A landlady in the United Kingdom has drawn widespread attention and sparked online debate after contacting police over what she described as “excessive cooking” by her Nigerian and Ghanaian tenants, which she claims has led to soaring utility bills.
The incident came to light after one of the tenants, identified as Simon Kay, a Ghanaian, posted a video to expose what they were going through at the hands of their landlady.
Simon, who is studying at the University of Birmingham, said the landlady was not known to them at the time they took the apartment.
She was abroad at the time, while her brother represented her interests.
Suddenly, she returned, entered the house and started living in the empty room in the four-bedroom apartment.
Within three months, she started complaining that the Africans cooked too much and that they had driven up her water and electricity bills.
Desperate to get rid of the Africans, she called the police and alleged that the Ghanaian, who was home at the time, assaulted her.
The police arrived and met her sitting on the bare ground, pretending to have been assaulted. The police men were able to establish that no assault had taken place.
After telling the landlady their findings that they could not see any evidence of assault, they asked her if there were other complaints.
She then told the police that she wanted Simon and his brothers (who were not present when the police came) off her property.
She claimed that in her nearly 30 years of owning the property, she had never experienced such steep costs for water and electricity—until she rented it to the current tenants.
“I’ve never paid £50 for a water bill in this house, now I’m paying £400 to £500,” she said in the video. “I used to pay £99 for electricity, now it’s nearly £1,000 because he cooks every day, all day.”
The landlady further accused Simon of being unresponsive to her calls and messages, despite her requests for him to vacate the property.
The police told her they could not eject the tenants since they had been validly given the apartment for which they were paying their rent.
The police said they had already communicated to the landlady’s brother the only legal way to eject the tenants, stressing that it could not be done by alleging assault where there was no evidence of such.
Some people reacting to the video commended the police for being professional and condemned the woman for trying to put the Africans in trouble with the law to achieve her aim.
Some, however, cautioned the tenants to reach a settlement with the landlady, especially as she was also an African like them.
One advised Simon to take the video off the internet so that it would not affect him getting an apartment in the UK in the future. He may have listened to this advice because he has deleted the main video, but left the other short ones.
See some of the videos here.
