Kenana Kingdom of Green Gold: Grand Multinational Venture in the Desert of Sudan

First Published in 2001. The Kenana factory was officially inaugurated on 3 March 1981 by the President of Sudan amidst a blaze of publicity. The Kenana concept aimed to combine Western expertise, Arab financial resources and Sudan’s natural resources of sun, fertile soil and plentiful water for irrigation purposes in the creation of a mega-agro-industrial project, bringing to the host country the advantages of large-scale job creation, transfer of advance technology and import substitution. The sheer size of the project, however, allied to Sudan’s limited infrastructure and the remoteness of the chosen site from the country’s only seaport, fuelled controversy, with negative comment the order of the day as far as the world’s financial press was concerned.

The first co-author, Osman El Nazir, has been involved in the project since 1973, initially as a representative of Sudan’s Ministry of Finance, then as a board member from mid-1975, and as Deputy Managing Director (1977-79), when he was appointed State Minister of Finance in Sudan Government. The second co-author, G. D. Desai, who had been associated with a Lonrho group company in Zambia since 1969, was invited in February 1975 to join Lonrho’s team managing the Kenana project. After completing his commitments as Financial Controller of the National Transport Corporation of Zambia, he joined Kenana in August 1975, taking up the position of Chief Accountant and later, in 1981, becoming Financial Controller through to March 1994.