A young man and his female partner approached him as he parked his car next to the busy Simmers Club. It was late into the night and the pair was visibly drunk.

“Taxi?” the man inquired, with the lady clinging to his arm.

“Yes,” the taxi driver responded, before opening the back door and ushering the two in.

As soon as they jumped in, they started making out even before the taxi driver could ask them where they wanted him to drop them.

 “Take us to River Road,” the guy who looked like a foreigner responded, before recoiling back to the sexual indulgence. It was a very uneasy moment. Within no time, all the taxi driver could hear was moans and groans as the two started to lustfully tear into each other. It was not the first time he was experiencing this with a client. In fact, it is part of his everyday experience.

“Hey guys, I will have to charge you for that. This is not a room for lodging,” the taxi driver casually told them. He pulled the car to the roadside and demanded that they pay an additional Sh1,500 for their guilty pleasures.

Unperturbed, the guy pulled out Sh2,000 from his wallet and begged the taxi driver to just excuse them for ten minutes so that they can finish their steamy pleasure. He stepped out. It was a really short affair. They never even got to River Road. Within another fifteen minutes, it was “Mission Accomplished” and now they wanted him to take them back to the club. He had made his cash, the taxi drivers’ nightlife way!

“I go through this every night. It is normal for people up to walk to me asking me to let them use my car for a ‘quickie’. I usually charge them some little cash and let them go ahead. It becomes an issue when they get caught romping away in the car by the police because it is illegal. I usually stand at a little distance, just to watch over them,” says the taxi driver.

Just like the night watchman, taxi drivers keep the dark secrets of the night life. They have seen it all. From near-death threats to their lives through to attending to clients who refuse to pay up, taxi drivers can tell tales that would leave anyone shocked.

They are strangers who people have learned to trust. The nature of their job makes them as trusted in those wee hours as men of cloth. Picture this; you have been hanging out in the club until 4am and now, sloshed as you are, you want to go home.

You have all your valuables- from your phones to the ATM cards and cash in your wallet- with you and as soon as you tell the taxi driver your destination, you slide into slumber at the back of the taxi, leaving your life entrusted to this stranger. The next thing you know is the taxi driver waking you up to tell you that you have arrived. So you alight, leaving to go get drunk and hopefully trust another stranger, another day.

Cases of rogue taxi drivers are not totally unheard of. Alongside the good guys, there are rapists, abductors and robbers who masquerade as innocent drivers and lurk in the dark, lying in wait for unsuspecting prey.

We at Pulse magazine have been on the prowl, investigating the night life of a taxi driver and here are some of the confessions of the ones we interviewed.

Case 1: Kamau picks up a popular politician with his clandestine women. Kamau, who operates his taxi around Nairobi’s CBD says that he picked a well-known rowdy politician from a city pub in town and took him and his clande to her home in Kitisuru.

At the back seat, Mr Politician was shouting, kissing his woman and Kamau had to stop the car a few kilometres from Kitisuru for the couple to fulfil their sensual cravings before driving on to the house.

Despite his advanced age, the politician is used to using the services of the taxi guy to collect young girls, some as young as 19. He pays Kamau handsomely for the services and they have unwritten rules that Kamau should never reveal all these to anyone.

Case 2: Mwangi had robbers counting cash in the taxi. These four guys had just executed a robbery mission when Mwangi, a Nairobi taxi driver, picked them.

“This was the most shocking of all experiences that I have gone through in my 20 years as a taxi driver. I picked up a band of robbers who after jumping into the car started counting a stash of cash on the back seat,” Mwangi, who is 63 years old, says.

He picked the three clients from Lavington. They asked him to drive them to Ruaka. It was after they jumped into the car that they unleashed their bags and started counting wads of bank notes.

He could tell they had just executed a robbery. At one point, Mwangi was so terrified since he thought they’d take his car or kill him because they had guns.

However, after getting to their Ruaka destination, they left as fast as they came, leaving him with a generous tip. This is not the first time in his career that he has unknowingly picked the wrong people unknowingly. He was once robbed at gun point and his car recovered the next day in Namanga.

Case 3: Jeremiah gets girls asking to “pay in kind”, instead of cash.

Jeremiah confesses how he picked a lady in Westlands last week and took her to Kahawa West. He had made it clear that he was going to charge Sh1,500.

Midway the drive, the lady revealed that she only had Sh200 on her but she still needed to get home. Jeremiah was shocked when the lady offered to compensate him with the unexpected. The young girl who seemed to be in her early 20s, offered him sex, including oral, as compensation.

“It was as if that was good enough to fuel the car,” Jeremiah says.

That said, he confesses that he took the offer. This is not the first time Jeremiah has gotten such an offer.

Case 4: Some clients blackout in the car and taxi drivers usually get a hard time when trying to wake them up.

“It not funny when someone passes out in the car and cannot even say where their house is. I remember picking up this girl from the club who vomited in the car before blacking out,” one taxi driver says.

Case 5: Street girls’ mission home

Taxi drivers who operate around the red light district confess how they offer call girls night refuge. In fact, they work closely with the call girls who once in a while give them handsome tips after making a good kill.

It is also said some taxi drivers collude with prostitutes who sometimes drug their clients after which they steal from them and abandon them on some dangerous streets.

Case 6: Muli and the girls who sneak from home and change in the car. Muli picks a young girl from Roysambu every Friday at 11pm and takes her to Westlands where she parties the night away.

The girl, who lives with her elder brother, has to sneak from the house and be back before day break. She always has, in a little sachet, a skimpy dress for the night and shoes to match. As soon as Muli picks her, the girl sets about changing her clothes at the back seat.

She gets stark naked in the back seat and does not mind his seeing her get uncovered. She then starts to put on her make up on and asks him to drop her in the club.

Muli tells Pulse how tempting this habit may be for him.

He remembers how the girl at one time had to change from some smelly stuff before throwing it through the window.