Boy's last chat on Facebook

By Lina Benyawa

He was preparing for KCPE but a year after his colleagues graduated, his family is still searching for him

A trip to the shop for a 13-year-old boy proved dangerous after he failed to return home and his whereabouts remain a mystery.

Abdalla Mwatsefu

It was during Easter holidays last year when after hours of chatting with friends on Facebook, he decided to reload more airtime to continue the chat. Schools had closed and he was quiet free.

April 28, last year, at around 10.30 am was the last time Abdalla Mwatsefu’s family saw him and all their efforts to search for him have proved fruitless. Mwatsefu had been preparing for KCPE and one year on, he has not been traced.

The Standard Eight student at Forest View Academy in Nyahururu had gone to purchase airtime just a few metres from his home in Nyali along Simba Road.

But relatives feared he had been abducted to fight in Somalia by the al-shaabab terror group but they quickly brushed off the idea as there was no evidence. His mother, Mwanasha Nrika, said Mwatsefu had been going through his past papers as part of the preparations for his KCPE examinations.

"My son was on the social media (Facebook) chatting with his friends but he didn’t have enough airtime on his modem. He went to purchase airtime and that’s the last we saw him," said the mother.

No calls

His sister was on her way to college and they walked together to the matatu stage and left him with a watchman nearby who was selling the airtime. She thought her brother had returned home but to her shock, she was called by her mother and told about Mwatsefu’s disappearance.

The search began. But by nightfall, they had not received any calls about his whereabouts. Even initial suspicions that he had been abducted were brushed aside.

"We thought that he had been abducted so we waited for any phone call but all was in vain and the following morning we had to report the matter to Nyali Police Station," she added.

They visited all the children homes in town with the hope of finding Mwastefu. The mother got some contacts of parents who had also lost their children and together they mounted searches.

"This really traumatised me, I could not go to work for two months. I was just crying and praying as a way of relieving the stress and the bad situation I was going through," she explained.

Though she had been hoping for positive news, she was not ready to talk to anyone about the incident due to emotional trauma.

The mother contacted his schoolmates and all the friends he had on Facebook.

"I had to go through his Facebook account since he had not logged out to know who he had been communicating with. But this did not help because all his friends were shocked to learn that he had disappeared," she said.

No lead

More complications arose when his younger brother refused to go back to school without his brother.

"I just want to know where my son is. If somebody is keeping him please bring him back to his family," she pleaded.

Nrika says she still has faith that her son is alive and that she will find him and with the help of the police.

Kisauni deputy OCPD Thomas Sungut confirmed the incident and said it was true the matter was reported to Nyali Police Station and circulated the information to local radio stations but to date they have not gotten any leads about Mwastefu.

"The mother came to the station on May 1, last year. We now request her to go back to the station and make another signal so that police officers could start searching for him again," said Sungut.