Time to start vetting landlords?

Nanyuki is a dusty frontier town. It must be the volcanic dust generated by Mt. Kenya erupting millions of years ago that causes all this dust in this rain deprived side of the mountain.

As I approach Nanyuki the refrains of the opening song to the famous Western movie “The good, the bad and the ugly” reverberate in my mind as this fine dust coats everything in its path.

Recently the county government seemed to have a plan to reduce the dust levels but after the bulldozers were done the levels are now worse than ever.They just seemed to have spread the dust more equally to the whole town.

Like any frontier town it has to have its fair share of bad ass guys like in any good Western movie and I encountered one barely a month after I settled down in town and I had to move house rather abruptly as a result.

The place that I called home in Nanyuki turned out to be a tough place to reside in…..like any frontier town! For starters, water was an issue and I came to realise that the landlord for whatever reason had not seen it fit to install a storage tank to have a regular water supply so many mornings like in any town with an intermittent water supply I was forced to bathe from a basin on a slippery floor, definitely not the best way to start a morning. The last straw was when the house help that cleans and cooks for me told me that there was no water to cook a meal and I slept hungry that night!

Secondly, the young man who had been employed to look after the property and who would open the gate whatever time I arrived home upped and left one fine day supposedly (according to the landlord) because his father was threatening to sell the family land in Meru but I suspect more because of non-payment of his salary by his employer......as the young man told me later.

The difficult job of opening a locked gate, on a lonely stretch of road, in the dark of night, after a night out was taking its toll on me and I was getting more and more paranoid that I would be mugged outside my home one night.

But the raison d’etre for my leaving was something more serious, career limiting serious for that matter. It was serious enough to warrant me reporting the incident to my security colleagues at Head Office.

I had no inkling when I moved into that house that the owner of the property was a bad man.....like found in any frontier town anywhere in the world. After all I had dealt with the wife when I negotiated for the place and he only happened on the scene a week or so after I had moved in supposedly after a business trip to Nairobi.

He did not strike one as being a villain and he was friendly and well-spoken his half-finished houses notwithstanding. Seeing possible business for the bank I had struck up a conversation with him once asking him why his 6 houses were still incomplete despite substantial progress on the same – about 85% - and he had shrugged off the question and told me that he would complete them at his own pace.

Apparently this bad ass of a man had a history of crime and more specifically handling stolen goods as the person that crooks took their loot to for sale after committing their dastardly deeds. Depending on who you spoke to, the story goes that he had also been involved in fraud to the tune of hundreds of millions of shillings which as a visitor to Nanyuki I had no idea about but which was however common knowledge in the town.

A person who I can only describe as a good Samaritan and intent on looking out for my welfare is the one that visited me at work and hinted to me that I needed to look for another place to live after giving me a summary of the ills of my landlord but she added that I was free to get independent confirmation from anyone else whom I was close to. I was confused because usually it is the landlord that investigates the tenant and not the other way round.

Armed with this snippet I went looking for confirmation that I was being housed by a delinquent. The information was confirmed through a very reliable source and I immediately began house hunting for alternative accommodation which I was fortunate to get the same day……..on the 3rd floor of an apartment complex in Muthaiga, Nanyuki! It also came out that his trips out of town were court dates in Nairobi.

When I informed him that I intended to move out for the reasons of water scarcity and my own safety……there was no way I was going to tell him that I knew he was a thug lest he shoots me dead……the promises came thick and fast of how he would install a water tank for me and hire someone to open the gate for my safety but I told him that it was too late and I had already paid for the new digs.

I feel sorry for his young wife with her two young kids who has to live in constant fear of her husband being jailed (again) and she having to look after the kids herself. The compound was in a veritable state of permanent lockdown with the gate always padlocked, with signs of CCTV surveillance (though I never saw a camera) and razor wire atop the gate….and a posse of very noisy geese to warn of any intrusion into the compound.

My biggest fear was that my landlord would convince the house help in my absence that I had agreed to keep something for him which I would eventually be found with only to be accused of handling stolen goods and I had to do what I had to do for my own security.

Now I know that in future you need to vet your landlord lest you find yourself caught up in stuff you had no idea about!

I am on a self-imposed travel advisory:

There is no other way to describe the shooting dead of someone other than to say that the movies glamorize the act of dying through a gunshot. Usually the person who is shot in the movies goes down and is dead before his body hits the ground, or else is able to make a last minute dying confession as his life’s blood ebbs away. But this was no movie that was being shot - pun intended- this is the real deal and real people has been fatally shot before our eyes and shocked the whole world.

