The thief-catching committees…

There are different breeds includ­ing those labelled as ‘cautious thieves’. They are not the bold type and, therefore, steal when no one is looking. However, such thieves are not lucky because they do not have the qualities of the spider. When you think no one is looking, someone might be looking from an angle acute to your left ear.

Some thieves realise the fact that they do not have eight eyes and, therefore, adopt the bold strategy approach. Such a type would walk straight into your house and tell your wife that you’ve sent him to come and service the television and video-deck.

The deck and telly are all in excel­lent condition and your wife will ex­press a bit of doubt about why you’ve sent a repairer but…

“You mean Mr Osei sent you?”

“Yes. He says the integrated circuit needs to be changed to improve pic­ture quality. A taxi is waiting outside.”

The wife is bound to believe this because the man is bedecked in the working gear of a TV repairman and holds a tester in hand.

Moreover, he walks like a radio-me­chanic, smiles like an electronic en­gineer and has a transistor-like nose. And he is talking knowledgeably about something called integrated circuit which is a scientific term not akin to the vocabulary of housewives.

“When will you bring it back?”

“Before six o’clock. Lest I forget, he says I should take GH¢6,000 from you for transportation and incidental expenses.

So the guy is smart enough to take away all your electronic equipment in addition to GH¢6,000 for beer and khebab.”

Another brand of thieves comprise those who use force. They arm them­selves with rifles, semi-automatic weapons, machets, kitchen knives and grenades. They are called armed rob­bers or jaguda (Nigeria parlance), and they normally operate gangs.

In some cases, there are certain requirements one must meet before he can be a member of a gang. For example you’re below a certain height you’ll not be eligible for admission because when it comes to making an escape you may be found wanting.

You must have the kind of muscles that can help in street-fighting and your face must be distinguished on the negative side, meaning that you must be looking hard and satanic-looking.

After you’ve been robbed, armed robbers can also kill you if they see a possibility of you identifying them later. Dead men don’t talk too much!

The day I really got angry with thieves was in 1985 when one of them professionally stole my Mum’s corn-dough. The old lady had soaked corn and had it grinded out of which she prepared dough in a large rubber container. That night the door to the kitchen was not locked and in the morning we discovered that our dream of having banku that day would not materialise.

Well, I guess the wife of the thief was overjoyed because for two weeks corn-dough would not be a problem to her. She’d only have to “claim’ some okro and tuna and if the husband had been able to steal some crabs, then it must have been a festival.

Stealing has become a profession, albeit an infamous one. It is count­er-productive to the progress of society and that is why thieves are enemies of mankind. You can be a millionaire but a thief can make you a penninaire in five seconds. For this reason, the idea of watch-dog commit­tees became laudable sometime back and even now. It was even fashionable for communities to inaugurate their watch dog committees and swear to crush the balls of petty thieves and armed robbers.

But the question is whether some of these thief-catching committees are just existing in name or are really functioning?

I was just asking my younger broth­er, Edward Alomele, alias Alor, who is an Organising Secretary of a Watch- Dog Committee, what exactly they are doing to combat theft in the communi­ty. We are doing a lot,” he said

“But I’ve never seen you in action? I’ve never seen you attending meet­ings and organising strategies.

You’ve never attended patrols.”

Well, it is normal for everybody to defend the group he or she belongs to, and so I was not surprise that Original Alor, sorry Duplicate Alor, was trying to defend organisation.

“We are always alert and we nor­mally do not advertise ourselves. All our members are always on the lookout for suspicious characters and you’ll be surprise that any thief who ventures would be caught,” he said

I wasn’t quite convinced, though. However, Alor is confident that the committee is alive and kicking. Per­haps, some logistics would make them a bit more revolutionary, and more aggressive (General Quainoo, please accept my apologies for now).

That also brings to mind the police, Ghanaian policemen, in spite of their numerous short-comings have been commended of late. They are break­ing up criminal syndicates, but I guess that they would be more effective in dealing with robberies when they work hand-in-hand with watchdog commit­tees.

I’ll recommend that all watchdog committees be re-inaugurated and revitalised and taught how to work better with the police. They must also be given incentives without which commitment to work will run down to zero. The committee members must also receive some sort of training to make them more disciplined and purposeful.

I guess it wasn’t only my mother’s corn-dough that has ended up in a thief-man’s cooking pot. Others too have suffered the loss of more valu­able items like TV sets, car tyres, windscreen, cash, sound system and chamber-pots.

My former classmate, Kwame Kor­korti, does not like thieves at all. He started hating them since 1961 when some palm-nut soup laden with goat meat his mother had prepared disap­peared rather mysteriously from the coalpot. A thief quietly relieved the coalpot of its burden and made Kor­korti’s stomach tumble and groan.

The article was first published of Saturday, October 16, 1993