Welcome to Nairobi, the city where everyone is a CEO, an advisor to the President, or a “presidential candidate” until the handcuffs come out. Nasir Egeh, a man with enough passports to keep a travel agent busy and enough delusions to fill a psychiatric ward, finally hit a wall at Terminal 1A. He thought he was sliding into the country on a flight from Johannesburg, but the immigration system had a different itinerary for him. Instead of a VIP lounge, he got a one-way ticket to the JKIA Police Station.

The 37-year-old dual citizen of Somalia and Australia was flagged for “obtaining money by false pretenses.” In Nairobi terms, that’s just a fancy way of saying he’s a common wash-wash artist who overplayed his hand. The authorities didn’t care about his TikTok followers or his self-proclaimed status as a Somali presidential hopeful. In this city, if you owe people money or run a scam, eventually the “active immigration control alert” will catch up with you, no matter how many filters you use on your videos.

Speaking of videos, Egeh’s first instinct upon being grabbed was to go live. Because, of course, why face a fraud investigation in private when you can perform for the digital masses? He claimed people have been trying to kill him or arrest him for ages, painting himself as some sort of political martyr. It’s the classic Nairobi hustle: when you’re caught red-handed, pretend it’s a state-sponsored conspiracy. We’ve seen this movie before, and the acting is getting worse with every remake.

Let’s talk about that “advisor” role he claimed to hold in the Somali Prime Minister’s office. Even the Somali government had to issue a public “I don’t know this man” statement last year. It takes a special kind of audacity to lie about being a government official when the actual government is actively telling everyone you’re a fraud. But in the age of the influencer, reality is optional - until you’re handed over to the DCI for “further investigations,” which is usually code for a long, cold night on a wooden bench.

This arrest is just another symptom of the rot we see every day, where the loudest people in the room are usually the ones with the emptiest pockets and the dirtiest schemes. It reminds me of the entitlement we see on our highways, which I wrote about in Roadside Tyrants: Why the Kenyan Prado is a Rolling Symptom of Our National Decay. Whether it’s a Prado pushing you off the road or a “presidential candidate” swindling your savings, the ego is always the same.

Kenya’s authorities haven’t dropped the full details of the fraud case yet, but they don’t really need to. We know the script. A man with a fancy title and no fixed address arrives with big promises, leaves with other people’s cash, and then acts shocked when the law finally grows a pair. Nasir Egeh is currently cooling his heels in custody, and for once, the “false pretenses” have been replaced by the very real bars of a Kenyan cell. Welcome home, “Mr. President.”