Protecting Kenya’s heritage: The case for Asahi’s EABL offer

First, the place of EABL in Kenya and indeed East Africa’s stock market should be viewed with more than the legal and administrative considerations that the fund managers cite.

It would also be useful to consider the Fund Managers Association’s motive: is their lobbying motivated by the interests of a small group of elite shareholders, who may not appreciate the value of EABL’s cherished heritage?

Established in 1922 by the Hurst brothers and Henry Dowding, the company decided to go regional in 1933, barely a decade after it had stabilised its operations. It established Tanganyika Breweries in 1933 and in 1959, acquired Uganda Breweries Limited, and became a truly East African company, one of Kenya’s first multinationals.

EABL has been a mainstay of the Nairobi Securities Exchange since the exchange’s formal establishment in 1954, when trading was moved from The Exchange Bar at The Stanley Hotel to a more formal establishment.

These beginnings point to the distinctly local identity of EABL. From early on, its flagship brands were deliberately woven into local events, tastes, and identity markers.

Tusker became synonymous with Kenyan pride; Uganda Breweries’ portfolio mirrored local tastes; in Tanzania, the brewery roots remained tied to national industrial history. EABL has consistently churned out a procession of top professionals in management, sales and operations.

Even as its ownership has changed over time, EABL is not a foreign conglomerate but a homegrown champion of East African enterprise, bringing the best from around the world to East Africa and growing talent and skills here.

Over more than 100 years, the company’s roll of shareholders has transformed from the colonial settlers who first bought into the idea in 1933 when it went public to include ordinary men and women from the countryside who saw in its leadership their own children.

Read: Kenya’s next industrial revolution will be built on scale

In the 1960s and 1970s, formal equity ownership in Kenya was concentrated among expatriates, multinational corporations, settler families, and a small African elite. The Nairobi Securities Exchange (then the Nairobi Stock Exchange) was relatively small, thinly traded, and not widely accessible to rural populations.

One of the endearing stories told is how, after he left the civil service, joined EABL, rose to become the CEO and later went into national leadership, Kenneth Matiba encouraged his constituents in Kiharu, Murang’a, to invest in the company’s stock.

This diversity is visible at EABL’s annual general meetings to date. Among the company’s most transformative projects was the making of Senator Keg in a unique collaboration that catered to categories of consumers who had previously been exposed to illicit alcohol.

With roughly 35 percent of its shares actively trading on the Nairobi Securities Exchange, EABL remains one of the exchange’s longest-standing and most valuable stocks. Its presence is not just historical but vital. Counters like EABL provide stability, liquidity, and investor confidence, forming a backbone for the market.

With Asahi Group expressing its keenness to grow the company, preserve its heritage, and keep it listed, should we be asking the investor to buy out the shareholders who have been part of the company for decades and effectively lock them out of that growth and all that it brings? Should we be asking the Capital Markets Authority to enforce takeover rules rather than looking into Asahi’s own heritage and experience in other markets where they have bought into local companies?

Asahi has been categorical about preserving the company’s governance so that the interests of the minority are not jeopardised, and as Kenyans, we should therefore focus on the value and opportunities Asahi will bring, rather than pushing a foreign investor to pay more, only to risk the delisting of a heritage company.

The writer is former CEO of the Nation Media Group