When we visit her home in Mogoiywet, Bomet East, Angela Ngetich, a widow and mother of five, is feeding her rabbits fresh sukuma wiki.
She also rears chickens, a job she has been doing for more than 15 years now, since her husband's death. The money she gets from the rabbits and chickens supplements the little she gets after selling two litres of milk daily from her two cows.
For Angela, life has not been easy as she tries to make ends meet for her family.
Her late husband, Simon Ngetich, who worked as an Administration Police officer until his death was the family's sole breadwinner
He served 17 years in the service before he fell ill and died in early 2001. He developed hemiplegia—a condition that paralyses one side of the body after an injury to the parts of the brain that control movement of the limbs.
Simon was 22 when he joined the service in 1983. This not only brought joy to his family but his entire village of Mogoiwet in Cheboin.
Angela’s co-wife, Rosaline, is languishing in an IDP camp at Nkoben, Mau Narok Forest, after she was evicted from her farm in efforts to conserve the forest.
Rosaline moved to the Mau more than five years ago in search of a better life for her five children.
“It was out of desperation, after my late husband’s pension delayed, that I decided to venture out of our home...so I can at least get money to pay our children's school fees,” she says.
During their husband's burial in 2001, they were promised that his benefits would be processed and wired to their bank accounts.
They are still waiting 18 years later.
Mathew Barmen, Simon's’s brother, was tasked with following up on the pension. Barmen says he has made countless futile trips to various offices in Nairobi.
In 2016 he visited Bima House and was told his brother's personnel file (No 83015814) had got lost.
“This was very frustrating. At the last minute when the pension money is about to be released the file disappears and we suspect some people are up to something bad,” Barmen says.
He has made many trips to Bima House in the last two years and the answer is still the same—the file is missing.
Barmen is now pleading with the Interior CS Fred Matiang'i to intervene.
“My late brother’s children are in secondary school and some have been in and out of school due to lack of fees. We had hoped the pension money would enable them finish high school and university,” he says.
“My appeal is to Matiang'i is to intervene…The file cannot go missing at the last minute. There could be a scheme among some individuals who want to disappear with the money and they have decided to hide the file.”