Some distraught Kenyans have been sharing distressing stories about their botched job searches in the UAE, where they were deported as soon as they landed. Reason, a purported government-to-government deal, proved to be a hoax.
This is not to diminish their pain, or to excuse those who scammed them, but one has to ask: What did they expect? I mean, who, seriously, trusts anything said by a bunch of liars and charlatans? It’s a conversation that I have had privately with relatives who considered sending their kin under some of those government schemes, which I dismissed as scams. Now that the chickens are coming home to roost, you can predict the government’s line of defence: A legitimate government programme was hijacked by rogue agents, we’ll be told, a commission has been established…
I understand Kenyans’ attention span is a paltry two weeks. Then life goes on… And the crooks implicated in the scam will gather courage to take pictures with the same technocrats to launch new scams.
Here’s the thing. Nairobi is not reputed as “shamba la mawe” for nothing. It means the same forms of trickery that kept crooks in the streets for generations are being deployed by State agents on a national scale because a) they are confident of police protection, b) they have gotten away in the past c) growing desperation among Kenyans will guarantee more new “customers.”
In the Nairobi of my youth, one notorious group comprised a mother and her children masquerading as beggars. The woman’s grown son’s wife joined the fray, as did her grown daughters’ children. Every day, they staked out under a variety of guises, the most inventive being the bandaging of their kin as an invalid who needed urgent medical attention.
One day, a good Samaritan who offered to take the “patient” into a pharmacy to pick the meds returned to find the group had melted in thin air, with the bag containing his valuables. The Kenya Kwanza administration acts and looks like those street thieves, always scheming and plotting to scam Kenyans. As some sages keep saying online: Hapa hatuna nchi!
This is not to diminish their pain, or to excuse those who scammed them, but one has to ask: What did they expect? I mean, who, seriously, trusts anything said by a bunch of liars and charlatans? It’s a conversation that I have had privately with relatives who considered sending their kin under some of those government schemes, which I dismissed as scams. Now that the chickens are coming home to roost, you can predict the government’s line of defence: A legitimate government programme was hijacked by rogue agents, we’ll be told, a commission has been established…
I understand Kenyans’ attention span is a paltry two weeks. Then life goes on… And the crooks implicated in the scam will gather courage to take pictures with the same technocrats to launch new scams.
Here’s the thing. Nairobi is not reputed as “shamba la mawe” for nothing. It means the same forms of trickery that kept crooks in the streets for generations are being deployed by State agents on a national scale because a) they are confident of police protection, b) they have gotten away in the past c) growing desperation among Kenyans will guarantee more new “customers.”
In the Nairobi of my youth, one notorious group comprised a mother and her children masquerading as beggars. The woman’s grown son’s wife joined the fray, as did her grown daughters’ children. Every day, they staked out under a variety of guises, the most inventive being the bandaging of their kin as an invalid who needed urgent medical attention.
One day, a good Samaritan who offered to take the “patient” into a pharmacy to pick the meds returned to find the group had melted in thin air, with the bag containing his valuables. The Kenya Kwanza administration acts and looks like those street thieves, always scheming and plotting to scam Kenyans. As some sages keep saying online: Hapa hatuna nchi!
By Peter Kimani