Kenya is a market-based economy with a liberalised external trade system and a couple of state enterprises with significant agriculture, forestry, fishing, mining, manufacturing, energy, tourism and financial services developing slowly.
With this, one would have imagined that the number of tycoons in the country would have been good but not extremely high. However, this is an alternate story.
A recent 2020 wealth report by Property Management firm, Knight Frank shows that Kenya has 2,900 dollar tycoons with forty two (42) people worth $30 million or more, yet none in the class of dollar-billionaire.
Despite the fact that Kenya’s neighbor Tanzania produced increasingly millionaires, Nairobi has kept on extending its lead as the region’s biggest economy – most recent data from the International Monetary Fund (IMF). With per capita income of $957 starting at 2018, Tanzania is seen by the World Bank as a poor nation.
That said, the intriguing part of this is that, Kenya which has per capita income of $1202 is arranged as a low-middle income country. Kenya, which has had an ideal run growing its dollar-moguls, experienced a significant slow down in 2019.
Per the report, Kenya’s intense financial condition saw six Kenyans drop out of the extremely rich people’s club. High net worth people who are worth million of dollars additionally decreased during this period of 2018 where it dropped from 3,399 to 499.
In 2019, the benchmark file for the 20 best performing counters at the Nairobi Securities Exchange, dropped by 6.3 percent contrasted with the earlier year. An engrossing part of this is, Tanzania millionaires moved into Kenya and were reported to have purchased 7,000,000 shares of Equity Group worth millions, making their investments in Kenyan firms recorded at the NSE huge.
Firms in which the Tanzania billionaires have put resources into in Kenya include Co-operation Bank, KenolKobil, Jubilee Holdings and I&M Holdings. Notwithstanding, Kenya’s number of multimillionaires has expanded exponentially in the course of the most recent five years to 2019. Obviously, the rate at which Kenya produced millionaires somewhere in the range of 2014 and 2019 was the fastest in the world, as per the report.
The number of people who were rich increased by 263 percent from 800 six years ago to 2,900 in 2019. The expansion has been seen notwithstanding a critical circumstance in the Kenya. The number of dollar millionaires grew from a low of 800 out of 2014 to a high of 3,360, and out of 2018 preceding it decreased to 2,900.
The uncommon drop can be ascribed to different reasons, key among them is the revaluation of investments and corruption.
All in all, on the African landmass, South Africa has the most multimillionaires with 88,460 followed by Nigeria which has 40,869 super-rich people.
