An Ekiti State High Court, sitting in Ado Ekiti, has just sentenced a burglar, Jimoh Dele, to 14 years imprisonment. Jimoh Dele was arraigned before the court on two count charges which border on theft by the Nigeria Police.
That Jimoh was sentenced for a crime he committed is not an anomaly but Nigerians are getting more and more bewildered over small thieves being struck with sledge hammers while the big thieves are almost cuddled.
On May 11, 2020, the burglar according to the charge broke into a building around Mobil Petrol Station, Waterworks, in the Ajilosun area of Ado Ekiti, “as well as a shop belonging to Oluwayemisi Adeleye and carted away goods and foodstuffs worth over N234,000. The prosecutor, Kunle Adeyemo, said the offences were contrary to sections 413 and 390(9) of the Criminal Code Law, Cap. C16, Laws of Ekiti State, 2012.
In her statement to the police, the complainant said, “My shop was burgled twice, in May 2020 and June 2021 during which my foodstuffs and soup ingredients, including rice, semovita, wheat and tomato paste, among others, which I was selling, were stolen.”
During interrogation, Jimoh according to the prosecutor confessed to having broken into the complainant’s shop. Consequently, Justice Olalekan Olatawura, found him guilty, and sentenced him to 14 years on count one and seven years on count two.
Not long ago, Joshua Dariye, former governor of Plateau, and Jolly Nyame, former governor of Taraba, who was convicted and sentenced for fraud were granted state pardon.
Nyame was convicted in 2018 and given 14 years imprisonment for diverting public funds, but his sentence was later reduced to 12 years in 2020, following a ruling by the supreme court which affirmed the judgment of the court of appeal on the matter.
Dariye was sentenced to 14 years in prison for N1.126 billion fraud, but his jail term was reduced by four years, following a verdict by the supreme court affirming an earlier judgment by the court of appeal.
On 8 November 2021, an Abuja Federal High Court sentenced a former chairperson of the defunct Pension Reform Task Team (PRTT), Abdulrasheed Maina, to eight years’ imprisonment for money laundering offences involving N2billion pension funds.
Contrarily, China for instance considers the looting of public treasury a crime against humanity and so public officers found culpable are sentenced to death.
Speaking on corruption and the Chinese approach, Law Teacher and Legal Practitioner, Dr. G.A. Onuoha observed: “The other day in China, the former Minister of Justice was sentenced to death for stealing $16m of the people’s money! Such death penalty for stealing public funds should be quickly introduced in Nigeria to checkmate the rapacious grand larceny of our public officials in order to improve our economy and boost the value of the Naira.
“Trillions of Naira belonging to the commonwealth are in private bank accounts while society at large, including the national and State Governments, are virtually bankrupted to the point of borrowing practically to run the Government itself and provide essential services to the people.”
In his article “Thieving frenzy and debt slavery”, published in Premium Times on 23 October, 2022, Wole Olaoye wrote:
“At the rate Nigeria’s patrimony is being pillaged by known and unknown but well-connected rats, the Guinness Book of Records will have to be updated to recognise our frog leap to primacy in thievery. Imagine, the Antwerp diamond heist used to be considered one of the largest robberies in history, in which loose diamonds, gold, silver and other types of jewellery valued at more than $100 million, were stolen.
“Compare that with the 95.4 million litres or 600,000 barrels of crude oil valued at $9.54 billion stolen within seven months in Nigeria. In this matter of large-scale thievery, the Belgians are mere lizards, while their Nigerian counterparts are crocodiles. Forget the nomenclature — technocrat, bureaucrat, meritocrat, democrat, aristocrat, theocrat, meritocrat, gerontocrat — a rat by any other name will still be a rat, especially if he occupies a position of authority.
“The economic rats in our oil sector, free of all legal or monitoring impediments, have bred profusely enough to outnumber the legitimate players. The result is that there is as much oil being stolen as the quantity officially exported. The thieves have collectively stolen too much for the owner not to notice. In other climes, those rats would have been incinerated long ago. But this is our beloved Nigeria where the lines between the good, the bad and the despicable are blurred…”
“What is even more befuddling”, the exasperated Olaoye also pointed out “is the fact that the government would rather borrow money to fund its budget than staunch the revenue leakage!”
