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Deacons chief executive recalls ill-fated Saturday [Business Daily (Kenya)]
[September 19, 2014]

Deacons chief executive recalls ill-fated Saturday [Business Daily (Kenya)]


(Business Daily (Kenya) Via Acquire Media NewsEdge) September 21, 2013, started as a normal day for Muchiri Wahome, the CEO of the Deacons Group. As part of his weekend routine, he would visit some of the shops in the malls to speak to staff and customers. That Saturday, he was at Sarit Centre.



"I started receiving calls from (Westgate) members of staff and the store managers saying there was a robbery. I got into my car and dashed there but I found a large crowd of people in front of Westgate. They were mainly the hawkers on Peponi Road and they were helping people streaming out of Westgate. They put a man who had been shot in my car and I drove him to MP Shah Hospital then started to drive back," he recalls of that dreadful day, this time seated in the safety and comfort of his office.

By then the police had arrived and had barricaded the area. Mr Wahome parked his car and walked to get closer to the mall. He was still getting calls from staff and customers from inside the mall begging to be rescued but all he could do was to assure them the police were on the scene and ask them to calm down.


At Westgate, Deacons had 30 members of staff and operated four stores, namely Identity, Mr Price Home, Adidas and Woolworths.

"At that time we did not know it was a terrorist attack. It was just chaos. Luckily over a period of five hours, the last employees had been rescued. One of our members, however, was shot but was rushed to hospital and has since recovered," he says.

His phonebook is full of staff members' phone numbers (they also have his) at all levels thus he was able to keep in contact with them.

"I felt responsible for my staff and customers. I felt hopeless standing there because we did not have a disaster response plan. I mean who anticipates that sort of thing. I think that was the biggest exposure. You are supposed to be in charge, to know what to do to save people," he says.

That day he realised that organisations and individuals need to think more seriously about worst case scenarios.

"I just realised how vulnerable we are and that is also what business is. It is vulnerability. You have got to analyse risk all the time and have a plan for those risks that you identify; fire, death of staff and accidents in stores. Anything can happen but do you have a survival plan?" On the second day of the siege, they called all the staff to the head office and in a "very manual way", ticked their names against a list provided by the HR department. It was an emotionally draining day, Mr Wahome says, as the trauma of facing death and seeing it happen around them set in.

They shared stories of using towels to bandage customers who had been shot in the Mr Price Home store, hiding in storage rooms at the back, the sound of gunfire ringing in their ears and the sight of human blood all over the mall.

Deacons then organised a counselling programme that lasted three months and absorbed the Westgate staff in the rest of the business.

Before embarking on a business recovery programme, Deacons talked to their staff, security agencies and IT department to create a quick and effective communication policy in a disaster environment.

Deacons developed a response tree that saw the whole organisation broken into small modules of 10 people each responsible for 10 others. Had it been up and running during the Westgate attack, Mr Wahome would have called 10 people and they in turn would have called 10 people each, and he would have known immediately what was happening.

"Communication was the biggest gap because in the absence of information there is worry and chaos. You don't know what is happening and you cannot make a decision," he says.

After writing off $3.5 million (Sh300 million) worth of assets and inventory, Deacons started the long road to recovery. Luckily, the company had taken terrorism insurance because one of its audit and risk directors had felt that given its cost at the time, it was necessary.

READ: Deacons estimates losing Sh173m in mall attack [email protected] (c) 2014 Nation Media Group. All Rights Reserved. Provided by SyndiGate Media Inc. (Syndigate.info).

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