Man beaten after an elderly woman borrows his phone and accuses him of stealing it

One lesson I had to learn rather too painfully was that matatus plying various roads in Kenya are thoroughly infested with crooks of all categories. They come from various villages, I guess, and in various shapes, sizes and… yes, smells.

I also suspect that there must be a very huge underground college – that our very own NSIS is yet to unearth – where these crooks sprout from, more equipped with ‘life skills’ better than an average First Class Honors graduate.

After that painful experience that I am about to narrate, I decided to come to some conclusion that the safest way to travel on Kenyan roads is by first giving every other person in the matatu (including the staff) a default ‘criminal’ tag. Whether he is that frail looking old man with that ubiquitous X-Ray envelope, a youthful college boy or just an innocent-looking beauty, it is mandatory that you be on your guard.

Most of we men have always had a bit of difficulty ignoring a well-oiled skin, a pair of shapely legs in a very short skirt, and a smile we all know is plastic but for convenience, we choose to make it mean friendliness. And before anyone can say ‘pay cut’, you are thoroughly snoring (drugged of course) as your pockets are emptied. And the beautiful pair of legs, the well-oiled skin, the high heels etc alight at the next stop, regardless of what her bus ticket reads. Mission accomplished.

I found this interesting. It was eight in the evening and for some reasons I was still in Kisumu. I boarded a Kakamega-bound matatu and the moment everyone was seated and all the preliminaries cleared (the bus preacher had also secured his bread for the day), one of the crooks announced he had seen some ‘bad’ people board that contraption, and so could people please check whether their purses and phones were safe?

Passengers rushed to most unlikely places. One woman who was breastfeeding her three-months-old baby frantically searched the nappies for what I suspect was her ‘safe’. Some three elderly men went for their socks almost immediately. A drunk who had staggered in saying incomprehensible things, and I had assumed could not spell his own name, carried the day. His hand went straight to his inner clothes. I really doubt whether anyone who fell into this trap reached Kakamega with all the contents of their various ‘safes’ intact. But just before you give up on this story I had earlier promised to narrate, allow me to get to the details.

A very elderly woman occupied a seat next to me. She really looked stressed, this woman. But Kenya has been a source of stress since time immemorial. So I stuck to my ‘Up your game’ article in some magazine I had picked at a friend’s until she asked me to help her with my phone so she could ‘flash’ some mysterious individual. Her phone had run out of power, she said.

The village in me assured me that there was no way such an elderly woman could be up to some mischief. So I gave her the phone, and she truly went ahead to ‘flash’ as she had promised.

Barely ten minutes later, had this ‘stressed’ woman started shouting that somebody had stolen her phone. Stressed women can really make noise when they decide.

But before long though, a ‘Good Samaritan’, a heavily built man, asked for her number so he could call just in case that thief had been unwise enough not to switch off the phone upon stealing it.

The number was dialed and as sure as tomorrow’s sunrise, my phone rang. What followed was a rain of blows on me. All of a sudden I was the thief who had stolen the old woman’s phone. My very expensive phone went just like that. Imagine.