From truck loader to a globe-trotting executive

Sidney Wafula says joining BAT was the best career move he ever made. Photo/COURTESY

By Wallace Kantai

For most of us, any association with the Kenya National Examination Council (KNEC) thankfully ends when one is done with the immense stress that is the KCSE exam.

Apart from the time a few months later when we collect our certificates, the KNEC often just serves as a reminder of the stressful months of study before the big exam.

For Sidney Wafula, the KNEC served as his first port of call career-wise after high school.

It was not the most glamorous of jobs, though – certainly nowhere as exalted as his current position: ‘My first stab at employment was right after high school. I was privileged enough to be employed as a clerk at the Kenya National Examination Council doing all sorts of manual jobs including packing boxes of examination answer sheets for KCSE candidates, loading question papers into trucks and entering candidate details on spreadsheets. That was great fun’. His salary? Sh104.50 a day.

Wafula has moved on from those days, into more rarefied circles.

He’s now Head of Operations – Finance, for British American Tobacco (BAT) Nigeria Hub.

The role is wider than just dealing with money matters – according to him, the role ‘entails giving strategic and operational finance support to the Operations arm of BAT in West Africa.

The operations arm spans the full end-to-end supply chain from planning to delivering product to 14 end markets around West Africa’.

Old boy

So how do we reconcile the Wafula who was lugging boxes in a dusty KNEC warehouse to the Wafula who makes million-dollar decisions covering operations across an entire subcontinent?

It helps to take a bit of time to trace the path his career has taken.

Wafula is an old boy of Alliance High School, back in the early 1990s.

He then joined the Catholic University of Eastern Africa for a Bachelor of Commerce degree in Accounting.

At the same time, though, he was earning his CPA qualification at what was then Strathmore College, and the Vision Institute of Professionals.

He wasn’t patient enough to wait to graduate from university to put his new accounting skills into practice.

He joined the former Coopers & Lybrand as an audit assistant.

(It all came about from his alacrity in responding to Jim McFie’s offer to his students of an opportunity at a blue chip accounting firm, one Friday afternoon).

The role still involved lifting boxes, although, this time, thankfully, ‘I didn’t have to lift boxes into trucks- all I had to do was lift box files for the audit seniors into client sites’.

Coopers & Lybrand opened doors for him.

After three months, Barclays Bank came calling – which was lucky seeing as the C&L internship was coming to an end.

He served as a clearing clerk for a couple of months, before the final months of university meant that he had to hunker down and concentrate on his studies.

As is all too depressingly common in Kenya, graduation – even from a respected institution and with stints in blue-chip firms under his belt – didn’t help Wafula from having to ‘tarmac’ for a few months.

Relief came in the form of offers from PricewaterhouseCoopers (Price Waterhouse and Coopers & Lybrand had merged in 1998), and Procter and Gamble. :“I went with my gut and decided to join PwC,” he says.

He was part of an elite incoming group at PwC.

The interview process had winnowed 1,500 applicants down to a freshman group of 25.

This was a crucial part of his career, and one he remembers fondly as it imparted lessons that still come in handy. The role was “very intense.

Inspiring mentors

It was characterised by lots of pressure to deliver work in relatively short timelines and with relatively little scope for error.

Lots of people were made and broken, plus it gave me an insight into corporate politics which I have later learned is an integral part of successful work life”.

Wafula rose through the ranks, and got promoted every year until June 2003, when he was appointed Audit Manager.

The world then opened up to him.

He was recommended for secondment to the PwC United Kingdom office.

It was a slight step backward: “I got demoted one level as was customary with secondments from Africa into the UK. I was fortunate enough during my career to have met some inspiring mentors, some of who had been through this hurdle before, and used their advice, together with my personal determination as motivation to prove that I belonged as a manager. True to this determination, I got promoted back to Manager during the next round of promotions in June 2004”.

He was then moved from the PwC office in Leeds to Deloitte & Touche in London.

All this time, however, he was seeking the challenge of being in the operations of a multinational, with the eventual aim of rising to the top of such a company.

He had kept contacts from the days of auditing BAT, and when he put out feelers to senior management back in Kenya, he was made an offer to be the Audit Manager for the East African Community and the Horn of Africa.

It was a time of fairly momentous change as he also got married to his fiancée Laura.

Significant mark

He says that joining BAT was the best career move he ever made.

“During the three years and three months I have served, my role was expanded to include the Indian Ocean Islands to become the Audit Manager for the East Africa Zone. In March 2008, I made a lateral move into mainstream Finance to become Finance Shared Services Manager for East Africa Zone.” The role in Nigeria was a natural next step.

For anyone trying to make a significant mark on the African business scene, Nigeria is the perfect challenge.

Its population is more than a hundred million, ranging from the multi-(dollar) millionaires on the Lagos islands to some of the world’s poorest people, and with a huge diversity in population.

He still looks at Kenya as home, and he says he would come back, but only as a part of the progression of his career.

The main attraction of Kenya for him is for their son Silwa: ‘I would also like him to experience the Kenyan culture first hand so it would be good to settle back in future.”

feedback@kantai.co.ke

http://www.businessdailyafrica.com/