BY OLIVER MATHENGE
If his mother hadn’t threatened him with eviction, Robert William Collymore’s life’s work would probably be hanging on a wall somewhere. Young Collymore had fallen in love with painting. As a teen be believed he would spend the rest of his life with a canvas and paints.
“I used to be very bored in biology and history classes, and during this time, I used to draw a lot. So I took up painting which I believe I was good at and I would still want to be a painter,”
But his mother would have none of it. She pushed him to get “a serious job”, later landing him an interview at British Telecom, where she worked. That is how the man who decades later would become a venerable captain of industry and the CEO of east Africa’s biggest company got into telecommunications. He started as an entry-level clerical officer.
On Monday morning, the news of his death came as a shock to millions who had welcomed his return to work only last July after spending 10 months of treatment in the UK. Last year, on his return, Collymore revealed he had been feeling unwell for some time and was misdiagnosed with Vitamin D deficiency. He told Citizen TV’s Jeff Koinange in an interview that a doctor at Nairobi Hospital suspected a blood problem and referred him to a specialist in the UK.
“I left that very night to London and it was there that a haematologist diagnosed me with acute myeloid leukaemia — a type of cancer that starts in the blood-forming cells of the bone marrow and is curable,”
Collymore, Vodafone CEO Nick Reed and Safaricom chairman Nicholas Ng’ang’a on Thursday were scheduled to meet President Uhuru Kenyatta at State House. But this was not to be as the country was plunged into mourning after he succumbed to the disease at his Kitisuru home.
Born in 1958, Collymore was a Guyanese-born British businessman and the Chief Executive Officer of giant telco Safaricom. He spent much of his childhood in Guyana where he was raised by his grandmother after his mother left home to find work in the UK. Typical of the public and yet very private family man, little is documented about Collymore’s relatives save for his mother and grandmother.
Collymore started school in Guyana while still living with his grandmother until age 16 when he moved to the UK to join his mother in 1974. He joined Selhurst High School for Boys in London where he completed his formal education. Here he reportedly came face to face with racism, being the only black student at the time. Collymore was offered a place at Warwick University but turned it down because he was not eligible for a scholarship.
“I wanted to go to university and I disliked not having gone and for some years after I wished I’d gone. Now it doesn’t matter, [but] I would always advise a young person to go to the best university you can find,”
The man who made Safaricom the most profitable company in the region was the envy of many and towered above his peers.
His business skills became evident at a young age and even without a university degree, he used whatever he could learn in his job and work-funded training to enhance his knowledge.
“There tends to be a lot of reliance on paper qualification. We stuff ourselves into universities, then we come out and there is very little difference between us and all the other people who also did the same,” he said in an interview with the Standard last year.
In various interviews, Collymore revealed that he started earning money at the age of 12 while living with his grandmother in Guyana. He would make art pieces from plastic moulds sent by his mother from the UK and also little brooches from coconut shells that he would sell. For a man whose childhood dream was painting, Collymore did a lot to become one of the best inspirational business managers Kenya has had.
Credit: Source link