be a world in which hope wins out over hopelessness; in which a shared purpose beats individual glory; and a world in which problems become solutions.
I want to live in that world – and I believe you do, too.
A version of this article originally appeared in Kenya’s Daily Nation newspaper.
