Mwaura Githua and the quiet work of building a connected Kenya

The news of Evans Mwaura Githua’s death landed with shock, and with questions that are still unanswered. Early media reports said police were investigating after he was found dead in Kilimani, and that investigators were awaiting a post-mortem and further analysis.

In moments like this, the public rushes toward certainty. The wiser move is to slow down. To leave investigators to do their job. To let a family grieve without noise.

And then to do what Kenya rarely does well: to name the builders, and to describe what they built.

Githua was part of a generation that walked into a newly liberalised telecoms market and chose to work on the hard, unglamorous layer: distribution, infrastructure, integration. Com Twenty One’s own story places its founding in 2000, right at the point where “Information Technology and Communication” were collapsing into one industry, and where local firms could finally take their place in a market that had been closed for decades.

That timing matters. Kenya’s mobile revolution did not arrive as a finished product. It was assembled, town by town and client by client, by people who could move devices, connect sites, maintain systems, and keep networks usable in the real world.

Com Twenty One later grew into an ICT solutions provider and systems integration firm, with a footprint beyond Nairobi, listing branches in Nairobi, Nakuru, Eldoret, and Mombasa.
Its older company materials also speak to retail stores that brought services closer to customers, a detail that hints at the company’s early proximity to the everyday telecoms economy.

That early proximity is often missing from the way we tell Kenya’s tech story. We celebrate apps, platforms, and big consumer brands. We skip the chain that made mass adoption possible: the people and companies that kept devices moving, connections stable, and service delivery practical outside boardrooms.

Two decades later, Kenya’s connectivity numbers tell you how large the market became. By end of June 2025, the Communications Authority reported 76.7 million mobile subscriptions, a penetration rate of 146.3, and 47.7 million mobile money subscriptions.

Those are national figures. They were achieved through thousands of choices made by operators, regulators, investors, engineers, distributors, and integrators. In that mix, firms like Com Twenty One sat at the junction between ambition and implementation.

As Com Twenty One matured, it positioned itself squarely in the infrastructure and integration layer: enterprise infrastructure, integrated security, data centre solutions, cybersecurity, training.

Its older materials describe an engineering division with “a strong bias to the Telco industry,” and include a Safaricom testimonial referencing network engineering work.  Capital FM’s reporting on Githua’s death also framed Com Twenty One as a systems integration firm whose clients included major state institutions and programmes.

This arc, from the retail front line to complex systems integration, mirrors Kenya’s own telecoms evolution.

At first, the national challenge was access. A handset. A SIM. Airtime. A signal that held long enough for business and family life.

Then the country moved into scale. More towers. More fibre. More enterprise links. More public sector digitisation. More private sector dependence on always-on systems.

Today, the challenge is resilience and trust. Security. Continuity. The ability to keep critical services working when pressure hits.

Githua’s work lived inside that arc. He was not a headline chaser. He was part of the cohort that treated infrastructure as destiny.

That is why people who knew him speak about temperament as much as achievement. Gentle. Strategic. Kind. Those words can sound soft until you measure what they produce in business: trust, repeat work, teams that stay, clients that call you again when the stakes rise.

A tribute shared by entrepreneur Michael Macharia captured how peers saw him in the ecosystem, describing him as “a fellow founder” and “the founder of Com21-Kenya,” even as details around his death were still unfolding.  It is a simple line, but it carries weight. In Kenya’s ICT market, “founder” often meant pushing through thin capital markets, uneven supply chains, and customers who wanted results yesterday.

George Njuguna, MBS put the infrastructure point plainly: “Mwaura Githua understood that infrastructure is core. In founding and leading Com21, he helped build the communication and digital infrastructure that powers our connected future. His legacy is built into the networks we rely on every day. I honour the life he lived and send Mwaura off with gratitude and respect,” he said.

“Kenya’s telecom story is often told through the big brands. It should also be told through the builders who made adoption real. Evans Mwaura Githua was one of them. He helped put capability in the market, from access to integration, and he did it with calm discipline and respect for people. We will miss him. We will also keep benefiting from the pathways he helped open,” said Harry Hare, Chairman, CIO Africa by dx5

Evans Mwaura Githua stands as part of the generation that helped mobile become normal. Not by talking about impact. By doing the work.

May his family find strength. May the truth of his final hours be established with care.

And may Kenya remember that markets are shaped not only by the giants we quote, but by the steady builders we rarely profile.