After five months of unsuccessfully trying to get a job, including the government’s Kazi Mtaani programme, Daniel Marando, a resident of Kibra, contemplated suicide as a way out of his financial troubles. In March, just as Kenya recorded its first case of coronavirus, throwing the country’s stock market into a tailspin, Marando lost his job as a security guard. He had been employed by one of the leading private security firms, which had posted him at one of the high-end hotels. However, Mr Marando and 27 others that used to man the hotel, were declared redundant after the hotel severed ties with their employees owing to cashflow challenges occasioned by the Covid-19 pandemic. It is his wife, Yuniah Kemunto, a hawker of second-hand clothes at Toy Market in Kibra, who talked him out of the suicide attempt. As soon as he gets enough cash he will retire to his rural home in Kisii County, joining a pilgrimage of fired workers who have been escaping from the harsh urban life as the cost of living gets unbearable. He has not paid rent for four months since he was fired. A send-off package the company promised when they laid him off has not been forthcoming. And he remains within the State’s statistic of job-seekers, and has everyday tried his hand at almost everything. The father of three says they have forgotten breakfast and only eat supper. “Most of the food we eat is sent by my parents in Kisii,” says the 38-year-old who worked for the security company for seven years. For a while, they have been relying on trifling income from his wife’s business. But with the ban on importation of mitumba, this revenue stream is also drying up. “Since I came to Nairobi 15 years ago, I have never suffered as I have in the last five months,” Marando said. READ MORE
It is five months since Kenya recorded its first case of Covid-19, setting off a health and economic crisis. Hundreds of businesses, including airlines, schools, pubs, nightclubs and hotels, went for long without operating. As a result, hundreds of thousands of workers were laid off, leaving families without money to buy food, pay rent, electricity and other needs. The economy, which includes a mishmash of almost everything that has a monetary value including the services offered by the hotel that Marando guarded or the security services his […]