Your money and your life 

BY 

Aig  Imoukhuede

Things have come to a pretty pass in Lagos, as illustrated by this story of an everyday occurrence in the metropolis. On a Saturday morning, as a motorist gropes his way through a part of Ikeja to which he is a first time visitor, he enters a road that he believes will take him to a certain address. Then he finds his way blocked by a massive gate. It is locked and unmanned, and there isn’t even a smaller gate set in it for the use of pedestrians.

Through the gate’s vertical grilles he can see the other side, where a man is busy washing a car outside the nearest house. The motorist calls out to the man, to ask for direction to the address he is looking for, and is told:

"It’s in the next street, but you can’t pass through here. That gate is locked."

The motorist turns back, drives some distance up another road and, on turning a corner, finds his way blocked by yet another locked gate. By now he knows what the problem is. The entire neighbourhood has been turned into a sort of Hampton Court Maze, but without the frills. This maze has been constructed by residents seeking to escape the unwelcome attention of armed robbers.

Years ago, when the gates first became permanent features of the urban landscape, they were locked only at night, between midnight and 6a.m. And they were also manned. Today, only one of the two or three gates likely to be erected within an area is open in the daytime. At midnight it too is locked.

These gates (or, more correctly, barricades), dotted as they are all over Lagos, have become symbols of a people’s feeling of insecurity. Unfortunately they have not noticeably reduced the incidence of armed robbery and violent crimes - just as the "burglar proofed" windows that have become a must in every house have long ceased to be a deterrent against today’s sadistic killers.

Here is a random selection of incidents that have happened to people I know - or knew - very well:

At about 1 a.m. one October morning, six men climbed over the fence of a house in a neighbourhood that was supposed to be well patrolled by a security team that included some policemen. As the intruders stood in the garden, trying to figure out how to break into the main house, somebody spotted them from an upper floor window, and raised an alarm. To discourage the residents of the house from getting too adventurous, the robbers fired at the window, and then proceeded to let themselves into the sitting room. It took them about one hour, for they had to displace two very stout bars.

Once they were inside, the robbers knocked a fortified door off its hinges by demolishing the supporting wall with a cold chisel. They then made a hole in the ceiling, and through the hole gained entry into the living quarters upstairs. While doing this the robbers fired a total of eight shots in and around the house, so it was not a particularly silent operation.

It was not particularly unwitnessed either. All the neighbours within hailing distance were at their windows getting a ringside view. Also among the onlookers were thirteen policemen from the nearby police station. They were led by the D.P.O. himself. They were armed, and they did nothing. After it was all over, the D.P.O., service revolver at his waist, explained his men’s inactivity by claiming that they were under a powerful spell cast by the armed robbers.

The intruders took all the money they found in the house (they had brought a ridiculously large Hessian bag for the purpose!), a camera, and all the jewellery belonging to the lady of the house. Luckily no member of the besieged family was harmed. One of the robbers — the only one among them who carried a gun — ended up shooting himself in the leg, and had to be helped off the premises by his mates. As marvellous an example of retributive justice as one could wish to see.

It was a little after 7 o’clock on a Saturday evening. A man sat in his lounge, watching television. His wife had taken three of their four children down to the fast food outlet around the corner. The fourth stayed behind with her father to watch television.

Two strangers walked into the room, while two others took position outside. The ones who had entered the sitting room slapped the owner of the house around a bit, then ordered him to give them all the money, especially a cache of "dollars" which they assumed he was keeping somewhere. They also demanded the key of a car parked outside his window, a car that actually belonged to a man visiting a tenant in another part of the compound.

The man who had been watching television with his daughter was shot in the neck for not "co-operating." He died before he got to the hospital. His daughter, who was also shot, survived, but required surgery. It was she who gave an eyewitness account of what happened.

