Instructors’ learning errands

By Tony Ngare

Two weeks ago, I bumped rather coincidentally into a man I met at driving school. Ordinarily, I don’t remember people I scarcely knew beyond a couple of weeks. But this fellow was special. He sensationally claimed that he was Cabinet Minister John Michuki’s son.

 But when I asked him how Kiambu Road was, he was at a loss. I knew instantly he was trying to intimidate the others in the group and I let him off the hook.

Since that day he treated me with respect and didn’t tell me any cock and bull stories. With time we became more than mere acquaintances and I established that he just happened to have attended the same school with one of the minister’s sons.

By this time he was already regretting his bravado about being connected to high places. Word had already reached driving instructors and, since he dressed the part, he could not run away.

For the entire duration that we remained at the driving school, he was forced to part with tidy amounts of cash to the instructors as incentives to teach him better.

So when we met recently our conversation naturally drifted to those days.

"How is Mzee Njoroge?" I teased him and he was beside himself with laughter. For the uninitiated, Njoroge is Michuki’s lesser-known name.

"Forget about my folly," he quipped. "I really suffered for my stupidity."

This led me to seek out a few friends to recall what they had to endure in the hands of driving instructors.

Leave to own devices

David claims that besides exhorting money, these guys could leave you to your own devices while on the road if you refused to part with something.

"I remember one of the days we were scuttling down Valley Road and the instructor pretended to be drowsy," says David. Since it was just his fifth day at the wheel, this scared the hell out of him. Can you imagine it? Cruising down at some crazy speed for a learner with a sleepy instructor? That must have frightened him. To make matters worse, he had not realised that the instructor has a set of pedals on his side, so all that time he thought he was in control of his ominous destiny.

Brian, another good friend, is an oasis of amusing stories. He says that on one of the days he literally ‘worked’ as a taxi driver courtesy of the instructor.

"The instructor had some arrangement with a certain hotel, so he would call to find out if he had a client, " explained Brian.

One day they picked a client of European descent from a hotel in Nairobi’s CBD and dropped him off at Wilson Airport.

Get nothing out of the deal

But while Brian was mad for his lesson time being used up for commercial purposes, he was further irked to learn that he would not get anything out of the deal.

But nothing beats Patricia’s story. One day, her instructor used up her entire lesson to run his own errands. The day before he had colluded with the clerks so that he got a ‘double lesson’ for one student — Patricia. So during that long lesson they drove all the way to Githunguri! And if you thought Patricia was at the wheel, think again.

The instructor told her that student- drivers are not allowed to use Kiambu Road, so he was cruising to some place where she could practise the hill start.

That place coincidentally was his house. They off-loaded several bags of cereal and embarked on the return trip to Nairobi.

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