”Kowa ya dade yaga dadau”. – Hausa (Whoever lives long, will see wonders).
There is a peculiar intimacy to theft in Nigeria. It is rarely loud. It seldom announces itself with violence. More often, it is quiet, communal, rationalized, and almost always explained away. It is the kind that smiles at you, eats with you, prays with you, and later helps itself to what is not its own—confident that nobody is watching, and even more confident that if someone is, nothing will happen.
Two stories, seemingly ordinary, help us understand this national habit—not just of stealing, but of eating what does not belong to us.
Dele Farotimi speaks sparingly about his wife’s retail business. It is not secrecy; it is restraint. So when, on a Sunday, of all days, his wife decided to visit her business premises, it was not out of suspicion. She rarely showed up even on weekdays. Sundays were sacred, slower, assumed safe.
What she met there was not hunger. It was audacity.
Three crates of eggs had been fried. Ninety-six eggs. On a Sunday shift of about 24–26 staff, that averaged nearly four eggs per person. But that arithmetic is almost irrelevant. The deeper issue was that no one had authority to touch them. They were not staff welfare eggs. They were not damaged goods. They were stock.
Worse still, twelve tubers of yam had been boiled.
Let us pause here. This was not one rogue worker sneaking an egg into a pocket. This was collective agreement. A meeting without minutes. A consensus without conscience. A shared understanding that “it will not be noticed,” that “it will be counted as breakage,” that “everyone is doing it.”
This is how corruption begins; not in billion-naira contracts, but in breakable eggs. Not in offshore accounts, but in boiled yam. It is not driven by hunger, for hunger does not require secrecy among twenty-six adults. It was driven by entitlement, the dangerous belief that if something is accessible, it is permissible.