At about 11 o’clock on a Wednesday morning, four armed men casually walked into an office somewhere on the Lagos mainland. After herding staff and visitors into a room and locking them up, the men introduced themselves to the boss man as "hired assassins," and ordered him to hand over all the money in the office — or else. This took place, let it be noted, in an office, not a bank or a shop or any place where business involving cash is transacted. To soften the boss man up, and possibly to disorientate him, the armed robbers gave him a severe beating. The robbers took everything of value that they could find — his watch, his wedding ring and some money. And they continued to rain blows and kicks on him for not "co-operating." The way things were going, the boss man could see no guarantee that the robbers would spare his life even if he were to miraculously find dollars to give to them. So, when he saw a small chance to try to escape, he seized it — and was shot. Fortunately the bullet didn’t hit any vital organ, but he ended up in hospital.

A while ago, a gang of about fifteen armed men raided a house not very far from where I live. The men arrived at about 3 a.m., bearing guns and a sledgehammer. With the latter equipment they knocked a big ugly hole in the wall of the house they had targeted. And this was done, not exactly next door to a police station, but with about a half dozen armed policemen standing within shooting distance. It was the armed robbers who did all the shooting. No one was injured in that incident, but the scars it left on the minds of the invaded family took a while to heal.

And then there was the case of the well-known architect and politician who was trailed to his house, robbed, and then shot dead.

The most disturbing thing about all these incidents is that robbers now expect their victims to have large sums of ready money on the premises, just waiting to be handed over on request. I have a friend (name withheld for his own protection!) whose practice it was to keep a large sum of money in a special bag in his wardrobe, to be handed to armed robbers in exchange for his life, should that eventuality ever arise. Fifteen years ago the sum so set aside was N5,000, which was considered quite adequate at that time. Five years later, as inflation took its toll, he increased the amount to N20,000. Five years ago, in response to a further rise in the rate of inflation and in the general level of greed, it became N50,000. Today, an armed robber would take N100,000, consider it no more than his just due, and then shoot the giver.

The most exasperating thing about armed robbers is the way robbers seem to be able to stroll away from the scene of their crimes, secure in the knowledge that no one would stop them. The police, who should do that, usually arrive about thirty minutes after the criminals would have left. Someone was complaining on television the other day about how the police arrived at a crime scene thirty minutes after the armed robbers had walked away. The Inspector in charge explained that they had a flat tire on the way.

The most predictable thing about robberies is that the victim’s neighbours are not likely to rush to his help for a variety of reasons. It’s either that they are unarmed and therefore helpless against armed psychopaths, or they are still in shock, having just been witnesses to a carnage. If the truth is to be told, the urgent sound of a burglar alarm, or the victims’ hoarse shouts for help, are usually regarded by neighbours as a call for them to crawl under their bed and begin praying as hard as they had never prayed before. Not for them those ridiculously suicidal exploits we read about in THE SUN, concerning seventy year old grandmothers wading in with their rolled-up umbrellas and sending villains scampering.

In this neck of the wood, even the fiercest watchdogs — those pure bred Alsatians and Dobermans that are quick to bare their fangs at the mere sight of an innocent visitor, almost invariably keep their heads down and fall strangely silent at the sound of gunfire at 3 o’clock in the morning. It never seems to occur to them that some of us, when jolted from our sleep by the sound of gunfire, tend to find a countervailing sound of furious barking hugely reassuring. That is where my dog Nikki is different. He makes an almighty row at the first sound of gunfire. But is half German Shepherd and half something else. Maybe that makes him blissfully ignorant of what the pure bred Alsatians know about; self-preservation.

The most startling thing about armed robbers is the realisation that they are mere mortals who are also afraid to die — unless of course, they are doped up to the gills. Ordinary citizens form their impression of armed robbers from what they read in newspapers — about a swashbuckling Shina Rambo who is armed with "sophisticated weapons" and is ever ready to take on the police in a "shoot out." Or a too-too smooth operator in a smooth suit who is young, well spoken and ruthless.

Some armed robbers have even become mythical, like the one-man-matchete bandit who once terrorised the neighbourhood in which I live. As his operational name suggests, he is a lone ranger who goes about armed with a machete. He has a terrific reputation of being able to materialise and dematerialise at will.

Equally startling is the contrast between the often romantic image that people have of armed robbers, and the reality of those stripped-down and inarticulate ragamuffins that police commissioners love to parade on television from time to time. Obviously it is the guns that make them seem larger than life — even if those guns, as we often see from those parades on television, are no more "sophisticated" than crude, made-in-Awka pistols.