Housegirls’ lucrative ‘mboga trips’ exposed

Sunday, 28th August 2011

By Maureen Akinyi
Mama Opish, as she is popularly known, has been running an undercover brothel from her house in Eastleigh.
Outside her house, she was a humdrum vegetable grocer and few would have guessed that was merely a front for her real "business."
Her clients were housegirls whom she would lure when they came to buy vegetables from her kibanda.
"She told us that she would double our salary if we come to her house ‘to keep some old men warm’," said one of the housegirls.
With the current harsh economic conditions, this offer proved irresistible and few house girls turned her down.
They would come to buy vegetables and as Mama Opish sorted out their purchases and prepared them for the pot by slicing them into neat little pieces, the girls would duck into her house to hustle a quick buck from some fat geezer.
The deal was good, with business spreading by word of mouth.
In no time, housegirls found themselves doing more mboga trips than usual to make quick money and meet increasing demands for financial support from their families back home.
Dirty secretOne girl confessed she was making twice her monthly income from the mboga trips while another says she intends to go to college with the extra money she has been making.
But like all deals that are too good to be true, Mama Opish’s well-guarded dirty secret blew up in her face.
One of the housegirls’ bosses smelt a rat when she noticed that her house help suddenly started taking too long whenever she went to buy vegetables.
More curious, whenever the girl went to the grocer, she spruced herself up and even went through cheap make-up rituals, unlike before.
So one day, she sent the girl for the veggies but followed her secretly.
The girl spruced herself and then left for her usual trysts, not knowing that her boss was secretly trailing her.
When she reached Mama Opish’s grocery, she placed her order and then made her way to a rendezvous in a house on the top floor of a five-storey building.
But to her horror, her lady boss bust in and found her with a middle-aged man.
The boss involuntarily screamed when the set up unravelled before her eyes, alerting other neighbours who stampeded in to see what was going on.
But in the ensuing confusion, the man hastily wore his pants, and ran for dear life.
When Mama Opish saw her "client" burst out of the building and run down the street like a thief, she sensed it would never be business as usual and quietly melted into the bustling Eastleigh street crowds.
ScamIt is unbelievable how she managed to carry out a scam of this nature in broad daylight, without anyone, save for housegirls who were beneficiaries of the deal — getting wind of it.