Awful paying habits

By John Kariuki

A popular Swahili jingle goes, kula na kulipa, that you are duty bound to pay for all the services rendered to you. But this being Kenya, paying is often a study in arrogance and deceit! The worst in some people’s hearts often comes out when they are requested to pay up their debts.

Never mind that these creditors may include the estate mama mboga, milkman, mechanic and domestic helps. Often, all pretences to civility and religious righteousness end at the mention of money.

Pick money off trees

"Mnafikiri pesa inakua kwa miti (Do you think that I pick money off trees?)", comes the standard opener. Of course, the paying is deferred to a time "when funds will be available". But minutes later, such cheats will be in supermarkets, pulling shopping-laden trolleys or in pubs, drunkenly singing circumcision songs.

The people you mistreat this way question your all that you pretend to stand for beneath the disguise of your profession.

From my studious eavesdropping and watching in on people, I have come to chronicle some home truths about many educated people with awesome jobs and titles. The first fact is that often when you see them accosted by lower class mobs by the roadside, neither call the police nor intervene. It is not a hest but the mobs are demanding their six-month overdue salaries.

The second truth is that when such mobs visit the elite at their fortified mansions early in the morning, it is not for a cup of tea. Chances are that they have been taken round in circles for too long. "Mnajua mzee amesafiri ng’ambo. (You know the boss has travelled abroad and hence we can’t pay you)!"

When word goes round that the mzee is back, such people descend on him in droves first thing in the morning.

Like me, you probably watch with an academic detachment as a woman with a good job and name buys vegetables and fruits by the roadsides.

She brings along a calculated disdain and total ignorance of the thronging hawkers as she parks her car. "Hii mboga nayo ni nzuri kweli? (Are these vegetables really fresh?)" She may ask and pluck off a few leaves from a cabbage and peer at it keenly, as if expecting to see a snake coiled inside. With no explanation, she drops that one and moves on.

She randomly picks up tomatoes and oranges and plunges her manicured fingers into them as she forcefully squeezes them. Like a terra cotta soldier, she is deaf to the noise of hawkers around her.

Grown them in sewage

But the nastiest part is in her paying. "What you have here is not farm fresh and you have grown them in the Muthurwa sewage, eh! Add me three tomatoes, one orange and a bundle of sukuma wiki," she says.

And a banana that she has already eaten is part of the discount. The hawkers give in to her demands. But the money is in her car and she can only pay when all her shopping has been taken there. No problem. Yet, the hawkers have to wait for her to call her friends and review the previous "hen night" in a seedy part of town.

"Bring change of Sh800 first so that I can give you Sh1000. If you have no change, then open the car boot and take away your vegetables and fruits!" she screams.

Elsewhere, I daily see many grown up men with infantile pub paying antics. It is never enough to give them a bill but the waitresses have to take them through it, item by item.

"You have taken three, bwana and remember you bought that man over there a bottle of beer. You smoked a packet of cigarettes and ordered a bottle of mineral water as well as a recharge card!" they may be told.

Even then they will often pretend to go to the toilet and take off without paying, Other jerks routinely exaggerate their state of drunkenness so that the paying is often done in the car parks as they prepare to leave, making the entire pub management and security be on standby in case drunkards bolt! Yet, these are no ordinary ruffians but respected men of substance.

You must have seen the same attitude in matatus. Apparently well-read people are daily setting their own fares and digging in to defend their positions. You people are overcharging us!" they holler. And true to character, such people demand to alight at the point where their ‘set fares’ can take them.

As I sign off to pay my pending bills, please pay up all your dues quietly and promptly.

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