You can pretend for a long time but eventually time will catch up with you. That is what happened to Aggrey and I during the mid-90s when we succeeded in hoodwinking everybody that we owned all the property that was in the house we were staying in Kiyovu of the poor.

We had been living comfortably in this house as the real owners had abandoned it. The house was fully furnished with property all the way from Europe. The king-size refrigerator was packed with all tribes of booze.

When we entered that house, we were shocked to discover that everything was intact. In fact we also found some cash stashed away in drawers. It was like a miracle! So we started to enjoy ourselves from the word go!

Every evening, after work at the Gikondo based NGO, Aggrey and I would rush back home to guzzle the endless litres of Heineken beers. We would also invite friends to join us celebrate the goodies. We always convinced our female visitors that everything apart from the house belonged to us. Wow! We told them that our NGO was responsible for paying our house rent and refilling our fridge.

The truth of the matter was that the house belonged to other people we had never seen before. There was nothing like house rent and indeed all the glittering chairs and beds did not belong to us.

If anything, our meager salaries from the NGO could not last us two weeks let alone pay house rent. In short, we were just living for free and consuming free drinks from the abandoned fridge.

With this kind of lifestyle, we became a target for all the hungry and thirsty chicks of Kigali. Aggrey and I were so generous and that is why we never bothered when our so-called girlfriends came over with their friends. 

But alas! One day, the real owners of the house came back to repossess it. This implied that we had to find another house and shift within 3 days. We then started to hunt for a house everywhere. The problem is that the kind of house we were searching for would go for around Rwf 150,000 per month! Besides, what would our girlfriends think if they found us in a two-roomed lousy house somewhere in Nyamijos?

Eh? Things were becoming monkey for us. But we had to stand up and be counted! Eventually we found a house in Remera that would suit our needs. As ever, our girlfriends were always around to help us with the shifting arrangements. For them, they understood very well that we had a huge task before us since we had to shift all the property from Kiyovu to Remera.

In order to help us, our chicks went to Gikondo Magerwa to negotiate for a semi-trailer truck which would help us carry our beds, chairs, cupboards, wardrobes, music systems and sofa sets. While Aggrey and I were at Kiyovu handing over the keys to the house owners, we were surprised when we saw a semi-trailer truck negotiating a corner into the compound.

Seated inside the truck was the burly driver plus our girlfriends smiling from ear to ear. Behind the truck was a group of muscular boys who would have to lift the equipment from ‘our’ house. With our heads bowed down in shame, we entered the house and loaded the truck with our two suitcases – that was all!

We then asked the driver to turn back and drive. "Hey, but where is the stuff that we came here to load? You mean you hired this huge truck to carry two suitcases only?” Our girlfriends were also in a state of shock. The air was then cleared when the house owners explained to the rest of the onlookers that all the property belonged to them – "These two gentlemen had been enjoying our assets for free”. That was the last time we ever saw our chicks…