A Thief In High Places

A Thief In High Places

Abdullahi H. Mohammed

A couple of weeks ago a gang of thieves took advantage of my absence and broke into my house, carting away all my wife’s precious jewels and other sundry knick-knacks in that one single ignominious haul. Their method of invasion was frightening: they tried hacking the bedroom window off the concrete; failing that, they succeeded in dislodging the bathroom window’s antitheft bars with pincers and forged-iron picks.

The entire operation had the telltale signs of professional thieves, or so I thought, and the sobering sense of having one’s personal space forcefully violated left my wife with scarring nightmares of brawny, roughly-hewn thugs breaking in ready to hurt anyone standing in their way.

As luck would have it one of the thieves came back a week later and was apprehended. You see, the thing about crime is that there always is an inexplicable affinity between the act and the place of action: perpetrators almost always come back to the crime scene.

But here is the shocker: the entire criminal gang consisted of boys between the ages seven and twelve, and all of a sudden my preconceived notions of muscled thugs were shattered by the vista of a ragtag bunch of underage miscreants groping before me in the Police Station. There were 10 of them made up of the actual cell of eight that broke in, and the two end receivers of the stolen goods. The boys actually broke in to steal cash and only resorted to hauling away the valuables and other trinkets when they failed to find a kobo. But being so young they couldn’t figure what to do with the loot, and so the smarter ones in the gang took it off them. They themselves did not know how to proceed pawning them off. Fate and the inexperience of youth gave them away.

It paints a grim picture of our society when children of tender age know enough to break into someone’s house and steal. At their confessions, they stated hunger and deprivation drove them to it, and I’m a bit inclined to believe them. The rags on their scrawny frames, the hunger and fear in their eyes all painted a picture of misery and desperation. It was further confirmed when I saw the parents who trooped in to beg for leniency. Farmers, earth diggers, artisans, a motley collection of poor, starving, desperate and aging parents. If there ever was a picture of poverty and suffering, this was it.

Of course, there is no excuse for their own failings as parents to discipline their children, but there is also no excuse for a society that has fallen so deep its so-called future leaders are breaking into houses.

I’m not saying crime is justified when one wallows in penury, but it is understandable, if not excusable, in a society where the horrors in the streets are manmade. Emotionally intense situations coupled with despair can test the extremes to which one can go. In the face of our worsening socio-economic conditions people are daily driven to near-insanity especially when they see a select few steeped in wealth so vast it threatens to smother them while they themselves are trapped in the quagmire of poverty and dejection. If Nigeria was Ethiopia, or a Sierra Leone, or any place where there is a lack of national wealth and resources or where the scourge of civil war retards national development, one can very well understand the deprivation on the streets because there weren’t many resources to counter it. But In Nigeria it’s all the more painful because we have everything to change our luck around, everything but leadership. Indeed, if God had blessed us with visionary and bold leaders we wouldn’t even be in this mess in the first place. Or if we got here by some quirk, we would know how to get out.

After the collective ravages of the military we had high hopes for the civilian political class since we assumed they too were victims of the uniforms. How wrong we were! The varied individuals who suddenly found themselves in positions of authority with the power to better lives and create monuments for themselves instead chose to better their own lots and damn the consequences. We gave them ten years of hope from May 1999 to May 2009. We waited patiently, swallowed all the excuses of learning on the job, empty treasuries and so forth. But they squandered the chance, and resorted to strong arm tactics to perpetuate themselves. Ekiti is just an example.

During the 10 years we have been having “democracy”, Nigeria saw an unprecedented rise in oil wealth, but Nigerians only saw a deepening pit that sucked in all indices of national and personal development and spat out bony remains. In spite of the wealth they couldn’t provide us with security, electricity, water, fuel, jobs, and housing. But they provided themselves and their cronies with all of these and more, and in ten years people once close to begging found themselves suddenly fabulously wealthy only because they hopped on the political wagon and stole some votes here, denied a few rights there, inflated a figure or two over there and so on. In those ten years our hopes harbored visions of grandeur, and hope kept us going. But now our collective senses are daily benumbed by the ravages of the very real dystopia unmercifully foisted upon us by the greed and callousness of a select few. Should it then surprise us if some with weaker fortitude resort to crime?

In a situation where attaining the necessities of life is bedeviled by corruption, incompetence, theft, ignorance, arrogance, injustice, bigotry, hedonism, lies and brigandry, all perpetrated and perpetuated by a small cabal of overweight, licentious, vulgar and deceiving so-called “elites” one would definitely see evidence of desperation driving people to extreme ends of human possibilities. Point proved with the boys who broke into my house. It makes me wonder if indeed every little crime merits punishment when a greater crime is being orchestrated and executed at the top of the socio-political food chain and the perpetrators always go scot free.

There is nothing those boys could steal from me that could hurt as much as the theft of my rights to decency by the political class and its ancillary machinery. There is no greater theft than the stealing of the future of anyone’s children, no greater injustice than the rubbishing of one’s right to choose who governs one’s affairs. One asks: What punishment befits a clique that denies one the rights to chase that elusive daily bread down the dusty road? What judgment could compensate for the theft of one’s soul?

No one seems bothered to do anything. Not the labour unions, not the endless civil societies swirling in their acronym soup. Not even the “opposition” which supposedly, being a faction of the elites, has the means to counter the menace confronting us. Instead they talk of erecting a wobbly structure called a Mega Party. Are they envious? After all Success breeds envy. Even questionable success.

Perhaps when the “opposition” wakes up from their stupor they would realize there IS a Mega party already, and it’s known by the letters PDP. Now this PDP is a green and white skulking, preying, devouring predator spawned from the bowels of utterly greedy and unscrupulous Nigerians, and it feeds and grows fat on its sacrificial offerings of society. It cannot be fought on ideological grounds alone. Simply remaining in existence with a label that says “opposition” is not a counterweight neither is it a good strategy to topple the hydra-headed monstrosity. Nor is attempting to mimic PDP’s vast size a means to its demise. Has the lesson of David and Goliath meant nothing, O Ye architects of the Mega Party? Size matters little in the face of greater strategy and popular support. Win our hearts and minds, and we’ll carry placards for you. Otherwise PDP remains defiant.

The current political contraption is deepening the gloom, and its cancer is wreaking havoc on the ability of some parents to properly cater for and discipline their children.

The ruling elite class knows little of the suffering on the streets. How could they know? Safely cocooned behind the darkened windows of their massive luxury cars, or curled up in their comfy chairs in vast air conditioned offices cordoned off from the public by armed security, or wining and dining their cohorts and mistresses in walled off mansions, their children sent off to London or Dubai, they chose not to see and hear. They shield themselves from the devastation their greed has wrought, and in a strange way it makes me happy knowing that their conscience burdens them so much they had to mask themselves in public. To them Nigeria is heaven and in the hazy atmosphere around them they either feel everyone else it at ease as they are, or they just don’t care.

But the sad truth is this: in a society where a child, even just one child, is left to wander and fend for itself and even go as far as stealing, that society must be hell. And if one child finds society as hell, it’s pointless if a lucky few find it as heaven.

Those young boys stole from me, but a bigger thief daily steals from me and my unborn children.

God help us all.