People say that there are only two groups of people, the haves and the have nots. Everyone wants to be the former but most eventually land on the latter. I today found myself among the haves who had closed out a road to showcase their mega beast bikes. The have nots on matatus or on foot are trying to get to their various destinations but are inconvenienced by the large number of haves who seem oblivious of all this. It's a story so old that people try as much as possible not to scream it in public.
This is my story from the nairobian perspective and it all started about 80 years ago.
In those times the haves consisted of the white colonialists and their pets, home guards. The have nots on the other hand consisted of the illiterate, don't want to be bothered towing the line Africans who had their land stolen from them. Amongst these illiterate people some wisdom sprouted, this wisdom was either forced out in the form of forcing at least one child from the homestead to go to school or the child volunteering and showing promise and sufficient aptitude to handle the lessons. The "one student per home stead" initiative created what would be the first generation of modern day haves in our community. Most of the well known politicians of that time came from this team, same us business men and in some cases religious leaders. However, with the sudden upbringing that they got and the upsurge in power unfortunately ruined what would have been good morals. The newly literate went on a rampage after independence and started looting the country, what came next was a clear valley separating two escarpments holding the haves on one side and the have nots on the other.
In the last 50 years people have been working on moving from the lower escarpment, braving the floods and the winds poured down by the privileged to prevent them from reaching their goal. Some have made it while others have died trying, and it's with this I come to my point. How do you differentiate between a have and a have not in Nairobi, it may sound simple but I would like to say that it is not. I have three friends, mark ,Jonathan and michael. I definitely have more friends than that but let us assume that I only have these three. Mark has a 9 - 5 lives in a rental house in a lower middle class area( umoja 2) and commutes to work, Jonathan works as a lawyer in a high end law firm earns six figures and drives a Mark X while Michael is a self employed guy who basically moves from one business line to the next. These three friend if mine hang out regularly with each other where Jonathan offers to buy a lot of the drinks while Michael almost never offers.
It may be obvious to you all who the have in this situation is, but before I tell you there is an undercover story to everyone. Mark is involved in the company Sacco and has been for a very long time, because he is not married he doesn't have a lot of obligations so he saves most if his money and he invests what he can. In his 4 years of employment he has a million shillings in the Sacco and has about 200,000 worth of stock in a business he opened up in his neighborhood. All in all he lives off of the business but ploughs his salary into other profitable endeavors. At an instance he can get a loan for 2.5 million and build a house for himself without accessing a mortgage.
Jonathan has two loans, one for the car and the other he took to purchase his furniture. He got a job straight out of law school and started living the good life early. One if the basic laws of money is to use less than a third of your salary in housing, he uses half. On top of the party time and women he entertains, Jonathan lives from month to month. If he was to lose his job at any particular time then he would have 15,000 shillings to his name and most if his physical possessions would either be repossessed or auctioned off.
Our good friend hustler Mike, is a complicated case. He has minimal expenses, the basics needs of food shelter and clothing reign supreme in his mind. He never sees the use of fun times if he is the one paying, his deals fall through about 30 % of the time so he is always wary. He is never in debt to anyone at any time and is always liquid because you never know how the next deal will come. One thing he has over the others is that being linked with other hustlers also means he gets stuff a bit cheaper and he uses what Kenyans would call a third hand car and has purchased a few plots of land here and there for extremely low prices.
So tell me from your assessment, who do you think lives next door to you?
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