When he is working, Geoffrey Mutai rents a tiny hut on a muddy hillside in the village of Kapng’tuny in Kenya’s Rift Valley, a 20-minute drive from the nearest surfaced road. In a bare-walled 10ft-by-10ft room his few possessions include a CD player and a bedside radio. Light shines from a single naked bulb.
He and the three colleagues he shares with take turns to cook, tidy, sweep floors and scrub dishes — chores typically carried out by their wives and daughters. Work begins before dawn and ends close to sunset. To wind down, the men crowd around a grainy DVD or drive to a local town for a modest meal.
Yet Mutai’s austerity is self-imposed. His main house, where his wife and two daughters live, is a comfortable, well-appointed, two-storey building in the town of Eldoret, an hour’s drive from Kapng’tuny. In Eldoret, where he is one of the town’s richest men, he also owns a host of rental properties and some farmland as well as several cars.