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!