A klepto in the Assembly?

It was like a dream during the daytime.

A few days ago, there was an unusual sight in the premises of the Assembly that prides itself as the number one state Assembly in Nigeria. At the security post, a young man driving a cool red car was seen being manhandled by a team of security personnel in broad daylight.

The man was slapped a couple of times and ordered to sit on the bare floor. In another instance, an apparently overzealous police officer was seen attempting to hit the young man with the butt of a rifle.

Eko Akete would later learn that the man had just been arrested for allegedly stealing a laptop which he hid under his car seat. But quite strangely, the laptop reportedly belonged to his friend whose office he just left.

The acclaimed thief, who also works in the Assembly, had acted as if he had come to spend some time with his friend (the laptop owner) whose office was just a stone’s throw away. Once in his friend’s office, the culprit expertly stole his friend’s car keys, took the laptop, hid it under his own car and quietly returned the keys.

However, while doing all this, little did he know that somebody was watching and had alerted the laptop owner who in turn alerted the security officers at the gate.

The thief had aroused suspicion because after his last visit to the same office, a phone was declared missing.

But one of the things that made the whole saga really bizarre is the fact that the guy in question is believed to be well off, able to buy the kind of laptop he stole many times over.

“As a matter of fact, he has a bar that is doing well and he just recently returned from abroad. So, why steal a laptop? I would strongly recommend him for deliverance in a church, because what he did does not look ordinary,” a man who claimed to know the thief well, was heard saying.

Eko Akete later gathered that the thief has “strong connection” in the Assembly. Perhaps this explains why, after being whisked away in police patrol car, he was “released” a few hours later.