Somebody is stealing from guards

Would you employ someone on inhumane terms? Would you be responsible for their death, breach the law on their terms, make them miserable, and shorten their life expectancy?

Because, somehow, a lot of people are. The conditions that many of our night watchmen work in is a social breakdown, and yet the law is clear.

Night watchmen bring security to many of our homes. Just the fact that they are there, at our gates, at our estate gates, in vans on our streets, a call away on a panic button, makes us safer.

As it is, Kenya’s reputation for insecurity isn’t accurate. Take a spot check on homicide rates globally, and our capital city is among the safest cities in the world.

Diehard believers in Kenya’s insecurity argue that those low levels of violent crime are actually borne of poor reporting: the deaths, the muggings, and the break-ins just don’t get reported.

But compared with all the rest of Africa, where reporting is no different, and based on the ways violent crime figures are calculated – multi-sourced, including from mortuaries – it’s clear we’re safer than most people in the world.

Yet knowing you would be at more risk in Johannesburg, or in most European cities, and very definitely in most US cities, isn’t a sleep aide when crime is still happening.

And we are all part of the human race, which psychiatrists tell us encompasses some 3 per cent who suffer from some range of psychopathy or sociopathy that makes for big risks and almost absent compassion.

So bad stuff can happen.

As it is, in my own 10 years living in Kenya, I have suffered no more security incidents than I did anywhere else.

In London, my home was broken into in broad daylight and cleared out of jewellery and electronics. In rural France, my barn was half emptied of stored furniture in a passing theft.

In Nairobi, close to my only security incident was when I, by strange coincidence, happened to be in a dispute with a rather powerful person. My compound was suddenly broken into twice in a month.

Yet, both times, my night watchman raised the alarm, and the thugs ran. So those night guards headed off two incidents that went ahead in London and France.

I owe them, my gratitude, and my sense of security.

And, in fact, I owe them more too.

Night work is damaging. The human body’s circadian rhythm triggers hormones that make us tired as dark falls, and alert and active as the sun rises.

When we move our bodies onto a cycle that counters our bodies’ rhythms, we take a straight line to depression, illness, and a shorter life.

Night watchmen are often cold too, living that long, corrosive passage of being not quite warm enough through the night hours.

All told, before trouble ever hits, being a night guard has the potential to be a horrible job. Which is all the more reason not to abuse the minimum of returns.

Night guards are, by law, not allowed to work more than 60 hours a week, which on a 6pm to 6am shift is five nights a week, not six. Nor should any night guard ever be working seven nights a week, no matter the shift length: they are entitled to a rest day.

And to a minimum wage too: in Nairobi and other Kenyan cities that’s Sh110.20 an hour. That’s the law.

Our responsibilities go further too — and hats off to the Mombasa Labour Tribunal on that. When one father of two who was working as a night watchman at a school got killed in a break-in, the court awarded his estate some Sh126,000 on the basis that the employer had a responsibility to ensure the guard had the equipment to ensure his own safety.

It’s dark, it’s cold, it’s a hard job, and those night guards give us security and head off countless losses. It’s the least we can do to ensure they have the means to deal with any security breach: a club, a panic button, a radio, an alarm system to raise.

For who cheats their own protectors of basic and humane rights, and still expects protection?