By the time Maina Mwangi returned to Kenya from Nigeria in 2007, he had already spent most of his adult life away from home. An investment banker for the past 22 years, Mr Mwangi, 45, has lived and worked “everywhere in the world”, from London and New York to Singapore and South Africa. Everywhere, that is, but home, apart from a brief stint in the mid-1990s when he brokered a series of IPOs in the recently deregulated Nairobi Stock Exchange.
“It was time,” Mwangi explains. “I have two kids. They were both born in South Africa and had never really lived at home.” He took up a job with Renaissance Capital, a Russian investment bank that was expanding into Africa. And then came the credit crunch. The Russians retreated. Mr Mwangi moved to Equity Investment Bank, a newly-launched branch of a vibrant, mid-sized local bank, Equity.
