Kris Yena Senanu — Ghana’s party envoy in East Africa
Kris Senanu loves to party and to have a good time. He always has.“Time and tide wait for no one” he says regularly, always in a hurry to get the most out of life.
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After surviving a near-fatal heart attack in 2012, 41-year-old Senanu is even more determined to get on with it.
I was in Nairobi recently as his guest and he insisted on taking me out each night. He likes to show off ‘His’ city.
He is a gracious host and an excellent guide, with an intimate knowledge of Nairobi’s finest night life.
Amongst other things, Senanu invests in restaurants and nightclubs. So we check out some of the hot spots in his portfolio. Thanks to him, I also get rock star status and treatment.
Senanu’s love for partying is equal to his love for making money. For him, it has never been an ‘either/or’ situation. He has always made money while partying.
Almost thirty years ago, he said to me: “Why party and spend money when you can party and make money”. Even then, Yena – as we called him then, a tall lanky and slightly awkward teenager – was already laying the foundations for BlackRock, the private equity firm through which he invests in small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) across Africa.
How it started
While at the Presbyterian Boys Senior High School at Legon, Senanu and his friend Darryl Bekoe, ran a successful business providing equipment, music and DJs for student parties, raves and funfairs.
They were a familiar sight at secondary schools across the country, including at my own Achimota School. While we innocently danced the night away, Senanu and Bekoe would make money from us. But we didn’t mind.
All throughout high school, Senanu juggled academic and entrepreneurial pursuits.
Such a balancing act was to provide early experience for Senanu for whom BlackRock is only a ‘side job’.
His ‘real job’ is Deputy CEO of Access Kenya Group Limited. In this capacity, Senanu oversees one of East Africa’s leading converged communications and IT infrastructure service providers, offering clients cloud services, communications connectivity and carrier facilities.
After a stint as Sales & Marketing Manager at another company, Senanu joined Access Kenya when the entire operations were based in one room - as employee number four. He has worked his way up the old-fashioned way: through hard work, charm and a bit of luck.
Senanu previously ran Access Kenya’s internet subsidiary and at the time of his appointment as Managing Director of the internet subsidiary in 2008, Senanu was the youngest MD of a company listed on the Nairobi Stock Exchange. (Access Kenya subsequently de-listed and was acquired by the Japanese IT company, Dimension Data Holdings).
Supporting fledging SMEs
He tells me as an employee he is more of an intrapreneur: the entrepreneur inside an established organisation who uses entrepreneurial skills to develop fresh ideas for the benefit of his employers, with the support and resources of his employer. He says he has never had an employee mentality and has always thought of all his employer’s business as his business.
It helps that for him sleep “doesn’t need to get in the way”. A self-confessed insomniac, Senanu says he needs no more than five hours sleep a day. The rest of his twenty-four hours is devoted to work (16 hours), partying and family.
Senanu takes seriously his calling: he feels he has to support fledgling SMEs across Africa. In addition to hard cash, Senanu provides his investee companies with smart capital – mentorship, access, contacts and, of course, his own experience. His investee companies benefit from shared services - from professionals they might not otherwise be able to afford at the stage of their growth.
So while Kris loves to make money, he also likes to give something back to society, to the younger generation. Just like when we used to happily dance the night away to his DJs back in high school.
Anywhere is home
As we go club-hopping and I get used to the red carpet treatment that my association with Senanu is providing me, I almost forget that Senanu is not Kenyan but Ghanaian, a fellow ‘number 9’ born and bred on the campus of the University of Ghana.
He protests when I say so, insisting that he is ‘pan-African’. “Anywhere in Africa is home to me”, he tells me. ‘I just happen to be living in Kenya today.’
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He adds: “I believe home is anywhere on the continent where I feel comfortable partnering with my fellow Africans to generate wealth and to create employment. In short, I am and will always be a believer in the pan-African dream.”
But how has this man, happily married with two children, managed to rise to the top in a cut-throat competitive industry in a country where he was (despite his Pan-African philosophy), a foreigner?
The answer is that he adapted. Then he immersed himself in the culture.
Of course a Kenyan wife must have helped too.
Senanu first came to Kenya to visit his father who was working as a professor of English at Moi University at Eldoret. He stayed on to study for a degree in International Business Administration at United States International University (USIU). In typical Senanu style, he finished in a record two and a half years (instead of the usual four).
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After USIU, Senanu returned ‘home’ to Ghana to try and find a job.
However, he quickly grew impatient with having to justify to potential employers how he managed to finish his degree in such a short time.
So he headed back to Kenya. But not before he had been to the Arts Centre in Accra to fill a suitcase with things (mainly clothes and accessories) which he could sell in Kenya.
Although he found a job soon afterwards, Senanu continued to sell clothes and accessories from Ghana, and even opened a West African themed outlet called ‘Yake Yeke’ in downtown Nairobi.
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So how does he combine two separate roles – as an employee and a serial entrepreneur?