THE STORY OF BUZEKI A SELF MADE BILLIONAIRE.

 
He has been dubbed the golden calf of
dairy business,
avi diode kandakala tv and on the floor
i read carpet crazy
music is actually a mix of my three
names the kia ke prop under teach
i love cows yes now
i am in politics because i have
aspirations
but on the other side of course i'm an
entrepreneur the the journey
is still going on
[Music]
while soaring high in the world of
business the soft spoken man unveils his
dropping skills
when i was a teenager i had i had a song
that i used to sing that used to say
make a prop a millionaire me
me owns a house a big man shawna me
own a car those days i say bmw now they
approach it despite his life of opulence
he goes down memory lane his most
sentimental possession
i heard him
a real coco
that i used
we used to use it for for distributing
milk
in mombasa those days when i started i
drink
clearly he is a big dreamer and an
incredible cyclist
while a day-long off-work access to
bouzeki is seldom
we caught up with him in his upcountry
home in ainabkoy
the heart of osengishu county
[Music]
an hour of adora town his massive farm
comes into view
the scale of operation impressive
[Music]
i seek to find out how much i need to
build an upcountry home like he's in
eldurate
plan your house get an architect
and start slowly and believe me you will
achieve it without so much pain
and without so much trouble to me
everything boils down to this place when
when
all the good and the bad that can happen
in this world
all will settle here you know because
this is where i run in the morning this
is where i joke this is what i do stuff
and this in mombasa where he started by
hooking milk
bouzeki has certainly set himself apart
from a pool of business owners
ranging from agriculture logistics and
politics
buzeki is a titan and one of the
wealthiest
ceos in kenya has featured in forbes
2017 list
i appreciate what i have
and i try to share it out with the
well-deserving people as much as
possible
and if there is billion that i pray
for every day is god to give me good
health
you know those are the kind of billions
that i would want to to have
rosetta swept away was in gisho county
in the 2017 gubernatorial campaign
he ran a fierce campaign against his
major rival
governor mandergo so
yes now i am
in politics because i have aspirations
uh as a person but i think i can be
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part of the agent of
the kind of leadership that this country
would want
and you know
that is a journey that i started one
year ago and
the the journey is still going on
for the last days of the campaign every
all my family members from mumbasa all
over came
you know they came and stuck with me and
you know we did the last days of the
campaigns together
this house has a very
rich history this house
has a history and memories that you
cannot buy with money
me and my entire siblings were brought
up in this house
this was just for rooms and a living
room but
everything else was was outside
this modified wooden house however
is where he's adjourned to success
started
you know so what a memory what
a memory you cannot buy with money
as his cows lick him in adoration he
tells us the tale
to his billions it was a humble uh
childhood uh but i'll tell you i i have
uh
you know we we we were brought up with a
lot of discipline
uh when i see myself hanging around cows
today i'm not surprised because
as early as when i was in class five i
used to wake up
at five o'clock in the morning there was
a routine in our family that you go to
the dairy
in the morning you know it's not like
the dairy that you have seen
there but i would go in the morning to
go and take measurements for
milk for every cow yes i used to get
milk from nairobi
i bring to mombasa in a country i come
and distribute and i do
retail to shops i used to get a shilling
that's gross profit
yes i was employed in california
plantations in 1998
99 and then i left
in califor i was working in a milk
processing plant
and i rose to the level of being a sales
manager
for california plantations and then i
left califor i started distributing tuzu
milk in mombasa
which i did for eight years and i was
one of the biggest distributors
that i've ever sold a fast-moving
consumer product in kenya
after that i went back and bought
califor plantations the same boss who
had employed me had closed the factory i
went and bought it
i also came and bought molo milk that
had closed
and i also bought limu dairy farmers
cooperative society
and i created a huge brand called molo
milk
new califor gold and limuru and then
eventually in 2013
i sold it to brookside
his obsession is quite interesting i'm
more obsessed about cows
than a car buzeki who sums up as an
environmentalist
takes us on any animal that is a rabbit
is also part of this forest so please
if you see any hair running around here
there is a bouzeki here
