A young man was buried in Homa Bay County on October 6, after dying in Nairobi in September. The sombre burial slammed shut the chapter of a rising star.
As his family pursues closure, it is experiencing pain from at least two fronts. One, their son died suddenly in his prime.
Two, some of the money that was contributed by some of his friends via a WhatsApp group has not reached them.
The man’s mother asked not to be named. She said that more than Sh180,000 that had been raised by a man who claimed to be a friend of the deceased had not reached the family. She had been in the contribution WhatsApp group, she said.
The mother said she had never met the man who ran the group and collected contributions until the day she went to collect her son’s body in Nairobi.
“That’s when he introduced himself as his friend,” she said.
When her son died, the man rode in the vehicle the family had hired to take the body to Homa Bay. He went with them to the mortuary and back home, where the family fed him and arranged for him to spend the night at a neighbour’s house. By morning, he was gone.
“I was his host, then he disappeared on me. That is when I started thinking, ‘What kind of friendship is this?’” she said.
A day later, a WhatsApp group was started, and she got a link to join. From inside the group, she watched friends send their contributions to the man.
As the burial drew near, she told members of the group that the central burial committee had set up an M-Pesa Pay Bill number to receive all contributions to coordinate the budget.
“I called him to tell him we were holding the final fundraiser: ‘Please deposit what you have in the Pay Bill so that we can complete the funeral.’ It was all excuses. He’d say he’d send, then say he’d deposit in the Pay Bill, and all that,” she recalled.
On the burial day, she says, the man was there, taking photos of the coffin and the mourners and posting updates online, “yet not a cent from him had been contributed to the event”.
She left the WhatsApp group in frustration. The man has since claimed that the deceased told him any money contributed should go towards the education of his child. It is a claim the mother finds hard to accept, but some who attended a heated meeting on Tuesday evening told Nation Lifestyle that the friend had a point.
The brewing controversy is an example of the ever-rising disputes arising from funeral contributions happening online in Kenya. While the present case hasn’t been conclusively labelled as fraud, some have taken that path.
For instance in July, the family of Mercy Githuku said a man who had joined their WhatsApp fundraiser through a shared invite link vanished with several days’ worth of contributions meant for her burial. The group had been set up to help pay her medical bills and was turned into a funeral fundraiser after she died. The man allegedly led daily contribution “challenges” and collected money directly from mourners, who thought it was going to the family. When the treasurer asked him to hand it over, he blocked her and left the group.
Photo credit: Shutterstock
In some cases, there is no death at all. In August, a woman identified only as Michelle found out that a former university friend “killed” her, started a WhatsApp group in her name and collected Sh27,000 from sympathisers for a “funeral” before disappearing. Michelle only learnt she had “died” when a mutual friend sent her emotional farewell messages.
Afro-fusion artiste Tony Ndiema.
Photo credit: Pool
Even when the money gets to a committee, the accounting can cause a storm. In August, the committee that organised the funeral of ohangla musician Tony Ndiema published a breakdown showing it had raised Sh3,930,824 and spent Sh3,932,074, leaving a deficit of Sh1,250. That left tongues wagging.
Days earlier, Jonah Kariuki, the father of hawker Boniface Kariuki , who was shot during protests in Nairobi, said he had lost Sh200,500 to fraudsters posing as Social Health Authority (SHA) officials.
Jonah Kariuki, the father of Boniface Kariuki, who was shot at close range by a policeman, speaks to journalists at Kenyatta National Hospital.
Photo credit: Boniface Bogita| Nation
Even the country’s most prominent families are not immune. On October 1, the committee organising the first anniversary of former Prime Minister Raila Odinga’s death warned Kenyans against giving money to anyone fundraising in the family’s name.
Nation Lifestyle spoke with criminologist Maurice Matheka and innovator Seroney Memba for solutions to the contributions problem.
Mr Matheka is the managing director of City and General Security Consulting Centre, which trades as City Spy. He is a criminologist with a Master’s degree in criminal psychology and a fraud analyst by training.
For him, every contributor should start with questions: “Who has appointed this person to collect money on behalf of these people? Who has given them the authority to bring people together and start collecting money on behalf of the family?”
He sees two kinds of fraud. In the first, someone the family handpicked steals or under-declares the contributions. In the second, nobody appointed the collector at all.
He says the second kind is down to contributors failing to do “amateur due diligence”, which takes only a few seconds: opening the group’s member list.
“If I don’t see any family member of the deceased, I start getting anxious, because probably this person has placed you in a WhatsApp group where there will be no accountability on the side of the beneficiary,” he says.
To catch fake deaths, he suggests checking whether the death has been announced in the obituary pages, and asking basic questions like: was the deceased unwell? Did they die at home or in hospital? If it was an accident, where did it happen and which vehicles were involved?
“Many people take advantage, and you realise one particular burial has up to six WhatsApp groups being run by six different individuals,” he says. “It is important to centralise all contributions to one phone number to the family directly. And all the contributions should be known, clearly indicated and totalled every day during the period of contribution… So that even the day before the burial, everybody knows the total contribution.”
He says families should use their newspaper and social media obituaries to state clearly where money should be sent, and appoint their own treasurer “who is accountable for every cent, every shilling that has been contributed”.
Those who pocket the money, he warns, could face charges of obtaining money by false pretences, and even forgery and fraud if they impersonated a relative or lied that they had been appointed.
“Most people think it’s funny; that after this burial, nobody ever bothers about money that was contributed,” he says. “Remember, the people in that WhatsApp group are witnesses. They contributed and they can bear witness that money was sent.”
Mr Memba, who is the brains behind Chamasure, a platform that helps people in low-income communities get insurance through informal groups, says the problem is as much about how money is spent as how it is collected.
“During the mourning period, people are confused. The bereaved families cannot manage to do the operations,” he notes.
He proposes a transparent system where the committee lists every item and its price, so that any contributor can push back. If a coffin is quoted at Sh25,000, he says, someone should be able to say, “No. That can’t be that price.”
Such a platform, which could also serve weddings and graduations, could hold contributions in a Pay Bill or wallet and pay vendors directly.
“I think it will create more transparency, and it will not give people room to do any kind of misappropriation,” he says.
But he also says some people accused of short-changing families may be innocent. “If you have ever managed a funeral, sometimes you spend your money and it’s not even accounted for.”
Mr Memba adds that any solution must reflect local culture, such as the habit of hiring vendors who are themselves contributors.
“As long as someone comes and handles the trust and the quality of the services provided, I think we can end this menace of every funeral having a war afterwards, especially over the expenditures and the finances,” he says.
