by Mark Nicholson
The internet tells us that the five most crime-ridden countries in the world are Haiti, Afghanistan, Papua New Guinea, Venezuela and South Africa. The first three are unspeakably poor and/or chaotic . The latter two are less obvious but probably mainly due to the inequality between rich and poor. Anywhere in the world where there is big gap between the haves and have nots, crime is bound to be worse. The Gini coefficient is used as a measure of inequality in income and wealth. South Africa has the highest Gini coefficient. By contrast, the Nordic countries have the lowest Gini coefficients, along with Slovakia, and the lowest crime rates.
Anyone who has spent a long time in Africa is bound at some time to have been the victim of crime, major or minor. I have been at the wrong end of automatic pistols and AK-47s but lucky enough to have got away with it. Other friends have not been so lucky. A recent incident of minor crime at my home in Kenya has developed into an interesting story.
It started with a game of table tennis on 27th November. My wife and I tend to play five games every evening when alone. The fact that she frequently thrashes me is hardly relevant to the story but I have to admit my annoyance; I was quite a handy player in my youth. The table is downstairs. Otherwise, we live on the upper floors. On walking up the stairs, I happened to glance at a few family heirlooms on the wall and suddenly noticed that some medals in a glass frame were missing. I showed my wife and sure enough, where there had been six, there were only three. On taking the frame off the wall, we first thought it must have fallen onto the floor, but the glass was unbroken. It was clear that the back of the frame had been forced open. My wife placed the tampered frame on a nearby table and that was that. The next day we went out to lunch with friends. The following morning, my wife shouted “What have you done with the frame?”. “Nothing”, I replied. “You must have done, because it isn’t here!”, she riposted. She then started hunting for it, opened the draw in the table and there was the frame, this time with all the medals gone. We then went downstairs and found that two other boxes containing my father’s and my other grandfather’s medals were also empty.
It didn’t require Sherlock Holmes to work out who the culprit was. Our cook and gardener have been with us for over 20 years but we recently hired a bright under-gardener from the tea camp below in the valley. When our cook goes shopping, she hides the key not very securely in an unlocked cupboard outside. The following morning the young suspect sent me an SMS message asking for his salary. I invited him to accompany another worker and me and join us in the car for an errand. Instead I headed straight to the police station nearby. I told the Inspector there that we had had a robbery and that the culprit was sitting in the car. The young man declared his innocence and said he knew nothing about it. His phone and house keys were handed over and he was put inside a cell with other inmates. A police cell in Africa is very different proposition to a cell in Europe… 20 in a tiny room with no chair, bed and just one bucket.
I then suggested to the Inspector that as the thief's keys were in our possession that we should take him to his house and see if we could find the medals. So off we all went, found his room and had a look around. There we found some items of mine of whose absence I was unaware. These included an unopened bottle of Glenfiddich (“I bought it” , he claims… interesting when I found the empty container upstairs - left), binoculars. a new pair of boots given to me by a pal from Texas (“a gift”…yes, from Mark Nicholson), my spare swimming pool pump, some coins (George V & VI Crowns etc.) but no medals.
A gentle bit of persuasion back at the Police station elicited a confession. Yes, he had taken the medals but most of them had “gone”. Where? “To Montenegro”. ‘Where??’, we all exclaimed. Most of us had never heard of the place unless we had seen Casino Royale. Eventually it came out that he had stolen the medals in three tranches. He had then advertised them on Facebook and was contacted by a collector in Podgorica who asked about their provenance? ‘My boss has died and left them to me’. The Montenegran did not know the thief so he was told to hand them over to a middleman (let’s call him MM) in Nairobi. Fifteen medals were handed over and cash ($200-300, amounts differ) exchanged hands*.
So on a hot Friday morning, we all set off on a seven and a half hour jaunt round Nairobi. The Inspector in the front, the thief in handcuffs behind with two cops, one armed, whom we had collected from a second police station and me, the driver. First stop in Nairobi was a high-end gated community owned by a wealthy developer I knew, who by coincidence is also a medal collector. At the barrier, a gardener saw the cops, pulled out his phone and tried calling a friend. The Inspector nabbed him amid much shrieking and was done for “Obstructing a Police officer”. A second pair of handcuffs appeared. We then found MM, who was also cuffed. Now we had two handcuffed suspects in the boot and one behind me. “Where are the three medals?” MM was asked. “In my house?” says MM. “Where?””Gachie”. Gachie is a particularly insalubrious satellite of Nairobi peopled by all sorts of mostly illegal immigrants from Nubia, Democratic Republic of Congo, South Sudan and Somalia. Near MM’s compound we had such unpleasant stares from hangers on that the Inspector demanded we go to a third police station to get armed back up. Back to MM’s house by which time we had eight in my car and two semi-automatics rifles. The three medals appeared, ribbons now torn off. “Now where?”, I demand. To DHL, to find out where the other medals were.
When we got to DHL we discovered that the medals were in Montenegro but had not been collected. Back to the diplomatic Police station to get a letter confirming the consignment was stolen property. We then WhatsApp-ed Mr. Montenegro who assured us he was a bona fide collector while I averred that I was not yet dead. He of course wanted his money back. “That’s your problem, mate”, I reassured him.
We succeeded in stopping the medals being collected but I had to pay 80 € Montenegro duty. Then I paid DHL to send them back ($86). It took eight days for them to re-appear via Rome, Brussels and Berlin. Back in Kenya, import tax please (about $67).
MM then forwarded all the thief’s photos of my house which included other curious items like antlers (maybe he thought they were ivory), hippo tusks, and pictures of another very heavy frame containing WWI bits and pieces including a Death Man’s Penny and an award signed by Winston Churchill, as Secretary of State for War.
Dead Man's or Widow’s Penny. This was a plaque, in fact bigger than a penny coin, which was given to all British Empire service personnel who died in the First World War. This one was for my grandfather, Captain Eric Newzam Nicholson, 1886-1917.
The good thing is that I have learnt something. I had never actually looked at the medals before, had no idea that they had any value and had no idea that there was a difference between campaign medals (very little value) and medals for being a Good Egg (two Military Crosses with names engraved on them). The two unusual medals were the Delhi Durbar medal and one with Haile Selassie’s head (right).
Mr Thief has repeatedly been calling me since, begging for forgiveness. Of course, I can forgive him but he should receive some punishment. Bail was set at Ksh. 200,000 and his family would be stretched to find a hundredth of that. The hearing was set for 11th January, and the main trial, to which my wife, our cook and I have been summoned, will be in February.
The Inspector glibly says he faces several years in the nick and here’s the rub. A desperately poor young man faces imprisonment for trying his luck, with the help of social media, to improve his lot by carrying out a crime, which in the UK would scarcely be worth investigating. Meanwhile our poor President, William Ruto, was unfairly pushed into second place in a recent poll looking for the worlds’ most corrupt leader of 2024. The winner was ousted Bashir Al Assad only because he has recently been in the news. The vote was run by the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP) and our President received over 40,000 votes more than Assad. He does not enjoy being No. 2 and an investigation into an obvious case of vote rigging needs to be opened. Ruto actually started out in very similar circumstances selling peanuts on the streets and he is now worth well over $800 million. But, as always, there seems to be one rule for the rich and one for the poor. Who is more deserving of punishment and who will receive it?
*I had to get an official valuation from a friend in the UK and the valuation was ten or twenty times that value
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