Jail-time: His short stature got him imprisoned, then out

Are ABSENT fathers presenting boy-child criminals to police and courtrooms?

At a tender age of 12 years, a young boy named Ngunjiri dropped out of school to start a two-man criminal enterprise.

Unlike celebrities and politicians whose imprisonment or release is peppered with protests and swathes of media coverage, Ngunjiri slipped in and out of jail with no fanfare. He was radically transformed, but was his deadbeat dad responsible for his life choices and outcomes?

It’s a resounding yes. Dad is destiny. Take it or leave it, a father’s presence or absence wields invincible power to who their children become.

Life in the dusty roads of Dundori was all Ngunjiri could ask for.

Fetching water from the river after school, with the other boys and girls from the village was routine. Jerry-cans in hand, they told child stories and shared adult dreams on the narrow and winding paths. Doing this mindless chore for ten years helped Ngunjiri to know all the kids in his village, both young and old.

Waithaka was a year older than Ngunjiri. They schooled together at Rutara primary school, the only public school. Both dropped out in Class 5 with a difference of one year apart. This was before the so-called Grade 5, in the Competency Based Curriculum era. But what’s the difference between Class and Grade? It’s all hubris and semantics!

On airplanes, they still have business-CLASS and cattle-CLASS, as passenger categories!

In a matter of years passengers might be GRADED. But grading systems are closely associated with quality assurance in the food industry. Specifically, grains are graded according to volume, weight, moisture content and size.

Waithaka and Ngunjiri were neither air passengers nor grains of wheat, but Class 5 dropouts. Ngunjiri’s parents lived apart. His father worked in Machakos Hospital as a Mortician and while his mother single-handedly raised him and his four siblings in Dundori, thriving as a small holder livestock farmer.

Both parents were labouring in vain.

None of their children went past Class 5 and the livestock ate more than they produced, whether milk, meat or money. Her children didn’t perform well in school and always had disciplinary issues.

There was a joke in their village, that it was better to buy cows than send cows (referring to Ngunjiri and his siblings) to school.

Waithaka’s and Ngunjiri’s friendship was a matter of (school-dropout) convenience.

In the year that Waithaka had been out of school, life was proving difficult. His creativity cooked on the pot of poverty. Soon enough he started stealing and selling pencils and rubber to school-going children. He enticed Ngunjiri with the idea of stealing in school, while he sold them after erasing all marks of ownership.

In a matter of weeks, their enterprise was flourishing. It was a booming Start-up business generating revenue of Ksh.100 per week, for the two young lads. By all means, their hideous trade couldn’t attract any Venture Capitalists.

Profits were split in half. Promptly, the enterprising Waithaka recruited a school-going boy from a newly started private school, in the neighborhood. Customer prices for this institution were so lucrative that Ngunjiri and his public school pupils were almost abandoned.

With innovation, Waithaka doubled his profits by scaling his geographical coverage.

They had lots of cash at hand. Waithaka bought all manner of second hand shoes and clothes to brighten his teenage hood. Ngunjiri was helplessly envious. While most of the week days he was in tattered school uniform, his accomplice, Waithaka traded stolen merchandise by the roadside. All spruced up in gleaming attire bought from Wambui Mini Shop, the only clothes trader in their hood.

Ngunjiri’s young mind deceived him that he could catch up with Waithaka, if he doubled up his trade time. In a miniature Network Marketing approach, he recruited a pupil in all the eight classes in their school, to source pencils and rubbers for him. This way he increased his stock supplies to Waithaka, since their new market had constant demand.

Both were brilliant in enterprise. They followed the money. Quickly their new market segment was saturated. Public schools have a higher population of learners than private schools. With lots of pencils in stock, it was either they give to charity or expand their market.

By this time, none of their parents knew of their booming business.

