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Toilet paper sales will go up this season, what with Kenyans carrying some to Shagz in anticipation of the feasting with their blood relations.
While there are parts of Kenya where toilet paper is still a rumour, it was not there in the mass market sense for the first 25 years of independence. Five star hotels and the well-heeled imported their toilet paper.
Kenyans were content to use environmentally friendly shrubbery but avoiding the ones with thorns and nettles. Leaves that could leave behind butts were also avoided by the well versed in rural ‘horticulture’ while their counterparts in urban areas were content to help in disposing newspapers via calls of nature.
Then one day, SK Macharia, nicknamed Kenya’s ‘Rupert Murdoch’ and who had tried and burnt his fingers dabbling in matatu business visited Italy while working as the financial controller for the Agriculture Development Corporation in 1976, as we are informed in A Profile of Kenyan Entrepreneurs by Wanjiru Waithaka and Evans Majeni.
While he was in Italy for a trip on how best to improve our beef through crossbreeding cows and buffaloes to create ‘beefalo’, the idea of a farming family that manufactured toilet paper from waste paper using a hand-made machine interested him more and “for the first time he wondered, how many people used toilet paper in Kenya” and upon his return found that they were found in five star hotels.
He took a roll, imported from Andrex, UK, from the Hilton Hotel in Nairobi as a sample to the Kenya Industrial Estates (KIE) for a study on whether it would mint money in truckloads when manufactured for the mass market.
The study affirmed his hunch, but the KIE could neither fund ideas above Sh3 million nor incubate them. Armed with the feasibility study, SK took it for a loan application to the National Bank of Kenya where RS Atwood, the General Manager sat on it for six months. Atwood was shortly replaced with Stanley Githunguri, who was so excited with the idea he loaned SK Sh7 million. No collateral.
That was the birth of Madhupaper International Ltd. SK applied and was granted 10 acres along Lunga Lunga Road in Industrial Area, Nairobi by the government. Production of ‘Rosy’ toilet paper began in 1977 as the first indigenous toilet paper. Alongside facial tissues and wrappers, Madhupaper also exported its products to Uganda and Tanzania, working 24/7.
Kenya had about 16 million people and by 1982 it was so successful that ambitious SK applied for a loan to start a pulp factory between Thika and Chania Rivers (as they require a lot of water) with a 50, 000 acre seedling farm in Maragua, Murang’a County.
The International Finance Corporation was so jazzed by the idea it gave SK Sh1 billion without a government guarantee, the first in the Third World. But the project was met with political headwinds spurred by jealousy and falsehoods to the effect that the Sh1 billion syndicated loan was to finance a coup.
The project was halted through a cabinet meeting, heralding one of the most vicious commercial court cases in corporate Kenya.
But the man who traveled 45 days bus across the Sahara, boat through the Mediterranean and plane to the Seattle Technical College in America, one who was housed by a foster family while holing up in a church during winter, lost the battle for Madhupaper which gave Kenya ‘Rosy’-which is still there today.
Had the Thika pulp factory morphed into reality, SK Macharia would be Kenya’s richest citizen.
