Real estate firm Knight Frank published a report in March 2018 showing that Kenya created 180 new dollar millionaires in 2017 bringing the total number to 1290.
Kenya had a total of 291 ultra-rich individuals who were worth at least Sh3 billion by the end of 2017.
These Kenyans defied last year’s slowdown in economic growth and diminishing corporate performance to stand among the world’s top 10 countries that increased the ranks of the super-rich at the highest rate.
Another report by Wealth-X, a firm that publishes the annual World Ultra Rich Report, shows that the number of the ultra-rich grew by 11.7 percent in 2017, beating the United States, Hong Kong, and India.
The high rate of minting multi-billionaires is particularly puzzling, given the hard economic times the country has experienced in the past three years and the resulting fall in corporate profits, that has seen thousands of people lose their jobs.
Investment analyst Aly-Khan Satchu explains that Kenya’s economic performance in recent years only points to the fact that, the list of the newly super-rich is likely to be dominated by politicians and few investors in fast-growing fields, such as ICT.
Kunal Ajmera, the Chief Operating Officer at Grant Thornton, a consultancy firm, acknowledged that the report was a painful reminder of the widening gap between the rich and the poor.
“A clear trend emerging from this report is also the sad reality of increasing gap between those who have it all and those who have nothing,” he remarked.
According to the most recent research by the Kenya National Bureau of Statistics, there were 16.4 million people below the poverty line at the time of the survey.
This showed a reduction of 10 percent from 16.6 million in the last 10 years.
