The hustler seeks an early Christmas miracle to survive the weekend
He hung up, then turned to me and said: “Madam amesema ni sawa. Take time off to take care of your brother – but try and fix the rent situation by Jamhuri Day.
What you need to know:
- The phone rang and after listening to the news I received, caretaker Dougie had to support me to sit on the sofa in my sitting room – and pick up the phone I’d dropped.
- “Our brother Safari got a very serious stroke, Mike,” my cousin Ohuru had said.
Mike Safara, your everyday hustler, is still stuck in a situation many a Kenyan will recognise and maybe even sympathise with – facing an eviction for lack of rent money, and not daring visit your son (with an estranged Baby Momma) because you have no cash with which to take them out, manze.
And true to her word, the landlady, Madam Karen, had the caretaker ringing my doorbell at five past five PM (Close of Business had passed without the Mpesa).
Dougie, or ‘Mbwa,’ standing there in his overalls with his dreaded padlock, saying:
“Sasa Bwana Safara. Si unajua tuu haujalipa rent? Sasa lazima nikufungie nyumba.”
Despair flooded my heart and I snapped: “You can’t lock it nikiwa ndani ya nyumba. That is illegal …”
“You can send me for supplies kama hautaki kutoka, Mike,” the stone-faced Dougy said. “But I will padlock the house with you inside kama hautaki kutoka. Ukichoka, you call me I open, you leave, we take your things to auction, look for another tenant. Ni hifyo tuu!”
I recalled reading last month in Business Daily that non-performing loans had hit Sh675 billion, and one property company was auctioning Sh8 billion worth of homes across the country.
Times are very hard!
Just then, the phone rang and after listening to the news I received, caretaker Dougie had to support me to sit on the sofa in my sitting room – and pick up the phone I’d dropped.
“Our brother Safari got a very serious stroke, Mike,” my cousin Ohuru had said.
“He is in ICU, on life support, and is not likely to survive …”
You will remember my first cousin George Safari Safara, with whom we grew up close as brothers, and whom in April tried to boost me with a taxi biashara?
Well, looks like he had quietly returned from the States last week, and no doubt had planned to just show up and surprise me, as we got set to be ‘Winter Bunnies.’
Safari always showed up with dollars to burn every December, after a year of his hustles in Dallas – and between Boxing Day and New Year, we’d paint the town red – something I enjoyed as I barely had what people call “disposable income,” – which you can’t have when Maisha ni kutoka mkono mpaka ndani ya mdomo.
“Ni ndugu yako ame-collapse?” Doug asked, picking up my smart phone and unashamedly staring at the pic that had come in on WhatsApp. I nodded numbly.
“I am sending myself the photo!” he said, and before I could object, the deed had been done by the man.
He then spoke rapidly in Kimeru on his phone after re-forwarding the ICU image of Safari, and from all the ‘Madames’ that rolled from his heavy tongue, I knew it was the landlady Karen that he was talking to.
Finally, he hung up, then turned to me and said: “Madam amesema ni sawa. Take time off to take care of your brother – but try and fix the rent situation by Jamhuri Day.” Then before I could even thank him, the ‘Dawg’ was gone, padlock and overalls.
So the chap after all had a heart, and not just a padlock of lead in his chest?
The next day, last Saturday, an old friend from my formal working days Andrew Kithuku called me to invite me to the closing party of the ‘Euro-African Entrepreneur Summit,’ something he called ‘EAE,’ and I told him ‘Why not?’
It’s not like I had anything to do, having ignored Laura’s thousand calls to pick Neo, and not daring open the million texts/ WhatsApp, some that started ‘you useless...’
The EAE closing reception was a grill and open bar affair at a five-star hotel, full of men and women in a mix of formal and casual but expensive clothes, the air a heady fragrance of cologne, conversation, cash, cocktails and Euro cheese picks.
I myself was in a white open shirt, jeans, black boots, neck chain and shades that I thought made me look casually entrepreneurial but Kithuku laughed: ‘You PIMP!’
Embarrassed as I felt about my flashy attire, I still managed to mingle and chat – not ‘network’ like them, as I was a broke hustler with nothing to offer to Europa.
I met a bawdy Andrew Krapper who was really in the lavatory manufacture business and wanted to take on the Chinese crap market in Kenya, and a tall, lanky lovely Charlotte Munch, English lady in sea cargo, with horses here as her hobby.
There was a windbag called Dr. Harold from some clean energy research institute, a local Indian importer Ambani Thara, Ahmet Ousmane (Somali Italian entrepreneur), and one Purity Ngweno, former nurse turned exporter of local nurses to Europe, who marketed her singleness as much as she did her business.
‘I wonder what it would be like to seduce such a lady and live off her like a lazy bum,’ I idly, and half-desperately wondered, already buzzed from pina coladas.
That is when a gentleman with curly hair I later learned was called Petro Pinkras cornered me and flashed a wad of notes at me, that I soon learned was 100 K.
He winked and said: “How much are you selling your Coca Cola for, sir?” he said.
Oh no! Drew had been right. My clothes, as per Petro, made me out as a dealer!