Ngunjiri dropped out of school, a year later. In the morning he dressed up for school, but went to Waithaka’s crib to strategize business for the day. In the evening he donned in school uniform and duped the mother about the day in school using intelligence gathered from the other pupils.

During an inter-schools sports competition, Waithaka and Ngunjiri unashamedly showed up in the playing fields. They sold all their merchandise to visiting pupils, leaving the school compound as the richest kids in the hood. When Rutara primary school’s head teacher caught wind of the narrative, he summoned their mothers, who were shell shocked.

Immediately, Waithaka and Ngunjiri fled the town. They had the money and skill to survive anywhere, out there. They had collected Ksh.1,000 in coins from their sale that day. This was a lot of money in Dundori.

Enough to pay for movies and video games in the neighboring Miharati market.

In two years, the pair recruited two other school dropouts into their trade. Their merchandise wasn’t just pencils and rubber, but had diversified into stolen textbooks and school uniform, which they sold at the second hand market.

Second hand school items were selling like hot cake, considering the farmers in Miharati were experiencing short and scanty rains over a long period, and couldn’t afford new items. In a circular economy, the scale tipped to their advantage.

Expeditiously, their untamed ambition and greed sold them out to the local police.

One day, while honing their skills in home breaking, the four-boy gang scaled a secured wall to enter a rich man’s compound. Waithaka was the huge guy with the metal twisting bar, with which he created a small entry for Ngunjiri, the short guy to squeeze through. Just like that, Ngunjiri entered the main house and started scavenging for electronics.

It was pitch dark at that 2am hour.

He tripped on a cable connecting the home theatre. One of the high tower speaker fell with a clang that woke the man of the house. The watch-out gang outside heard the sound too. They scattered and scaled the wall in confusion.

Sadly, they landed into the hands of waiting police as CCTV footage had been transmitted to Securex company who had alerted the police.

Waithaka narrowly escaped with two gun wounds, a bleeding left ear and a splintered right hand. The other two accomplices were rounded up. Ngunjiri remained trapped in the house, as he struggled to find his entry point into the house.

The following day, the three were arraigned in court, with the metal twisting bar as evidence. Waithaka was on the run. After three court hearings, a harsh sentence was delivered. Two counts of robbery with violence, and the trio were handed 30 successive years of jail term, for each offense.

At the time, Ngunjiri was 17 years old. It meant he would be freed at a sad age of 77. In essence, his youthful years would waste away behind bars, laboring for the multimillion Prison Industry. He would rot with the moth and rust.

While delivering the judgement, the magistrate scanned the half-filled courtroom.

Pointing at Ngunjiri she blurted out, “Look at this young man, he is barely an adult. It seems to me, the absence of his father or his instruction, left a void that he is paying for with years of truancy and many mistakes. Where is the man who fathered him?”

Silence filled the room as the piercing words sunk in. Ngunjiri’s estranged father looked on with detachment. Back in the days, while he was actively embalming the dead in Machakos, his son was wounding the innocent and curving out a career in crime. Chances for his only son to marry or start a home had been dimmed.

His heritage and progeny was cast into thin air.

She concluded, “It is a shame that the absence of fathers is linked to most social nightmares, from boys with guns to girls with babies. No rehabilitation or welfare program can cut crime and truancy as thoroughly as a two-parent family. Children should honour their parents, but I dare say, parents should honour their children, with their active presence. Case closed!”

There was no celebration as the handcuffed Ngunjiri and his two accomplices were handed prison sentences. This wasn’t a milestone to cheer like a PP2 graduation, but an embarrassing moment for Ngunjiri, his family and the larger Dundori community. It takes a whole village to raise a child, not so?

Jailing isn’t a ceremony but a castigation. While former SA President Zuma’s jailing in July 2021 sparked unrest in SA’s port city of Durban, for Ngunjiri, the sleepy towns of Dundori and Miharati were elated to have their stubborn thief incarcerated for life.

Ngunjiri was jailed in 2000.

