Guest post by Samuel G. Njenga
I constructed and my
final verdict is that everyone on that site was a thief unless they proved
otherwise. You see these fellows thought that I had loads of cash (limitless)
and all they wanted was to squeeze the most out of me, illegally and otherwise.
I set out to do my
residential house with the little cash I had and hoped against hope that
someday I’ll live in my own home. The dream came to pass but by the end of the
project, I had some Solomonic wisdom regarding the dealings in that world;
which I will share with you. The trusted hardware supplier stole in cohort with
the clerk of works, the jua kali foreman stole, the timber guy based in Rongai
stole, the KYMs stole cement, the fundis stole man hours and my rogue brother
meant to assist reduce the pilferages also colluded with them that stole…but
they only did it for a short time because my eagle eyes and a bit of investigative
skills and that mole, actually two of them helped me…Someday I woke up and
decided enough was enough, slapped the foreman after a lengthy rebuke, fired
all of them workers, sat down and reflected on the way forward, installed
controls before resuming the construction….welcome to the underworld that
construction has become.
It started with
profiling of the house and using lime to mark where trenches were to be dug. No
sooner than the markings were done, a gang of Mungiki youths showed up
demanding to dig the trenches, in their own words, that work was set aside for
them and no-one else. And you see they were to charge some fee 3 times compared
to the usual charges from other KYMs…of course I told them I had no money and
will call them when am ready only for them to show up a few days later and find
the trenches already dug. Few threats here and there but they disappeared into
thin air.
Then I met this guy
who would supply everything in this world and dude is an architect by
profession. Kamau will have a solution to all problems; he will get you fine
sand from somewhere past Athi-River, he’d hook you up with some cheap AFCO
cement, he owns a lorry that he’d use to get foundation stones somewhere in
Ruiru, Ndarugu stones as well. Wait…Kamau knew where to also get some nice
trees which we can split and get timber…actually that guy who prepares the
timber is a good friend of his…this Kamau even had the best of painters and metal
fabricators around. The interesting thing about Kamau is that he even proposed
redesigning my house to make the roof better, space utilization…sijui nini…and
so I asked him, “Kwani Kamau you know everything, what is you speciality ” I
smelled a big rat here and avoided Kamau like a plague. And by the way he used
to sniff snuff; that powdered tobacco…and that really put me off and so I
dismissed him.
By the way, when they
were digging those trenches for the foundation, it emerged that the hard rock
was as many as 7 to 10 feet below ground level. You see when I flashed back to
that time I was buying that kaplot and that agent who usually drinks himself
silly showed me some rocky area within the plot and I thought that doing the
foundation would be very easy on that plot only to be confronted by that thick
layer of hard core stones upon digging the trenches. So this place was actually
a quarry at some point, which was back filled with hard core stones and a layer
of 1 foot thick cotton soil; so in other words what I bought was a quarry plot.
This architect of mine who doubled up as a structural engineer returned a
verdict that we could only suspend the house as opposed to doing 7 to 10
courses of foundation stones…..suspend the house..in the air or what?..I wondered.
So he explained the concept of suspending…doing columns to the level of the
hard rock, then some beams at ground level to support the walls..
Then I
realized that not only had I got a raw deal of a plot, but I was in for some
more surprises…most of them very costly….and I will tell you how I formed a
habit of whistling subconsciously when confronted with those costly
surprises…and this neighbor of mine who promised to give me water for koroga
only for the wife to decline on the material day of koroga, having already
assembled the team and machinery and my begging mission to salvage the
situation that had boiled down to a teary fight between man and wife……more in
the next post.
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