By Mbugua Ngunjiri
It all started in 1983. At the time, David Mwita was a humble teacher in Jumbi High School, in Muranga County, earning a paltry Ksh2,000.
That same year, he applied for and got a job as an education sales rep with Macmillan Publishers. In his new job, he would be earning sh5,000.
He only lasted a day at his new dream job! “This was early 1983 and the country was still recovering from the devastating effects of the 1982 attempted coup,” Muita told me in a past interview.
“The economy had been badly shaken and there was no way Macmillan would employ me.” To lessen the pain, Macmillan offered him two months’ pay in lieu of notice.
Luckily for him, the principal at Jumbi took him back with the intervention of TSC. A year later Macmillan called. They were now ready to employ him.
At Macmillan, he rose through the ranks to the position of managing director in 1990. In 2010, Muita bought off Macmillan and named the company Moran Publishers. Moran is one of the five biggest publishers in Kenya today. They are based at Juddah Complex, on Forest Road.
It was not easy for him though. They had put in several bids to buy out Macmillan but the bosses in the UK kept on rejecting the offers. That was not enough to put him down. He kept working for the company as if it was his own.
It was not easy for Macmillan to let go the Kenyan outfit, seeing as it was the most profitable of the branches in Africa.
More than anything else, Muita explains that it was his loyalty and years of dedicated service to Macmillan that swung the deal in his favour. “They had belief in our capability to successfully run the company after buying it from them,” he said.
Moran Publishers joined two other publishing houses that changed hands from multinational companies to locally owned entities. Henry Chakava led the way when, in the eighties, he wrested East African Educational Publishers from Heinemann Educational Publishers UK.
This was followed by the exit, from the Kenyan market, of Longman Publishers to be replaced by Longhorn Publishers. Oxford University Press therefore remains the only multinational to have avoided the wave of indigenization.
Moral of the story: Put in your best at your workplace, you might end up being the owner.