Neighbourhood thieves on the prowl

By Sunmola Olowookere
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Beware! Thieves are on rampage in our neighbourhood. Residents would wake up in the morning and cries of lamentation over the loss of their property would rent the air.

Indeed, idle hands are the devil’s workshop. Our neighbourhood just like any other neighborhood has its fair share of small town thieves. These are 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 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 loss as they would be nowhere to be found. They would curse and threaten all to no avail.

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. Valuables would have been carted away

Soon, they were caught red handed.

 The group of thieves had tried to steal an electric meter from a vacant quarters 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 they 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,  all of them went to hide out of fear. They were sorely troubled as they envisioned what their parents 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 themselves 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, they 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 all along.