MEN WHO GAVE AFRICA ITS TALLEST BUILDING

MAHAT MOHAMUD NOOR (LEFT) OF WHITE LOTUS PROJECTS WITH MOKASE MONONO AT THE CONSTRUCTION SITE OF THE PINNACLE, SOON-TO-BE AFRICA’S TALLEST BUILDING ON APRIL 25, 2018.

How do you build the tallest building in Africa? Well, naturally you need a thick slab of audacity. But first, you dream.

Sometimes monstrous dreams like these are borne in the oddest and remotest of places, in this case in the hearts of two friends in the hinterlands of Northern Kenya: Abdinasir Ali Hassan (executive chairman, Hass Petroleum) and Mahat Mohamoud Noor (White Lotus Projects).

“In 1970, we were travelling back home to Garissa from Wajir Primary Boarding School. When we got to the Lorian Swamp, we found it flooded and impassable,” says Mahat.

“For three days, we were marooned there. I recall thousands of mosquitoes buzzing around us at night but I didn’t feel them, I was looking at the land, the water, the waste, and thinking, ‘when will this become a farmland that can feed the people of this region? And now, close to half a century later, we are about to finally sign off a road from Mudogashe to Wajir. With the road, that dream will become a reality. By that swamp, we dreamt big. We believed that we would end up in the big city and fly as high up as anybody else can,” he says.

The flight started. Mahat became an accountant; ran the PricewaterhouseCoopers office in Somalia before coming back in 1989, got a job as an audit manager at Firestone, then went to Middle East as a general manager for the biggest confectionery and biscuit company (United Food Industries).

He then got into the energy industry. His childhood friend, Abdinasir got into business, joined his brother at Hass Petroleum in 1997 and expanded it into half a dozen countries in Africa.

The “Lorian Dream” finally took shape after another partner joined in— Raju Poosapati, the co-founder and vice chairman of White Lotus. He is a banker and a businessman who has invested heavily in the region: 12,000 acres of farmland in Malindi and Narok under Farm Africa; cashew nuts farming in Tanzania, mining in Zambia and South Africa and other ventures.

Together they looked at Upper Hill in Nairobi and all the pieces slowly fell in place. In 2013, the seed of audacity was planted.

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