Why Nairobi women are hiring parents

African American couple looking at laptop in home.

A Kenyan woman recently posted a job proposal on a popular Facebook group’s page. Her demands were modest. She wanted parents for hire. See, her old geezer of a ‘sponsor’ took her so seriously, he wanted to pay bride price. But she would rather have been caught dead in a sewer than have the ceremony. But hey, there was that small matter of hundreds of thousands of shillings at stake and could there be anyone out there willing to pose as her real blood relations in exchange for a cut of the spoils?

The 27-year-old asked ‘interested parents’ to inbox her since taking a 60-year-old odiero of a guka to meet her real parents was out of the question. She was looking for those bending their 40s or thereabouts for the ‘contract.’ A PR practitioner in Nairobi discovered he was being taken for a long ride when he was Sh500,000 short and four years of his life had been wasted by his Ugandan live-in girlfriend and whose university education he was paying for in a campus in Nairobi.