Building Sky-Swift: Enock Opara Makokha on Logistics, Freight and Cross-Border Trade

In this section of the interview, Enock Opara Makokha explains the origins of Sky-Swift Limited and the business experience that led him to establish the company in 2018. Before founding Sky-Swift, he had spent around seven years running Petrosun Kenya Limited, a privately owned petroleum trading and distribution business. Petrosun operated through Kenya’s Open Tender System and Kenya Pipeline Company arrangements, serving markets across East and Central Africa, including Uganda, Rwanda, Burundi, the Democratic Republic of the Congo and South Sudan. At its peak, the company had its own storage capacity, more than 20 trucks and four retail outlets, while handling approximately 5,000 metric tonnes of petroleum products per month, including petrol, diesel, jet fuel and kerosene.

Makokha describes how the expansion of Petrosun brought increasingly demanding working capital requirements. He says that although the business operated with approximately US$6 million in operational capital, managing liquidity became difficult when several petroleum cargoes were discharged within short periods. At the same time, regulatory requirements were becoming more demanding for smaller oil marketing companies, while multinational operators benefited from substantially greater financial resources. These financial and structural pressures ultimately contributed to his decision to sell Petrosun.

He then explains that Sky-Swift represented a strategic transition from petroleum into logistics, freight and accommodation. Rather than starting from scratch, Makokha sought to apply the knowledge he had accumulated in trading, infrastructure management, distribution and cross-border operations to a business model that he believed could grow more sustainably. His experience operating across several African markets therefore became an important foundation for Sky-Swift’s development and its subsequent focus on logistics and international trade.