Thou shalt not loot

In the late 1960s when I was a kid, there was a music band of five blind old women in my hometown.

They sang about how people survived during the famine of 1947, known in Hausaland as Yunwar Shago. Driven by hunger, people excavated the underground silos of black ants called tururuwa. These industrious ants had filled their silos to the brim, one grain at a time, from numerous farms during the harvest and post-harvest season, collecting all the leftover grains of millet and corn. It was the ants’ palliative store in readiness for the long, hot dry season. Looting of ant silos turned out to be a dress rehearsal for the recent mass looting in Nigeria.

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While the looting of government warehouses was going on, I saw one looter saying on a video clip it was God that gave them the food. Which cleric taught him that? Interpretation of the scriptures is the preserve of clerics. They alone should properly interpret the Eighth Commandment, which says thou shalt not steal. Although the holy books spoke of manna from heaven, it is supposed to fall on your laps. You do not have to break into a warehouse to get it.

If EndSARS protesters noticeably had no leadership, looters had a leadership system that resembled Hobbes’ state of nature: everything against everything. It was a case of every looter for himself or herself; there was no leader to announce the commencement or the end of looting. The only visual signal to end looting was when a warehouse was stripped bare. From some videos of the looting spree, I also saw a lot of camaraderie among the looters. In Jos for example, some young men stood on the warehouse roof, smashed holes in it and selflessly threw down bags of rice for others on the ground to grab. No looter tried to grab loot from another looter. One physically-challenged man hauled a bag of rice onto his head and ambled through the streets, but no able-bodied co-looter snatched it from him.

There was even a picture of policemen loading looted items into three vehicles at Idu, in Abuja; of a policeman spiriting a bag of rice through a garden; and of a civil defence corpsman stopping to rest because of the weight of a bag he looted from a store. At a hospital in Abuja last week, I overheard two policemen discussing the videos. They were annoyed that the social media made much of the policeman carrying away a bag of rice. They said it was making a mountain out of a molehill because policemen suffer the same crushing pains of pandemic and lockdown as everyone else. I wanted to suggest to them that the cop should have gone to the looting site in mufti, but I held my peace.

Tens of thousands of alleged hoodlums, made up of men and women, young and not so young, participated in the looting spree, united by a hastily contrived excuse that the food they looted was palliative sent to them through state governments, which in turn hoarded it. It was the most uniting ideology in Nigeria after premier league football.

The looters had a point. I cannot see why rice, indomie, spaghetti and sugar should be kept in large warehouses for any length of time. Rainfall has wreaked havoc across the country and could easily ruin warehouses. There is almost no way you can keep rats away from such stores. Rodents will steal a lot of the food, eat, multiply and come back for more. They will also drop faeces on them, which could aid the spread of deadly diseases such as Lassa fever.

Insects, especially black ants, could do a lot of damage to food stores. The quantity of grain that these tiny insects annually loot from farms and silos is not small, especially during the harvest season. One insect specializes in beans; the weevil makes tiny holes in a wet bean seed, lays its egg in it, so that its larva feeds on it. Other insects specialize in yam tubers. My former Head of Department Prof Naqvi researched on yam tuber storage at Nsukka in the 1950s. He reported that a beetle and a fungus work in concert to destroy a yam tuber; the beetle bites the tuber and breaks its skin, which allows the fungus to move in.

Birds could also assist in ruining warehouses. Grain-eating birds have the sharpest eyesight of all animals; they can spot a grain from high up in the air. Birds spot grain stores faster than tech-savvy young Nigerians using Twitter and Google maps. They can sneak into most of these stores through holes in roofs and windows. Unlike human mobs, birds are not vandals. They only take what they need to eat and feed their young; they don’t vandalise furniture and files.

Besides, all packaged food items have expiry dates. Many of them are either expired or about to expire. It is the height of official carelessness and incompetence to keep or, to use the looters’ phrase, “hoard” these items in stores long after the pandemic had eased and the lockdown was relaxed.

The organized private sector group CACOVID tried to come to state governments’ aid by saying it was the one that delivered palliative items to their stores only ten days earlier. Assuming that is true, how many days does one need to distribute indomie and rice? Some state governments said they had already shared out palliatives that they themselves bought. In which case they already had a sharing formula, which was usually through local governments, legislators, ward heads, traditional rulers, party offices and worship centers. Ten days was too long a wait. They should have just reactivated the formula and speedily shared out the palliatives.

How did hoodlums quickly identify locations of all the stores? One veteran government procurement officer said he suspected internal collaboration. Looting of stores may have helped many officials to cover up fraud, just like the story of a crooked bank manager who padded figures when armed robbers raided his bank branch. The robbers realized after listening to the news that what they stole was far less than the figure the bank manager gave to the police. The robbers’ leader screamed, “That bank manager is an unarmed robber! He stole more than we did without lifting a finger!”

One state governor, Ahmadu Fintiri of Adamawa, plausibly said the looted store in Yola belonged to his state’s emergency relief agency because the state always had one crisis or another, be it insurgency, communal clashes or flooding. I saw video clips of mattresses being stolen from Yola stores. Mattresses look more like IDP relief items than COVID palliatives. In any case, looters in Yola also made away with 110 tractors, very unlikely palliative items.

Sympathetic social media commentators said the looters did the looting because they were hungry. It is a problematic assertion because there was no direct correlation between hunger and looting. Poor urban folks, who did the looting, are hungry only in relation to the urban middle and upper classes. In many ways the urban poor are better off than rural folks, who did no looting. It was also noticeable that little or no looting took place in the most rural states even though they have much lower human development indices. On the flip side, some of the most shocking amount of looting took place in Taraba, Adamawa, Cross River, Ebonyi and Kogi states, all of them poor and rural. The homeless, illiterate, poverty-stricken and disease-ravaged almajirai, long alleged to be the foot soldiers of Northern trouble making, took no part in this looting.

Maybe there is an explanation. A World Bank expert wrote 30 years ago that poverty is stabilizing; it is rising expectations due to development that cause instability. As you read this, hundreds of alleged looters are facing the music in police stations and in the courts. At last they will realise the wisdom in the Eighth Commandment and wish they had obeyed it.