Three weeks ago, I was watching the sun go down from the terrace of a small hotel in Embu. You know, one of those joints where, if your half-cleared tea is getting cold, a benevolent waiter might just amble over and refill it — at no cost — to make it hot.
Anyhow, while seated there and feeling like I was Ndega (the Adam of Embu) himself, a childhood friend I had not seen in decades walked up to me. Smiling good-naturedly and with chubby cheeks that radiated what struck me as evidence of years of good life, I invited him to pull a chair.
“Life has treated you kindly, I can see,” I started.
Wrong, my friend politely told me. He had been to hell and back.
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About 10 years ago, he told me, some people asked him to help them move some ‘luggage’ to another side of town. He obliged. And just when he was unloading the luggage, he got new company. He was surrounded by police officers who wanted to see what he was carrying.
He looked around and to his utter shock, the owners the luggage were nowhere to be seen. It turned out that he was carrying a stolen car engine. Needless to say, he was arrested and thus started his journey to prison.
“I was sent to prison for 10 years but, though I couldn’t prove it, I was innocent,” he said, looking at me fixedly in the eye. “I am not asking you to believe me. I served my time, till I was released on presidential pardon for good conduct. What I want you to believe is that Kenyan prisons are hell on earth. They either kill you or harden you. The stories and ideas you get there make you a worse criminal, if you are one.”
What followed was a one-hour horror story. A story of how inmates with no relatives to visit them are forced into same-sex “marriage” by other prisoners who work in the kitchen. The alternative is to starve, as you get only a film-thin slice of half-cooked ugali and one piece of cabbage floating in what looks like dirty salty water.
“You can’t survive. If no one visits you and gives you cash to bribe the inmates in the kitchen, you die and the wardens say you were too weak for prison life. They then send your clothes home. Alternatively you become someone’s ‘wife’,” my friend said, a faraway look of misery clouding his face.
Yet it’s not just food.
Moneyed inmates apparently live large, larger than the prison authorities. They get cigarettes, keep phones and even get illegal stuff. If you have cash, my friend told me, you get everything you want. Some make a killing conning people using their phones and on the internet.
They even obtain phone lines with numbers that look almost like those that mobile telephony companies call from. They lie to you that you have won some lottery cash and in the process of helping you redeem the cash, they clean you out.
I would not have written about my friend’s prison experience; of how inmates hire criminals outside prison to erase evidence and silence witnesses as they continue with life behind bars. I had almost forgotten about it. Then on Tuesday, something happened at the mobile cash agent shop at the estate.
The owner of the shop got a call from people purporting to be from a mobile telephony company. They gave her instructions on what to do with her phone and within no time she had lost her business cash.
Given the rising number of people getting conned by people said to be operating from within prison walls, there is need to do something lest some of these scary heists take an uglier turn.
I am never under any obligation to believe anything I’m told, but suppose my friend’s allegations are all true? Perhaps after concluding that we are a country where those who have cash get anything they want, could some of our prisons have veered from correcting behaviour and become incubation cells for even more hardened thugs?
