In August 2013, Massmart sent David Kimani and his brother Simon Gashwe an offer that any retailer would have found impossible to refuse. The South African retail giant, 51 percent owned by Walmart, proposed buying a 51 percent controlling stake in Naivas for Ksh 3 billion. The deal would have given the brothers immediate capital, a global supply chain, and the institutional credibility that no Kenyan-owned retailer had yet achieved. It would also have connected them to a company generating the equivalent of Ksh 589 billion in annual revenue, roughly ten times the size of Kenya's biggest retailer at the time. From the outside, it looked like the culmination of two decades of patient, difficult work. From inside the Mukuha family, Naivas founder, it was a detonator.

Newton Kagira, the eldest of Peter Mukuha's sons, the man who had been given the Rongai branch in the 1999 family asset split and had since run it into insolvency, filed a court application the moment the deal became public. He claimed that he had contributed Ksh 20,000 of the original Ksh 100,000 seed capital in 1990 and was therefore entitled to a share of the proceeds. Naivas responded through its lawyers that Newton was a stranger to the retail chain, a person who had never been a legal or beneficial owner of the company's shares. The court agreed. But Massmart did not wait for lawyers to finish. A family dispute that could revive at any point during integration was an unacceptable risk for a publicly listed company accountable to Walmart shareholders. Massmart ended up opening a Game store at Garden City Mall on Thika Superhighway and left Kenyan grocery retail entirely to the families still fighting over it.

On top of losing a Ksh 3 billion investment, David and Simon had also lost a prime retail location at Next Gen Mall on Mombasa Road to Nakumatt, their largest competitor at the time. 

What made sense at that point was to continue opening more stores. Between 2013 and 2020, Naivas grew from 26 branches to more than 60, funded entirely from operating cash flows. But alongside that commercial growth, the brothers spent those seven years building the governance infrastructure that Massmart's due diligence had found absent. They created shareholder agreements, board structures, documented policies, and a management team that extended beyond the founding family. When they tried again with Amethis Finance, a French private equity fund, the deal went through and Amethis bought a 31.5 percent stake for Ksh 6 billion.

The story of how that governance gap opened in the first place begins in Rongai, Nakuru, in 1990, inside tiny discount duka.

Peter Mukuha Kago was, before Naivas, a farmer in Kitale. His older brother Joram Kamau had taken a different path, landing a job at Nakuru Mattresses, which later became Nakumatt. He worked here in the early 80s before opening his own discount-style shop in Rongai with the support of the Atul Shah family. The arrangement was that Mangalal Shah, the Nakumatt patriarch, would supply Joram with goods nearing their expiry dates on generous credit terms. Joram would sell them quickly at low prices and return cash fast. That relationship gave Joram a competitive product mix at minimal upfront cost and gave Mangalal a reliable outlet for stock that would otherwise go to waste.

After finishing Form Four in 1984, David Kimani, Peter Mukuha’s lastborn, landed a gig as a shop attendant at his uncle Joram's Rongai store, where his brother Simon Gahswe also worked. 

In 1990, Joram decided to try out his lack in Nairobi. And so he transferred the Rongai premises to his two nephews in 1990, handing over a stocked, operational store at a Ksh 1 million walk-in walk-out arrangement. At this point, David and Simon had absorbed six years of daily retail mechanics. They named the shop Gitwe General Stores and started operations, building a future that was their own this time.

David's daily routine involved waking before sunrise, traveling to Nakuru town to buy stock in cash, loading a matatu with goods, ferrying them back to Rongai, then pricing every item by hand and arranging the shelves alongside six other employees. There was no supply chain software, no credit facility, and no standing order with a distributor. It was a cash operation that demanded close attention to what sold, what sat, and where prices needed to be set to keep customers returning.

Peter joined his sons in the business shortly after the handover and took the role of the guiding elder who gave the family confidence to take expansion decisions together. He was the authority figure whose opinion the siblings respected when disputes arose. In a family business where trust among workers was the only internal control system, having a patriarch to resolve disagreements had real operational value. The brothers later acknowledged that their early growth model depended entirely on trustworthy people, because there was no software to catch a shortfall in the till.

This family trust would shortly be brought into question when in 1995, Simon discovered a Ksh 230,000 shortfall in the Elburgon branch accounts, attributed to Newton, the eldest brother who had been brought in to help run the location. Peter convened a family meeting to resolve it. The resolution led to the formal asset division which Peter presided over.  Newton received the Rongai branch and a house, Simon and his sister Grace received the Elburgon branch, and David and his sister Linet took the Naivasha branch. 

David and Simon moved to Naivasha and built the branch that would become the company's headquarters and its most important proof of concept. By 1997, the Naivasha store was generating Ksh 100 million in annual revenue. The town had a genuine economy, flower farms, livestock trading, a junction on the Nairobi-Nakuru highway, and consistent purchasing power. No formal supermarket chain had established there before them. They arrived with wider range, cleaner premises, and pricing that tracked buying prices. The Naivasha store's performance would become the most important financial backstop in the company's early history: when the brothers opened their first Nairobi store on Ronald Ngala Street in 2001 and found the city expensive, crowded, and hostile to a provincial chain, there were stretches of time when they used the Naivasha surplus to keep the Nairobi store alive.

The brothers arrived carrying the name Naivasha Self Service Stores, a designation that Nairobi customers openly mocked. Suppliers who had extended credit in the Rift Valley, where they knew the family personally, were not present. Nakumatt and Uchumi had already captured the most reliable accounts. Banks refused loans, checks were bouncing, and prime retail locations went to established tenants. Within six months of opening on Ronald Ngala Street, David was on the verge of going back to Naivasha.

