Some of them couldn’t afford the bus fare to get there. I remember that clearly. We had pulled together more than five hundred young Kenyans for a technology R&D project, “For Kenya, by Kenyans,” we called it. Most had come from places where a guaranteed meal was not something you assumed. They showed up with worn shoes and sharp eyes. On paper, they had nothing to bring except themselves.
That turned out to be more than enough.
Given real leadership and a problem worth solving, those young people built working IT systems from scratch, systems that went on to serve this country at the national level, replacing technology Kenya had been paying foreign companies to supply. Five hundred young Kenyans with empty pockets had out-built what money had been buying from outside our borders.
I have never forgotten that image.
Forty-five years of service in uniform, then in government, and I kept running into the same person. Different face, different county, different decade. But the same story: talented, willing, standing at the edge of a life they could almost touch. The door existed. The entry point did not. I watched, more times than I care to count, as the difference between a life that mattered and a life that was merely survived came down to one thing.
Not talent. Not intelligence. Not even opportunity, exactly.
Leadership.
Put the right leader in the room and that same young person, the one who scraped together bus fare, builds something a nation depends on. Take that away, and the same person disappears into the margins. The waste of it never stopped bothering me.
So, when the time came, I chose agribusiness deliberately.
Not because it is easy. Agribusiness is one of the most unforgiving sectors there is. I chose it because it is where most Kenyans earn their living. Where the stakes are real and the land does not lie to you. Where the gap between what we produce and what we are capable of producing is wide enough to drive a whole generation through. If you can form a leader in that environment, under market pressure, on difficult land, inside a value chain that punishes ignorance, you have formed a leader for keeps.
That is the conviction the Kameru Leadership Foundation grew from.
Not a theory. Not a programme sketched out in a conference room somewhere. Forty-five years of watching the same talent go to waste for the same reason, and a decision, finally, to do something about it. The talent has always been here. What it has always needed is someone willing to build the room where it can become what it already is.
