How Nairobi mayor spent 6 months and 30 pens signing 100,000 title deeds

By MUNGAI KIHANYA

The Sunday Nation

Nairobi,

12 August 2007

Nairobi mayor Dick Wathika announced this week that he had signed 100,000 land leases thereby clearing a 17-year backlog of pending title deeds. Now, that got me thinking about two things: how long did the exercise last and how many pens did he use?

I have never seen the Mayor’s signature nor have I seen him signing on a document (not even on TV). Thus it is difficult to make accurate calculations. However, I can use my own signature– simply, the name “Mungai” written quickly in my hand-writing – to arrive at a fairly good estimate.

It took me 54 seconds to write 10 signatures on a piece of paper – that is, 5.4 seconds each. Therefore I would need a total of 540,000 seconds to sign 100,000 times. That works to 150 hours, which is about 25 days (working for 6 continuous hours every day).

But the Mayor was not signing on one piece of paper. Each land lease was a separate document with a few papers to be turned over before getting to the signature page. Furthermore, he probably did a quick perusal to make sure that each has a name, plot number, date and a few other details – signing a blank document is very dangerous!

Thus Mayor Wathika probably took about 15 seconds on each lease. This works to a total of 1.5 million seconds, or 416 hours, or 70 working days. Now if he was doing it from Monday to Friday, this adds up to 3 calendar months.

But it would be unreasonable to expect that the Mayor spent 6 hours every day during those 3 months doing nothing else apart from signing the documents! Perhaps he reserved the afternoon period from 2pm to 5pm for this job. That reduces the daily allowance to just 3 hours and therefore the total time taken goes up to 6 months.

The question of how many pens were used is even more complicated – the signature itself and type of pen used are not known. But we can attempt to get an estimate – again using my signature as a guide.

A regular ball-point (biro) pen can draw a continuous line of about 1km to 1.5km in length. A more sophisticated one (like my treasured 17-year-old Parker Jotter) can do between 8 and 10 kilometres. Fountain pens also do an average of 1km to 1.5km before refilling.

By measuring the strokes of my (simple) signature, I estimate that they have a combined length of about 30cm. Thus 100,000 signatures would make a line of about 30km. Therefore that would require approximately 30 ordinary biros (or fountain pen refills). Alternatively, I would use only three of my Parker Jotter refills.

The above is based on my simple signature. The mayor probably used the same time and number of pens – give or take a few. The only way to get an accurate answer would be to ask him. But that would be boring!