It is rare to hear about Muhoho Kenyatta, the younger brother of former President Uhuru Kenyatta and the quiet pillar behind the commercial dynasty built by Kenya’s founding president.
It is even rarer to hear from the youngest son of Kenya’s founding President Jomo Kenyatta and former First Lady Mama Ngina—and when his name surfaces, it is usually because something significant is unfolding within the Kenyatta business empire.
This time, the extraordinary event that thrust Muhoho into the limelight was the acquisition of a controlling 66 percent stake in NCBA Group, where the Kenyattas have a significant interest, by South African financial services provider Nedbank Group.
It emerged that Mr Muhoho, 61, is the top individual shareholder in NCBA Group, with 227.3 million shares currently valued at about Sh20 billion, making it the largest disclosed personal fortune on the Nairobi Securities Exchange (NSE).
Muhoho’s interest in NCBA—which will see him earn a dividend of Sh1.6 billion for the year ended December 2025—dwarfs other disclosed NSE fortunes, including banking stakes held by other billionaires. He holds the NCBA shares directly and indirectly through investment vehicles.
His interest of 227.3 million shares in NCBA suggests that the wider Kenyatta family could have an even larger stake in the lender, with most of the holdings spread across multiple investment vehicles.
The Kenyatta family has long been associated with Enke Investments, which holds 217.4 million shares in NCBA, equivalent to a 13.2 percent stake. Previous disclosures indicated that Muhoho directly owned 12.7 million shares worth Sh1.1 billion. Mr Muhoho is a director at Enke and recently joined the board of NCBA.
But Muhoho’s firm hand in Kenyatta Inc. goes beyond NCBA.
Indeed, if Uhuru is the face of the Kenyatta family, Muhoho is its heart, tirelessly working to ensure the continuity of a dynasty that has grown from a largely land-based empire into interests spanning banking, hospitality, real estate, media and milk processing that generate billions of shillings in annual returns.
Mr Muhoho is at the heart of the Kenyatta family’s vast estate, which includes a chain of hotels under the umbrella of Heritage Hotels. He is one of the directors of Heritage Hotels.
He is also a director of 14 other companies, including Brookside Africa, Ilara Dairy and Brookside Dairy Limited, which are involved in dairy processing.
Other Kenyatta companies where Muhoho is a director include Greenhut Investments, CBA Property Holdings, Northlands, Kipungani Lamu, Gleenlee Company, Sukarii Development, Loops DFS, Serengeti Investments and Gicheha Farms.
After graduating with a degree in economics and political science from the prestigious Williams College, Massachusetts, in the US, Muhoho joined the family businesses, mostly involved in farming and real estate development in the 1970s and 1980s, but which he is credited with deliberately converting into corporates and disposing of the farms.
He helped found Brookside Dairies Ltd in 1993, which has since become the market leader in milk processing and dairy products in Kenya and the region, expanding its hold through a series of acquisitions of rivals in recent years.
Among the acquisitions, which have at times raised eyebrows over the effects of excessive concentration and dominance by a few players, are the Ilara, Delamere, Molo Milk and Kilifi brands.
Those who know him say the father of three—two daughters and a son—is a gentle soul who works 12 to 14 hours a day, often leaving his office at Brookside Dairies Ltd headquarters in Ruiru after 10pm. A huge leak of financial papers dubbed Pandora Papers indicated that Kenyatta family secretly owned a network of offshore companies for decades.
They linked to 13 offshore companies, with one associated with Mr Muhoho having a $30m (Sh3.9 billion) valuation in stocks and bonds as of November 2016, according to the BBC.
Although he might not come off as a political animal like his father and brother, he has on several occasions exchanged his corporate cap for a political one whenever the fortunes of the family have been threatened.
As Uhuru stared at the prospect of imprisonment in The Hague after being indicted by the International Criminal Court over alleged crimes against humanity during the post-election violence, Muhoho was recalled from the family business empire to coordinate the local and international legal research and defence strategy aimed at clearing his brother of the charges.
Saving his brother—and consequently his family’s name as well—also entailed ensuring Uhuru became Kenya’s fourth president.
Thus, he would later play a decisive backroom role in the acquisition, refurbishment and branding of The National Alliance party (TNA) and in providing backend operations for the TNA-United Republican Party (URP) coalition campaigns during the 2013 General Election from the Chancery offices on Nairobi’s Valley Road.
Uhuru, together with fellow ICC indictee William Ruto, would later win the 2013 General Election as President and Deputy President respectively.
Years later, when cracks emerged in the relationship between Uhuru and his deputy Ruto, now President, Muhoho was widely rumoured to have played a key backroom role in brokering the famous March 9 “handshake” between the then Head of State and former Prime Minister Raila Odinga.
But it is in business that Muhoho is at his best.
He is a strict timekeeper, methodical and does not entertain time-wasting during working hours, even from his children.
How does he relate with his big brother? “They are very tight. Muhoho often plays the master of ceremonies at family functions and respects his brother a lot,” someone close to Muhoho was quoted saying in a past Daily Nation article.
From his earliest days, a former childhood friend recalls, he always wanted to be a farmer and would say so to anyone who would listen.
“When children rattled off their list of wishes, Muhoho never hesitated to make it clear he wanted to be a farmer. We are not surprised he has become so successful and passionate about it,” commented a family friend who knew him from childhood.
