Nairobi is tough. If you are not conned by sweet-talking snake-oil salesmen, you will be drugged or mugged. However hard you try to stay safe; they will get you, one way or another. It doesn’t matter that you do not walk in seedy neighbourhoods, or take a matatu or stay online, they will find you somehow.
My first time getting conned was not dramatic. Neither did I court danger. I was just walking to the bus stop around National Archives and this elderly lady approaches me. She calls me “my child” and it strums my heart strings. She looks like my late grandma and since I was brought up well, I respectfully stop to listen to her.
She has a sob story about how she is coming from seeing her sick daughter in Kenyatta National Hospital but was pick pocketed in the bus and now she has no fare to get to her home in Githunguri.
How can I let the big bad city hurt an innocent grandma like her? Afterall, she just needs a hundred shillings to get home to her grandkids before nightfall. I reach into the depths of my impoverished coffers and dig out my lunch money for the next two days and gladly hand it to her.
I apologise on behalf of the bad people of the city, wish her well and walk away feeling good in the heart for doing enough God’s work to get me on either the diplomatic or fast track queue to heaven.
Two weeks later, grandma has forgotten my face but not her trademark model and she approaches me with the same sob story at almost the same spot.
It takes me a few seconds to realise what is going on and I angrily ask her how come she still hasn’t gotten home, two weeks later! I tell her that she needs to get out of the city! She rudely retorts that Nairobi is not mine and disappears into the sea of commuters.
I walk away feeling used and I can almost hear the Eurythmics song ringing in my mind- “I travel the world and seven seas. Everybody is looking for something. Some of them want to use you. Some of them want to be used by you. Some of them want to abuse you. Some of them want to be abused….”
In this city, the moment you become a wise victim and swear that you will not allow yourself to be conned again; the Union Of Conmen seem to hand you over to the next upper level of their membership. You are graduated. The second time I was conned much more than my lunch money.
The year is 2003 and a beautifully designed full-page press advert was laid out in one of the dailies, advertising an estate of own-compound three-bedroomed houses in Athi River for an affordable price of 3m. A few days later, another advert says that if you pay a deposit of 10% to commit in two weeks, they will discount the three million houses to an enticing two point three million price.
I was hooked. In my investment club’s next meeting, the golden opportunity is on the agenda. We are all hooked. I paid the 230,000 shillings and waited to be invited for the ground-breaking ceremony in weeks. Twenty-one years later, I am still waiting for the invitation.
My next encounter with conmen was by proxy. My mother had just retired, and she was looking for a profitable investment for her retirement benefits. Pyramid schemes were the talk of town. She put in all her eggs into one of the Ponzi schemes and did not mention it to anyone. That is until the media was awash with news of the collapsing schemes and how lives were getting ruined.
The bible verse Esther 8:2 best describes my mother’s state when she broke the news during an emergency family meeting; “And she put away her glorious apparel, and put on the garments of anguish and mourning; and instead of precious ointments, she covered her head with ashes and dung; and she humbled her body greatly, and all the aspects of her beauty she covered with her torn hair”. She must have raised hell because she somehow got most of her life-savings back.
This was the one time I did not have a dispute with the genetics branch of biology! How can my family be so susceptible to conmen? Do they smell my lineage out. Do we walk around with an invisible marking on our face shouting “next victim”! That evening, I must have worn a forlorn face looking at my children.
Anyway, although I have since grown a thick skin I will not sit here and lie that I have not fallen victim numerous other times since. How can I protect myself from the clever people who must earn a livelihood from fools like me.
Years later, my cousin introduces me to a company that is going to change her life from nothing to a billionaire. It is run by a clever guy who has just returned from abroad. The guy has a PhD. He is learned and knows what he is talking about. The richest people in Kenya and even bishops were some of the investors in this company.
The company is causing a splash in all sorts of industries- IT, property, hospitality, and it is a privilege to be invited to invest with them. They will shortly be going public, and it is important to be on the inside before they explode and make billionaires at the Nairobi Stock Exchange.
I put in my hard-earned one hundred and fifty thousand. I would have put in more if I had it. Numerous visits to their offices and tens of abandoned projects countrywide, court cases and evictions, my dream to be rich remains just that.
Today I only allow the online scammers to get to me. There are a hundred and one new WhatsApp groups looking for contributions for causes as wild as taking a child to a sporting event overseas, furnishing a house for a celeb, a deserved holiday for a shady character or paying school fees for an orphan who later turns out to be a scammer. My threshold is only a thousand shillings.
In the meantime, I gladly continue to do God’s work and will not hesitate to contribute for deserving medical or last rites causes because we are Africans.
Is there anyone in this city who can raise their hand up and swear that they have not been a victim?
Reminds me of a quote by P.T. Barnum Quote: “There is a fool born every minute.”
– By Raphael Mworia
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