But let me start from the beginning by firstly stating that I am neither a bigot nor a racist. What I am about to state is from the bottom of the heart of a peace loving and non-confrontational individual who is also a peace maker at heart and who loves humanity.

Like many of you I have watched the viral footage of those African Americans that were shot by white police officers leading to their eventual deaths in Minnesota and Louisiana whose only crime it would seem was being black American and male and who seemingly posed no threat to the armed police officers involved in the shooting incidents. This has traumatized me immensely for reason that I shall reveal.

This appears to the untrained eye to be the use of unjustifiable and excessive force in a situation which could have been easily resolved without the use of firearms. There is also no gainsaying that the work of law enforcement officers anywhere in the world is dangerous at best and risky at worst and that a split second decision when caught up in a confrontation with someone who could be hiding a concealed weapon and be liable to use it at the slightest dropping of the guard by the police officer is all it takes between life and death. The question on everyone’s lips now is would the same threat level have been perceived should the suspect been a white male American or conversely would the same level of deadly force have been used towards a white male suspect?

The resultant and unjustified sniper attacks on police officers in Miami in what was dubbed as a peaceful anti police rally that has led to the deaths of several police officers has also taken the world by surprise and now threatens to rock to the core the bastion of freedom known the world over amid loud calls to action for stricter control of gun laws in the United States. That action was totally uncalled for despite the levels of provocation that the black community felt in regards to seemingly unprovoked attacks on their community over the years. Is this the start of a civil war of epic proportions?

However that is not the point of this post despicable as the action by all those involved is, my point is to register the reason for my trauma ever since I watched one of the videos. This is the one of the man being subdued by two burly police officers one of who then draws his firearm and then appears to shoot the man at close range in the chest area then rolling off as the man now in his death throes makes feeble attempts to do something, anything as his life slowly ebbs away and all in the full glare of the public who were recording the whole incident. My trauma is probably being replicated manifold across the African continent where many have relatives and friends who are based in the United States.

It is one thing to hear of police officers fatally shooting a suspect but it is quite another to see this replayed in real life and it frightens and traumatizes those who are by nature squeamish and repelled by the sight of blood as I am. Those young men had families just like me, they had dreams and aspirations to see their children grow up into productive members of the communities and their society, they had dreams of being responsible fathers and parents and making a difference in the lives of their families but this was not to be as they have been felled by a policeman’s bullet at the prime of their lives.

I now wonder if I’d be safe as a visitor in the United States and if my African American and Kenyan brothers in law are safe in that country that they call home or if they might also suffer the same fate as has befallen their community member’s victims of tragic shooting incidents through no fault of their own other than supposedly being black.

I also wonder if my nephew who has recently joined college in that country is safe as he makes his way to and from school and his job with his car that may have him pulled over for having a busted tail light. What of my old high school friends who chose to make a livelihood in the United States many years ago and whom we regularly communicate with on social media and meet up with when they are visiting Kenya? Are they safe presently and will their safety continue to be assured?

I can only hope that reason prevails and that these incidences do not provoke an overzealous reaction by the police force intent on stamping their power and authority over a community that has seemingly had enough of their excesses over the years. If 9/11 is anything to go by it is likely that the authorities will want to tame what they fear may be a hot topic for years to come with some sweeping Senate legislation to back up any actions that they might take.

As things stand we had a planned visit to the USA next year with my wife which she is free to go for but which I shall have to put on hold for my own safety until someone, somewhere can guarantee me that I shall be safe in that country because a black man seems to be a walking and legitimate target for overzealous and mostly white police officers.

Accordingly and even as I mourn the senseless shooting deaths of the latest victims of police excesses in the United States I have put a self-imposed travel advisory on myself until further notice to the United States.

For now let me wallow in the difficulties of my own country anonymous amongst millions of other Kenyan males and unlikely to be stopped by police officers for the crime of being a man of African extraction. As for my male family and friends in the United States you need to remain safe as you move and travel around making sure that you do not fall foul of the law for the sake of the sanity of all of us back here not only in Kenya but across the African continent.

Even if I did not know any of the victims over the years I mourn with their families for the senselessness of it all and may God rest their souls in eternal peace!!