The Great Boardroom Cleanup

Good evening 👋🏽. It's Brian from The Kenyan Wall Street. 

In today’s newsletter, Kenya’s listed companies have been playing fast and loose with shareholder rights, and the CMA just caught them in the act…

This and more stories…

The Great Boardroom Cleanup 

By Harry Njuguna

Listed companies in Kenya have learned to behave, pushing their corporate governance score to a record 78.88%, the highest in eight years and firmly within the Capital Markets Authority’s (CMA) “Leadership” tier. The improvement, however, was less a flowering of virtue than a response to compulsion, as the 2023 regulations forced firms to redraw their boards, strip “independent” directors of convenient fictions, and comply with the law rather than merely gesture toward it. 

For years, listed companies in Kenya have performed a quiet sleight of hand, shifting decisions meant for shareholders into the safer, more controllable confines of the boardroom. The Capital Markets Authority now suggests that what passed for governance was, in part, a choreography of exclusion. Annual General Meetings rushed, questions deferred, and “independent” directors who were independent mostly in name. The effect was subtle but material: the people who owned these companies were systematically distanced from the levers meant to protect them. Even now, the regulator stops short of naming offenders, leaving investors to wonder whether the breach is an abstraction or something closer to home. 

Read about it here >>>>>

Flying Gets Expensive Again

By Fred Obura

Air travel is slipping into improvisation, as shrinking flight schedules and rising fares unsettle the rhythm of movement in and out of Kenya. The disruptions begin far from Jomo Kenyatta International Airport (JKIA) over contested airspace and tense corridors in the Middle East, but arrive locally as longer routes, fewer seats, and the quiet inflation of ticket prices. Airlines, pressed between rerouting costs and a near doubling of jet fuel prices, have begun passing the burden along with little ceremony, turning the price of distance into something newly punitive. What had felt like a steady recovery in global aviation now looks more fragile, its progress contingent on a geopolitical calm that seems out of reach.

Read the full article here >>>>>

A Brief Respite for the Market

By Harry Njuguna

After five bruising sessions, the Nairobi Securities Exchange (NSE) finally caught a breath, clawing back KSh 62.7 billion in market capitalization. The bounce was narrow, led by banking stocks that reversed only a fraction of their prior week’s losses. Trade volumes sagged, hinting that the recovery was more a sigh of relief than a rush of conviction. Foreign investors, undeterred, continued to sell, using the rebound as an exit ramp rather than a signal of confidence. In a market dominated by its top five counters, the rally felt less like a broad revival and more like a fleeting technical pause in an uneasy global landscape.

Read the full week 13 market analysis here >>>>>

INTERVIEW : Egidio Monteiro, CEO DHL Global Forwarding, Sub-Saharan Africa On Connecting Africa’s Growth

By Chelsy Maina

In an interview with The Kenyan Wall Street, CEO DHL Global Forwarding, Sub-Saharan Africa - Egidio Monteiro says Africa’s trade problem is not a lack of ambition but a surfeit of friction where goods that should glide instead stall at borders, ports, and paper trails. The vision of seamless continental commerce, enshrined in frameworks like African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA), remains aspirational, slowed by the stubborn reality of uneven customs systems and disconnected infrastructure. What emerges is a logistics network that behaves less like a system than a series of interruptions, where visibility is partial and efficiency negotiated case by case. The future, if it arrives, will depend not on grand declarations but on the quieter work of stitching corridors together: digitally, physically, and, perhaps most difficult of all, politically.

Read the full interview here »»»»»

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