The Old Theft Theories Continues

As usual, as it gets busy, the day started with so much psyche you could probably think I would win a lottery that day. Chilly and sunny, the day was a Friday. The normal routine for my fellow Kenyans is to gain boredom at the workplace for adrenaline to go high in the evening. For me, it was a commercial day. I had to catch up on some commercial transactions that meant a lot to me and my year endeavors. You may think I had a short day by the look of the smile on my face. Deep down, I was full of company, insolvency, cum administration, and partnership ideas. Let's say I was surrounded by a positive atmosphere ready to engulf me in the next business or commercial deal.

I live near the city, and going to the central business Centre is just a walk. I didn’t need to complain about the full prices or the city traffic jams. I just had to tell my two legs let's go and don’t catch the dust. That simple. As I walk past the sundry, busy rushing to jobs and business endeavors, I wonder why life can sometimes place us at a different avenue. You look so closely, and a depressed person yet when it is so close to Friday evening, that turns to happiness. Anyway, it wasn’t my time to judge the book; maybe the cover was just sold, and the book was still in the factory.

Here comes the place I yearned to enter and finish my day's business. The watchman at the gate greeted me with a smile as I hurried to escape his daily groan about the government increasing taxes and so the normal xoxo. Nine o’clock was the time I was supposed to begin my commercial undertakings through to midday, then I closed my day with a Friday mood. Smoothly, I successfully managed to capture the attention of my business counterparts as I engaged them on how successful they could run a partnership and more incentives here and there. Maybe I was closing with a smile after each sentence in my mouth. They say a smile is contagious, unlike a cold. Erasmus, the forgotten Charles Darwin grandfather, an 18th-century English physician, who first commented on the origins of a smile on what I named “smile socialization” stated:

“In the action of sucking, the lips of the infant are closed around the nipple of his mother until he has filled his stomach, and the pleasure occasioned by the stimulus of this grateful food succeeds. Then the sphincter of the mouth, fatigued by the continued action of sucking, is relaxed, and the antagonist muscles of the face gently acting, produce the smile of pleasure […] Hence this smile during our lives is associated with gentle pleasure; it is visible on kittens and puppies when they are played with and tickled, but more particularly marks the human features. For in children, this expression of pleasure is much encouraged by their imitation of parents or friends who generally address them with a smiling countenance: hence some nations are more remarkable for the gaiety and others for the gravity of their looks.”

I thought it would be a short day, but I tell you, the afternoon conversations extended to the normal Alasiri Kenyan time. Tired and feeling the Friday mood, I left the office thirty minutes past five. All I can think of is, please ground be easy on my legs; it's just a kilometer or two away. You could hear the ground smile back with a spongy feeling; in reality, the hardness it portrays was not evident; it was also tired of carrying me. Normally, I am used to walking while observing my dream car or people as they fade back to their places. But this one time, I was loaded into my earphones listening to mixed music from Kenny Rogers to Death Bed (coffee for your head) by Powfu.

Just four hundred meters away from my walk is when they stole my mood. I removed my phone from my pocket to look for a song I had recently downloaded to listen to the sweat beats of Mwaki by Zerb featuring Sofia Nzau. My phone was on auto-rotate and had refused to turn to the normal view. I tried to place the phone on a different angle while the earlier music was still on. Remember I am walking on a footpath beside a highway. I didn’t even notice who was ahead or behind. But before I could turn off and on auto-rotate on my phone, I felt a wind and a dark second. The next thing I saw was a motorcycle ahead with only my earphones hanging while they raced away with my dear phone. The phone that I have had for over five years and knew my happiness and my sadness. My adrenaline rose that fast, and I chased it. But I remembered I could only run 5 km/hr, and the bike could turn 80 km/hr in a minute. With a smile on my face, I stopped and relaxed for a minute. Snatching my phone didn’t worry me at fast; what worried me was my identity card was behind the phone cover. If you live in Kenya right now, the replacement of an identity card costs 10 dollars or so after the government decided to make it ten times more a month ago.

The mood of the moment was so mixed that I wondered why I was feeling happy yet worried. As a lawyer, I knew these people had my privacy spoiled from my number to my email to my identity card. I could just keep worrying that they could use it for something dirty. I decided to head back to a central police station near the central business Centre to report just to be on the safer side. All that filled my mind at the moment was, what was the purpose of all that on a Friday evening? Or is it because the time for the phone had come just like our time to die? All that and all that. It was a theft story that never really stole my mood but stole my network for the evening.

The police station seemed so busy. We are used to waiting for hours before someone helps us. That moment on the report and inquiry was another father who was explaining how his son's phone got stolen. The father was in agony since the phone was just three months old, and he was paying the hire purchase loan for it. The son, who was being questioned while being silent and worried, seemed guilty of the loss. Their story was that the son, being new and a first-year in town, fell into a trap of rolled thief cards. I call it a rolled thief card because the thieves are used to rolling a note in a bunch of papers so that it looks like it is a lot of money. They usually drop the money in a way that they make sure you see it. Working in two or three persons, one picks it while you see it, hides it, and tells you to keep quiet. The other comes back asking if you have seen his large amount of money for an MPESA shop or school fees somewhere then goes away. The one with the roll of papers covered with a one-dollar or half-a-dollar note engages you in a conversation to go share the money somewhere. If you're not keen, they will fool you into it, and you may end up giving away your phone and belongings for the lust of money. As the African saying goes, “Money can’t talk, yet it can make lies look true.”

Leave that aside. I narrated my story to the officer at the desk and was given an Occurrence book number. Feeling relieved that I was on the safe side, I walked home with so much keenness as if I was carrying the latest iPhone. Not to be snatched by the phone snatchers. All I can tell you is, there is a group of young men whose business is to steal, to snatch, and to rob. They never really get reformed even after a million shilling in the pocket. They have no upcountry, or if they have, most of them can’t farm the family land to make the nation productive. All they do is destructive and a useless life cycle of stealing. As one of the youths, I wonder how society would be without them. Anyway, let's leave that story for another day. The old stories of snatching and stealing continue…