Naivas (Kenya): They Kept the Business by Giving Up the Company
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They kept the business by giving up the company — and the one time they refused, it cost them Walmart.
In 1990 a young man inherited a general store from his uncle. Today it is the largest supermarket chain in Kenya, and the founding family owns forty-nine per cent of it.This is the story of what that family sold, and when. A will that handed the company to the four children who worked in it, and the older stores to the son who did not. A court injunction in 2013 that stopped a deal with Walmart's African arm. Thirty-one and a half per cent to a consortium of private-equity and development-finance investors in 2020, forty per cent to aMauritius-led group in 2022, and in 2023 the shares that took that group to fifty-one per cent — and with them, control. In 2025 the chief executive's chair went to someone who is not family at all, and the reason the outgoing managing director gave, publicly, was his own brother's fourteen-year lawsuit.
