BY NAMULONGO PETER,NAIROBI,19TH JUNE,2021-Mary-Ann Kirubi Musangi has vowed to carry on with her father’s legacy which has seen him celebrated as one of Kenya’s most successful businessmen and entrepreneurs with vast interests in real estate, media and agriculture.
Speaking during the burial service in honour of her father and industrialist Chris Kirubi, Mary-Ann however said she will run her own race.
“Daddy, I am still you little girl, and as little girls do, I will put on your shoes, those shoes that you have left behind. However my tiny little fight will be swimming helplessly in your shoes, as I reach out for your hands to hold me steady.”
“So before God, and all these witnesses, I ask you to bless me and allow me to wear my own shoes. The shoes that will enable me to run my own race,” the late industrialist’s daughter.
She told guests who included Cabinet Secretaries Joe Mucheru and James Macharia how she questioned her father’s decision to send her abroad for studies when she was only 12 years old.
Mary-Ann confessed that this tough love from her now departed father conditioned her to be the fearless entrepreneur.
“I kept thinking why would he do that to me, I thought I was his little girl, I would keep wondering why would he do this to me and sometimes it did turn into resentment from time to time. But you know what he was thinking ahead, coz in the 80’s how many african families were sending their children out of Kenya for school. He had a vision for me, and that was to be exposed, that vision was to be worldly, that vision was to be fearless of any culture and any language,” she reminicised.
She recalled her late father’s four-year battle with cancer, saying the ordeal left her father – a tenacious fighter by all standards – weaker and his family emotionally drained.