so we have everything from mahaya to
account to a forest
and even grasshoppers yeah so this this
forest
starts from the very far left
and stretches all the way through to
the very far right yeah the size of this
swamp uh
is is of course it stretches down all
through
uh for almost running for public office
comes with controversial stories
by bloggers there's so many you know
some are not worth mentioning because if
you mention
you're actually
confirming to to the people who who
wanted to get a swipe on you
that they caught your attention so there
was a lot of burger stories
and to me it's inconsequential some
allege
that he owns 3000 trucks however i
have 3 000 trucks you know that's
obviously
[Music]
exaggerating you know so you would see
that the person had a good intention but
obviously
what the information they are putting is
wrong buzeki who made his fortune
through hawking milk is equally
committed to improving lives
of people in his community
i already had started working with the
community i used to buy milk from them
so they they knew me
you know they knew who was what buzeki
is but they did know the person to be
honest most of them didn't know the
person
so when i came to to to politics
and that would also explain the reason
why i i made such a huge impact
is that i had
a pivot you know i had a fulcrum
to to to revolve around my political
activities
which is the people that i had met over
the years
the institutions that i had partnered
with other people to build
probably the people who are employed who
majority
came from north rift was in issue
you know their families knew that their
children had worked in music
and obviously that was part of the
reasons why i
probably had such a huge impact other
than the fact that obviously
i had a rich manifesto i also hit the
campaign trail
very hard you know campaigned
very passionately yeah
while he left her mark in the 2017
gubernatorial race
his loss was a harsh reality to his
ardent followers
we lost i'll keep it at that for now and
we stand a chance in the future
in the spirit of hanshik he tells us
about his relationship
with mandagoo we hacked
you know that's the sort of person that
i am i don't take things too hard that
was a contest it's over
it's over in my heart i'm finished with
that you know we look at other things
needless you know i have no grudge with
anyone you know this is politics and
that's how it's done in kenya and you
know you learn through the ropes and
on a good day you get the seat on a bad
day your brother gets it and life
continues
from eldoret we head to his other
favorite place
buzaki hosts us for dinner in his
mombasa home
as we seek to explore his world of
logistics
[Music]
beyond the coastal breeze and sandy
beaches buzaki ushers us into his world
of logistics
which apparently is his biggest niche
today he's transporting clinker a
product used in making cement this is
just a quarter of the ship
by the time we do a whole ship we will
have a huge
mountain here not the height of mount
kenya
but you know but quite a hill a man-made
hill but with last year for probably
another
[Music]
we started the logistics department to
invest whatever the
logistics division of music in 2004
and you know and we've been running this
far we have a fleet of
excess of probably 300 trucks on the
road today
we employ a thousand canyons one thing
that i'm proud of
is i am a taxpayer if i showed you the
record of
what taxes i have paid to kenya over the
year by virtue of being a businessman
it makes me proud
this is purely a private enterprise
that was conceptualized some 13 years
ago
and we have decided to focus on
bulk cargo handling so what we do is we
handle
material from the pot we come and
store it here in what we call an
intermediate
storage site and then we evacuate the
same material
to our customers in aerobics so we have
two customers
mainly we have bamboo cement we have
national cement we saw their material
here
we are about to head to the port where
ships carrying the cargo dock
bouzeki has one word for his employees
as we head to our next
destination
foreign
the process begins here without getting
the clinker from the ship there is no
way you can be able to have cement
first evacuating the material and you
can see there is one more damper coming
here so
they just do a circuit of circulation
evacuating material from the ship
yeah once we take the material to
mariakani
bouzeki will uh
transport they are ships that we handle
alone as muzuki they are ships that
bring material for muzeki alone
and they are ships that bring material
that
we will eventually call transport with
other peers in the industry
i think the biggest challenge is a lack
of proper regulation
in the logistics industry
as the day ends my favorite food he is a
man
clearly competitive whether in politics
business
or community service and he is not
slowing down anytime
soon sharon caprano.