Eva Ngigi Sarwari, managing director of Finserve Africa and Equity Group’s director of payments and international banking, has died aged 45 while on a business trip to China, according to a statement from her colleagues.
Her death cuts short a career that spanned over two decades in banking and payments, from introducing customers to electronic banking at Co-operative Bank of Kenya to leading Visa’s business across three East African markets.
“It is with great sadness that we announce the passing of our dear friend and colleague, Eva Ngigi Sarwari,” her colleagues said in the statement on Tuesday. They described the news as a “sudden and profound shock” and said they would make further updates as details became available. The statement did not disclose the cause or date of her death.
This comes in the wake of the passing of KCB’s Rosemary Chemutai Kimwatu two months ago through suicide. Our predatory banks, which overwork and underpay their staff, seem determined to extract every last measure of labour from the people they employ for the sake of an extra dollar for their shareholders.
The construct of success as perpetuated by standards glamorized by motivational speakers and authors, which hinged on solipsism for women, a ruthless focus on self and service to money, has re-introduced modern-day slavery, and work-life balance has been suspended for manufactured optics of career elevation.
These banks have optimized their profit lines so thoroughly that all other perks that once came with employment, such as company houses, staff vans, internal catering and club memberships, were terminated under the guise of rationalization and cost-cutting, even while the salaries of their CEOs ballooned a hundred-fold.
Equity is the worst case-study of banking success. It is a bank built on the destruction of the cooperative movement, which exploited Mwai Kibaki’s low interest rates regimes to hawk cheap loans, lure farmers into debt and then cash in after Uhuru Kenyatta’s regime moved to looting through odious debt and the bank’s focus shifted to lending to the government, pursuing ruthless debt recovery mechanisms, turning CEO James Mwangi and Chairman Peter Munga into the largest property and land owners in the country simply from grabbing collateral under the guise of recovering debt.
The constellation is toxic. Think of Thika Greens Golf and Country Club. Mwai Kibaki duped shareholders of Othaya Farmers District Cooperative Union to sell the 2,000-acre Makindi/Mihuti farm under the guise of “debt,” because his son and then Cooperatives Development Assistant Minister Peter Kenneth were shareholders. It was then converted from productive use of growing coffee and earning the country foreign exchange to a real estate project of which James Mwangi is a large owner of the land and properties.
James Mwangi has been the CEO for over 30 years, which is illegal for any publicly-listed company. The bank’s name also appears in the entities claiming Kenya owes them money which they loaned to treasury for fictitious or non-existent projects, money which we shall not repay.
The two deaths sit inside the same arrangement. One woman died on a business trip whose purpose was to keep the payments and international banking machinery running. The other died by suicide after years inside a risk and data-protection role at another major bank, with family accounts citing marital strain and the weight of debts. In both cases the public statement or the autopsy supplies a date and a location. It does not supply a ledger of the hours, the targets, the eliminated staff benefits or the pressure that remains after the condolences have been issued.
The model that treats staff as instruments for shareholder returns, that cut the older forms of support while CEO pay rose, continues to operate. The obituaries do not interrupt it.
