The thief we are allowed to catch

There’s a video that keeps finding me. Different faces, same story. A boy, sometimes a grown man, sometimes younger than a boy, on the ground in the middle of a crowd. Somebody shouts that he stole a phone. Or a purse. Or garri. The crowd doesn’t ask for proof and doesn’t wait for the police. It decides on the spot, and everybody films it.

I keep watching these clips and feeling the same thing. We’ve gotten very, very good at punishing the people we can reach.

Look at who ends up on that ground. Never the big man. It’s the boy who lifted the phone, because a boy who lifted a phone can be caught. He’s close. No security, no lawyer, nobody to call. He is the one kind of justice still within reach, so that’s where all the rage goes.

Now think about the people who emptied the country. The ones who moved the billions. The budget that got padded, the fund that vanished, the road that was paid for thrice and built zero times. Nobody surrounds them. Nobody films them on the floor. They steal amounts a market woman couldn’t count in ten lifetimes, and they do it in air conditioning, and they retire into titles and highlife. The garri thief steals something that could be handed straight back. The other thief steals the hospital you’ll die in front of.

We know this. That’s what makes it so bitter. It’s not that people can’t see the difference in scale. It’s that only one of the two thieves can be caught.

So the street becomes the courtroom, and I understand why. Who’s going to call the police? The same police we accuse of brutality, of bail-for-sale, of “anything for the boys,” of turning a stolen-phone report into another shakedown? People don’t lynch because they love blood. They lynch because somewhere along the line, they stopped believing that handing a person over leads to anything except that person walking free by evening. When the thing that’s supposed to hold justice is empty, the crowd fills it with the only thing it has left. Its hands.

Photo by Dan Burton on Unsplash

But here’s where I have to be honest, and where all of us do. We’ll cry to heaven about police brutality on Monday and set a boy on fire over garri on Tuesday. We’ll post about a broken, wicked system and then turn into the broken, wicked system the second a small enough target shows up. The brutality we hate from men in uniform is the same brutality we’re fully capable of, the moment we’re the ones holding the tyre and the matches.

And this is the part nobody wants to sit with. Some of the people in that circle, throwing blows, recording, shouting thief, are just thieves who never got caught. The one who inflates the invoice at work. The one who “adjusts” the transfer before it goes out. The one who’d loot too, if he ever got near enough to the pot. I’m not standing outside this, and neither are you. The distance between us and the man on the ground isn’t virtue. It’s opportunity, and how much of it we’ve been handed.

So no, I don’t think this proves we’re just bad people, top to bottom. That’s the lazy read, and it’s a convenient one too, because if cruelty is simply who we are, then there’s nothing to fix and nobody to blame. I think it’s harder than that. I think it’s what happens to a decent enough people when justice only ever runs downhill, onto whoever is poorest and closest. The anger is real and valid. It’s getting spent on the smallest possible target, because the real ones are behind gates we’ll never get past.

Imagine that same crowd, that same heat, aimed up instead of down. At the man in the office instead of the boy in the gutter. We already have the fire for it. We just keep pointing it at each other, at the smallest, softest version of the thing we actually hate.

This life sha. The big man sleeps fine, knowing the crowd will always find someone smaller to burn.