As she charts the next path after leaving the board of directors of Equity Group Holdings, Mary Wangari Wamae will be opening a fresh chapter in her rich personal story.
She was the group executive director for Equity Holdings, a role that saw her oversee all of the bank's subsidiaries. Besides the long-serving CEO James Mwangi and the founder and former chairman Peter Munga, Ms Wamae is perhaps the only other prominent personality who has shaped the history of Equity Bank.
As one promotion followed the other, rumours swirled that she was being groomed to replace Mwangi. Her exit puts to rest those rumours.
Ms Wamae is certainly one of the authors of Equity's recent success story, which started with a remarkable turnaround that saw Equity miraculously escape dissolution by the regulator after years of operating under insolvency. When Wamae joined Equity in 2004, after a 13-year legal practice, she played a key role in writing the next chapter of Equity, chief among which was converting the financial institution from a troubled building society into a formidable pan-African bank with a presence in seven countries.
Ms Wamae, a lawyer by training, was also part of the team that helped Equity Bank list on the Nairobi Securities Exchange (NSE), giving the lender the impetus to make the great leap into Pan-African banking.
A conglomerate with business interests spanning different sectors, Equity Group would become the first company in the region to cross the Sh1 trillion in assets in 2020.
There is just something about Wamae and Mwangi that makes them the perfect bearers of Equity Bank's DNA: They both had humble beginnings and were raised by single mothers in rural Central Kenya.
It is these modest beginnings which informed Equity's reincarnation as a bank for the common mwananchi, with the tier-one lender revolutionizing micro-lending in Kenya.
In the 1990s, banks were snobbish. They didn’t think the poor people like Mwangi's and Wamae's mothers were bankable.
The income for most of these poor rural folks was not only erratic, but it was also unreliably erratic. Banks slammed their doors on Wanjiku, and she clammed up with her money.
Thus, Wamae, who was also brought up in hardship in Kenya, was a perfect catch for Equity's spirit when she joined the company in 2004 as the secretary. Just like Mwangi, she embodied the fighting spirit of Equity Bank.
In a past interview, Wamae credited her mother for bequeathing her with the fighting spirit, and not to complain despite difficult circumstances one may find themselves in.
Raised in Nyeri County by a single mother in a family of six children, Ms Wangari did not have an easy childhood. Her mother did not have a fixed income but she made all efforts to educate her.
She powered through her education journey with finesse, picking a reading habit in the process. Later in life, she became an avid reader.
When she graduated with a law degree from the University of Nairobi (UoN) in 1990, Ms Wangari was beginning the journey towards breaking from the obscurity that her background risked driving her to.
Joining UoN offered her the chance to visit the capital for the first time in her life. She was in the famous UoN class that had the likes of Trade Cabinet Secretary Rebecca Miano, MPs Millie Odhiambo and Caroli Omondi, lawyers like Ahmednasir Abdullahi and Azimio leader Raila Odinga’s lawyer Paul Mwangi, Supreme Court judge Isaac Lenaola, among others.
The class has a grouping called MV90 and Ms Wangari once did a video explaining the unique aspects of the group.
A mother of three girls, Ms Wangari had a divorce in 2018. She told the Business Daily in a 2022 interview that the divorce affected her.
“I asked God questions,” she said. “I have done many successful projects, overseen successful investments in this bank that run in a trillion, but why couldn’t I make my marriage succeed? How come this project failed?”
In the interview, she also spoke of the need for women to be financially independent so that in case something goes wrong in their marriages, they have a way out.
Her Nairobi residence is proof that she has established herself financially, and in a recent interview in the palatial residence, where she spoke about her love for books, she was happy to show the Business Daily her home library, which has quite a collection of books.
Ms Wangari has lately been giving mentorship sessions about money and investments, and she said she is reading a lot on the topic.
“I’m doing quite a lot of mentorship on that,” she said. “[Books] help me to consolidate my thoughts around that topic…I wouldn’t want to mislead people when I mentor them, because sometimes they take what you say as the gospel truth.”
In 2023, Ms Wangari released her biography The Village Girl: My Dream, Life and Legacy where she set out her story in full, candidly capturing the moments in her life that needed her to be resilient and to show leadership. Her policy is that biographies should not always be about the good things that happen to people.
“There is a tendency to only tell the good things,” she said. “If a book is written in a way that it only depicts the good part of it, either the good part of an individual or the good things that happen to them, then of course we have question marks: Is it real? Is it authentic? That is why now people are looking for authentic stories because an authentic and balanced story will talk about the peaks, but it will also talk about the lows.”
She practised as a lawyer for 13 years before joining Equity Group, seeing it transform into the regional behemoth it is today.
Ms Wangari started a reading club for women at the bank, called the Equity Inspire Programme (Equip), as she sought to prepare female bankers for leadership roles.
“The aim of the programme is to encourage them and help them to equip themselves with the right skills, the right knowledge, the right confidence to lead in a bank and financial services group like Equity,” she told the Business Daily.
A frequent traveller, she has bought a good number of her books at airports. She remembers making purchases at the Dubai International Airport, Heathrow Airport, the Oliver Tambo International Airport, among others. From a girl who was at one point limited to the boundaries of her village, where her peasant mother struggled to make ends meet, she grew to become a globetrotter.