Three years into custody at Naivasha maximum prison, H.E. Moody Awori, the former Vice President visited the facility. He was monitoring progress with the prison reforms that his Home Affairs Ministry was spearheading in 2003.

His mantra was, “Prisoners are human beings who need to be rehabilitated. They are not social rejects bereft of any claim to the human right to love and the desire for acceptance.” Ngunjiri was one of his entertainers, as a leader of the prison choir.

He was a transformed young man. His singing and crowd managing antics were positively received by the visiting entourage. His performance caught the VP’s eye.

Ngunjiri’s prison experience cut through his layers of rebellion and stripped him of all chest thumping and teenage gymnastics. He became a devout Christian, although he still struggled with pornography.

During the presentation, the VP whispered to the Prison in-charge, “This short man’s talent doesn’t belong here. Whatever he was jailed for, needs to be revisited.” These were the marching orders that lifted Ngunjiri’s prison files from oblivion to an appeal for leniency.

Three months after this visit, a ruling rejoinder was issued by the Nyandarua Law Courts magistrate. She faulted the previous judgement citing that Ngunjiri was a minor then, who deserved a lesser sentence. In a flip, the 60 years jail term was annulled and replaced with a paltry 3 years. Having served 3 years already, he was released in 2004.

Leaving prison is an emotional experience, both for the ex-convict and the community. In the US, the disgraced actor and comedian Bill Cosby walked free in July 2021 after three years in prison. His accusers protested his release after the Pennsylvania Supreme Court vacated his sexual assault conviction.

Unlike Bill Cosby, Ngunjiri walked into freedom with no protests, fanfare or media coverage. Nothing! He was a badge of shame to his family and society. Nobody wanted to be associated with a former gangster, reformed or not.

His allure of a fast life had been sucked up in jail.

Coming out, he needed to re-set and re-start, like COVID has shown us. Having been convicted of crime left him no chance to re-enter formal education or pursue employment. His fingerprints and criminal records were archived by the DCI, for at least 7 years. He would never get a ‘clean’ Certificate of Good Conduct.

Being a societal outcast, his only hope was religion. He joined a local church and plunged into Outreach missions. His passion for evangelism and converting hard knocks like him for Christ, took him to different parts of Kenya. His short stature attracted entertainment-seeking crowds to his open air events.

I had this chat with him on the fringes of one of the Outreach missions he was leading in Isiolo town. He definitely thinks being un-fathered made crime an option. I asked him what he would rather: an absent, passive, abusive or manipulative father?

He grappled with the question as he bit his lower lip, eyes looking away.

We chatted a little bit about Caroline Kangogo, the fugitive 34-year old police who shot and killed two men before she was found dead in her parents home, 10 days later. Her alleged suicide notes point blame to her father for rejecting her after a failed marriage.

Then there was Masten Wanjala, the 20-year old who’s macabre serial killing of children shook the spine of the nation. He was raised by a single mum and only showed up at his dad’s doorstep at the age of 18 years. His father, Robert Wanjala regrets having abandoned his son before birth.

I asked his opinion on a screenshot (below) that had been doing rounds on social media.

He fought off tears, then smiled. He pulled out his worn out bible and read Malachi 4:6, “And he (God) will restore the hearts of the fathers to their children, and the hearts of the children to their fathers, lest I (God) come and smite the land with a curse.”

He said, “I think it is a curse when children and father are misaligned.”

Deadbeat fathers need to clean up. Children deserve interactions with the men whose genetic material they carry. Till that happens, many (children and adults) remain starved of their father’s presence, provision, protection, priesthood and prophecy.

Without this, the curse of boy-child criminals in police and courtrooms continues.

This is a true story. Names and details have been changed to protect family privacy. Views expressed on this article are my own

Joseph Ngaara is inspired by people’s life experiences. Do you have an intriguing life story and need to share your triumph or tragedy? Email: j.mungai@hotmail.co.uk