Eddy Njoroge is a darling in boardrooms

By John Njiraini

He is soft-spoken but extremely intelligent. He is calculatively down to earth and few might recognise him in a crowd on the streets as he projects a demeanour of a man minding his own business.

Within corporate circles, he’s one of the most celebrated corporate gurus, a manager who is highly respected and praised by his peers. He’s among the few corporate leaders who have the right political connections — with access to even the highest office on the land.

Because of this, companies are lining up to have him chair or sit on their boards.

Eddy Njoroge, the managing director of KenGen.

But why is Eddy Njoroge, the managing director of KenGen, a hotshot that every company wants to have him on their boards?

More critically, is Eddy as his friends like to call him, stretching himself beyond limits by agreeing to sit or chair the boards of many corporates cutting across sectors like energy, telecoms, insurance, financial to retail.

"I don’t think I am taking too much," he said recently when confronted with the question on whether he is chewing more than he can swallow.

A fortnight ago, France Telecom, which is the majority shareholder of Telkom Kenya, appointed Eddy as chairman of the loss-making local subsidiary with a brief to engineer a turnaround of the company and make it profitable in the next two years.

MAGICAL TOUCH

"The performance of Telkom Kenya has been below our expectations," said Michel Berre, France Telecom Vice President for East Africa.

He added: "We thought the company will have posted some profits but looks like it will take longer."

Mr Berre said that with Eddy at the top, Telkom Kenya expected the injection of new energy as well as immense corporate governance experience as the firm seeks its position in a market dominated by one operator.

By joining Telkom Kenya, Eddy’s already overflowing in-tray has new additions that require his magical touch.

This is because Eddy, who holds a Bachelor of Science degree from Makerere University, is already serving in the boards of many other companies.

Apart from being the managing director of KenGen, a company that many agree is a hallmark of proper management and visionary leadership, Eddy is also the chairman of the Nairobi Stock Exchange (NSE).

The 57-year-old is also a director of Stanbic Bank Kenya, Real Insurance Company (EA) Ltd and Proctor & Allan (EA) Ltd and sometime back resigned from the board of AccessKenya.

Eddy is also the President of the Union of Producers, Transporters and Distributors of Electric Power in Africa (UPDEA), Chair of the Kenyan Chapter of the World Energy Council as well as the chair of the investment committee of Aureos East Africa Fund, a Sh3.4 billion private equity fund.

LONG MEETINGS

So, how does he manage to juggle all these responsibilities?

For a man who emerged on the public scene after he agreed to take over the management of KenGen in 2003 – he had refused to take up the position because all his working life was in the private sector – Eddy is guided by three commandments.

The first one is time management, the second avoiding useless and long meetings and the third is delegating a lot of responsibilities.

"I am good in time management, I avoid lengthy and useless meetings and I also delegate a lot of responsibilities to train people and empower them to succeed," he said.

So far, this has worked perfectly for him as he can attend to KenGen as a fulltime Chief Executive Officer and juggle between boardrooms.

Most companies want Eddy on their board mainly because of two reasons.

The first and the most important is that Eddy is a savvy and transformational manager with vast experiences both at the management and board level.

Eddy’s record in KenGen speaks for itself. When he was appointed in 2003, Eddy was able to transform the profile of the company in three years, make it profitable and engineer its listing at the Nairobi Stock Exchange.

The IPO catapulted Eddy to the hallmark of few change managers in the country.

At some point, it even became hard to separate KenGen from Eddy and vice versa. But in 2009, Eddy was forced to state the two are separate when it emerged he was being investigated by the Kenya Anti Corruption Commission for graft allegations.