Strange Goings On at the Office

Two nights ago, my office was broken into - by who, we don’t know. But, whoever it was did a nice job of breaking down most of the doors. They came in though the back of the office. We are on the first floor (that’s second floor to you Americans), mind you, so whoever broke in had a tough job on balancing on a ladder while they bent the bars of the 'burglary proof' grid one-by-one. Writhing through the space created took them to a small balcony, from where they removed the louvres of the bathroom window in order to crawl in. From there, they broke down the bathroom door to get into the main office after which they broke down almost every other door in the office.

And what did they get for this incredible amount of hard work? =N= 14,000 (fourteen thousand Naira), or about USD 103. I couldn’t believe it!! All our computers, printers, photocopiers and anything else worth stealing were still there. Our documents were obviously also of very little interest to them, as the doors to the cabinets were wide open wit the contents largely left untouched. Why would anyone go into all that trouble? They were obviously looking for something specific (100 million Naira in cash perhaps- in which case, they really know nothing about my office) and I’m sure that they left extremely disappointed.

The most astounding part of it all (or perhaps not so astounding if you know even the teeniest thing about Nigeria) was that the security men heard and saw nothing. For the several hours it must have taken for the thieves to break their way into our office??? Unbelievable. Innocent until proven guilty I know, but I'm sure they were all looking forward to splitting the proceeds of their escapade (=N= 14,000 !!!!). LOL! On a more serious note, it does show how economic inequities persist for many Nigerians, when people would even consider going through so much trouble for the possibility of some indeterminate payoff at the end.