A day for small time thieves

With Sunmola Olowookere
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Our neighbourhood just like any other neighborhood has its fair share of small town thieves. Majority of those that are in these group are some unscrupulous, jobless young men and those that are awaiting admissions into higher institutions.

Most of these men idle away in the neighbourhood and the devil, magnanimous enough, would help them to secure “activities” to keep them busy. These are activities that give man no pride; stealing.

The residents have their suspicions about the identities of those stealing their goods but there was no evidence to support the suspicions.

Hence, they could only report that unknown men steal their articles of clothing spread on clothing lines, generating sets and any property that are left lying fallow outside the house. They steal hens and goats that are left by their owners to roam the streets.

Most mornings, owners of those livestock’s would cry out their losses as the animals and brids would be nowhere to be found.

Some of these thieves even burgle homes when the owners are not there.

Burgling houses was a new aspect to their activities. By then, the trend was that  residents will get back home from work and meet their houses in disarray.

Soon, they were caught red handed.

 A group of friends had tried to steal an electric meter from a vacant quarter in the neighbourhood.

 The building was usually deserted when people go to work and most of the tenants are civil servants.

Unknown to them, the occupant of the quarters opposite the one where we want to steal was at home. Their operation boomeranged when she raised an alarm

“What are you doing there?

” why are you removing that metre?”

Before she could decide that what they were doing was illegal, they became agitated as they sensed trouble and they quickly took to their heels with the uprooted meter.

Since they did not see the woman, one of them went to hide out of fear. He was sorely troubled as he envisioned what his mother’s reaction would be.

They did not know that she knew most of them that she saw. So unsuspectingly, they had all gone back home to hide ourselves for fear of being seen and recognized and had decided to sell the meter when the search would have died down.

That was how they made it easy for the police officers who came to pick them all up at their respective houses the next day.

It was a day of reckoning for the thieves as the woman who raised alarm had made a complaint to the police and had accompanied them to show them the boys’ houses as they rounded them up.

Their mothers were weeping as the police took them away. As they tried to control their fright, their mothers had no such bravery. They manfully tried to push the tears that were at bay away.

Their family members were sorely afraid as they had never been arrested by the police before. The neighbourhood had never had police issues before.

At the station, the boys had quickly confessed who was keeping the meter among them. They had heard enough stories about police brutality and they did not wish to be tortured as they had seen cops torture criminals in movies.

With this discovery, residents believe they were the ones that had been responsible for the thefts that had been happening in the neighbourhood.