They had arrived in Nairobi trying to compete with Nakumatt and Uchumi on their own terms, in their own geography, with none of their resources. In February 2004, David decided to open a store in Machakos, a mid-sized town 65 kilometres southeast of Nairobi, and found a market that Nakumatt and Uchumi had no interest in serving. There was no credible formal retailer there and prices were set by informal traders with no accountability. The moment a fixed-price, fully stocked store appeared, customers arrived without persuasion, because they had been waiting for an alternative. "People were being exploited," David said. "The prices they were paying were very high. That's when we changed our focus."

Towns such as Eldoret, Embu, Kitui, and Narok had formal retail demand but no credible modern grocery chain willing to serve them. In those markets, the margin compression that had made Nairobi dangerous was reversed. Volumes were lower, but overhead was cheaper and competition was almost nonexistent. Between 2005 and 2009, Naivas directed its entire expansion outside Nairobi. By the end of that period, it had opened 10 stores, 8 of them outside the capital. Each regional branch generated cash and built brand recognition in a geography where Naivas was the only formal retailer present. By 2009, when Naivas returned to Nairobi with the Eastgate branch in Donholm, it entered as a financially solvent operation with deep regional presence.

The competitive field it returned to was in the early stages of collapse.

Nakumatt had built its dominance through a model that treated supplier credit as a zero-interest growth loan. It would take goods on 60-day payment terms, sell them in cash before payment came due, and use the float to open another store. If each store generated sufficient cash flow before the payment window closed, the model worked. If the number of stores grew faster than the cash each store generated, the gap between what was owed and what was available compounded. By 2016, Nakumatt owed creditors an estimated Ksh 41.2 billion. It had also directed more than Ksh 1 billion of that money into interest-free loans to its own directors. The chain ended up closing all its Kenya branches by 2018.

Tuskys, the very company that Joram Kamau, the brothers' uncle, had founded, followed a parallel trajectory. Five Kamau siblings inherited the business after Joram's death in 2002 and spent the following decade in competing court applications over control. One sibling was accused of extracting Ksh 1.6 billion from the company while others filed legal challenges to remove him. The same governance failure that had destroyed Nakumatt, a structural absence of separation between personal financial interests and business finances, destroyed Tuskys as well.

Naivas watched its two largest competitors die of the same disease and took opposite positions on each point of failure. The brothers had learned the consequences of operating without cash reserves during the Ronald Ngala years, when bounced checks destroyed supplier relationships and halted the daily supply chain. From that period forward, they operated with a single financial discipline: never spend money not yet earned. They borrowed nothing from banks to open new stores. Every shilling that entered the business was paid to suppliers, returned to the government as tax, or reinvested in the next location. When the industry-wide payment crisis of 2016 and 2017 exposed which retailers had been operating on borrowed time, Naivas had no outstanding supplier debt to be called in. Landlords who had been anchored by Nakumatt and Tuskys suddenly needed replacement tenants. Naivas moved fast and outbid its rivals for six Nakumatt stores in a deal of approximately Ksh 400 million and got prime real estate in Greenspan Mall, Juja City Mall, the Southfield Mall, and the Next Gen Mall.

By 2019, Naivas had grown to 53 stores. The gap between its store count and the next competitor had widened, but the pace of expansion was constrained by the same discipline that had protected the company from collapse, capital. Each new store required between Ksh 100 million and Ksh 200 million to fit out and stock. Reinvested profits alone could not fund 10 new stores a year while maintaining operational standards across an existing network. The family had to rethink its approach to debt if it wanted to grow faster.

In April 2020, they welcomed their first investor, selling a 31.5 percent stake to a consortium comprising IFC, DEG, Amethis, and MCB Equity Fund for Ksh 6 billion. The transaction valued Naivas at roughly Ksh 20 billion. For the Mukuha family, the deal converted three decades of reinvested operating profit into liquid capital while retaining 68.5 percent ownership of a business growing at double-digit rates. 

During its two-year tenure from 2020 to 2022, the fund supported the development of a strong middle-management layer with hires across IT, e-commerce, category management, and environmental compliance. It funded an IT upgrade programme that equipped management with analytical tools for stock and category decisions. It helped embed the financial controls and corporate governance documentation that Naivas had assembled informally before and now needed to codify for a more demanding class of shareholder. 

Upon Amethis's exit, in August 2022, IBL Group, the largest conglomerate in Mauritius, acquired the Amethis consortium's 31.5 percent stake for the equivalent of Ksh 15.5 billion. 

The company that David and Simon built on personal trust and family memory is now, in the financial year ending 2025, generating Ksh 114.45 billion in annual revenue and Ksh 2.45 billion in net profit across 114 stores in 38 counties, employing 12,000 people, and serving 285,000 customers daily. Andreas von Paleske, hired as technical adviser in 2018 and appointed the first non-family CEO in October 2024, now runs the company. IBL Group, through its investment vehicle Mambo Retail, has bought more share in the company and is now the majority stakeholder at 51 percent.

The Newton litigation is still active in the courts as of 2026, thirteen years after he first filed to block the Massmart deal. In March 2025, the Court of Appeal gave him permission to reopen his challenge before a new bench. The High Court in Nairobi suspended the commercial proceedings entirely in March 2026, ruling that the question of Newton's proprietary interest cannot be resolved until the Court of Appeal determines the twin appeals he filed in 2016 and 2017 concerning the distribution of Peter's estate. The case that was supposed to have ended in 2014 is alive again.