Business begins to peak on Thursdays when those that patronise bars begin to unwind and ease into the weekend.
On Thursday this week, as the rest of you slept in, couch potatoed in front of the TV or went to a sherehe somewhere instead of cleaning your environment and planting trees like the government and your employer expected you to, I decided to use my hard-earned money on a taxi to work. Most taxi drivers put on music and ignore you, especially if, like me, you are the kind that prefers to sit in the back because you want to be ignored.
This particular taxi driver, I soon found out, is the talkative kind, therefore sitting at the back had no impact on him whatsoever. But I didn’t mind, if anything, his stories turned out to be quite interesting. He confirmed that the taxi business wasn’t what it was five years ago. Five years ago, he told me, the least he took home was 5,000 shillings a day, and then he began to make 1,000 shillings a day, sometimes less, change he attributed to the rising cost of fuel, and being paid half of what he was initially paid per kilometer by the taxi hailing companies he has registered with.
To survive, he told me, he sold his car and bought one that was more fuel efficient. Obviously, any business you can think of has been hard-hit by unfavourable economic conditions which have contributed to the rising cost of living.
He told me that Sunday was his most lucrative day of the week because many church goers tended to take a taxi to and fro church. Also, this was the day when most Kenyans visited friends, relatives, or boyfriends and girlfriends, and also the day when majority of families spent time together, with quite a number visiting entertainment facilities.
Business begins to peak on Thursdays, he told me, when those that patronise bars begin to unwind and ease into the weekend. This is where the conversation became illuminating. He told me that while he made most of his money on the weekends as he transported customers from one entertainment spot to another and finally to their homes late at night or in the wee hours, weekends are also the most challenging for those in the business, and that inexperienced taxi drivers can easily find themselves in unfortunate situations that have landed some behind bars.
“I never carry a lone intoxicated person, they have to be two or three,” he told me.
Perplexed, I wondered why, and he explained that chances of an intoxicated person falling asleep or ‘blacking out’ in his car are high. Should this happen, waking up this person when you get to the destination becomes a difficult task, and in the process of trying to rouse the passenger, one may be accused of trying to rob the customer, or attempting to rape, if the passenger is a woman.
“Even if your customers are all drunk, there is always one that is less intoxicated, and will take it upon himself or herself to wake the others when we arrive at the destination,” he explained.
He also says that in this business, it doesn’t pay to mix business with pleasure. To underscore why this rule is so important, he narrated a story of a colleague who is languishing in prison after he gave in to a female passenger’s advances and the two ended up in a lodging. The woman, he says, had been intoxicated, and when she woke up the next morning and found a strange man beside her, she had called the police and said the taxi driver had kidnapped and raped her. To cut a long story short, the man was tried and found guilty. His car, which he had bought using a bank loan and which he was due to repay in two months’ time, was repossessed by the bank, and his embarrassed wife, as you can imagine, left him.
“What life will he come out to after he leaves prison now that everything he had is gone?” he posed.
Another of his rules is that once the clock strikes 8pm, he does not accept requests beyond certain areas within Nairobi, pointing out that hijackings are common, and it pays to stick to busy urban areas when night falls. An exception is when a passenger he had transported during the day calls him and requests him to return him or her to the destination he did the pickup. But even then, he will only agree to this if the person is alone, never with another person.
And always listen to your intuition. Quite a number of times, he told me, he has taken one look at a person and promptly cancelled the ride and driven away. Once, he adds, “something” urged him to turn back on his way to pick a customer, even going as far as blocking the number the man had used to call him.
“Kwa hii biashara, lazima ukae chonjo…” he concluded as I paid him.
