YOU SHAMELESS THIEF, YOU!

By Shiku Ngigi

Yes, you there plotting your next burglary. You are the ever-absent student in class, thief in the hostel. So your parents sent you all the way to this land to steal? Did they labour day and night to send you to the university only for you to metamorphose into a common thief? 

It’s one thing to steal back in village, steal the neighbour’s chicken when they are not looking and have a feast with friends (It is, if you are a ten-year-old with all the time in the world to think of nothing but that). It is yet another thing to call yourself an intellectual and invest your time to devising ways and means of robbing students of their hard-earned belongings. 

You walk into the library and sling a bag over your shoulder as if it belongs to you. A bag you grabbed on one of the racks at the entrance. You break into rooms and grab the first laptop you see. You even wait for the dead of the night to walk out to the clothes lines and make away with people’s wet clothes. You have stooped lower than low.

OK, maybe your parents did not send you here. Maybe you laboured all on your own to make it to this great institution. So what? Did you make all that effort only to reduce yourself into an agent of crime? Oh yes, you are a criminal, just in case you have deluded yourself into thinking you are better than they who do it forcefully. 

Shiku, I am from a poor background. I cannot afford a laptop and neither can my parents, you say. Hold up. I am pretty certain that you are alive because you had some tea and mandazi for breakfast. Also, I am pretty sure you are not naked or out there in the rain. What am I saying? A laptop is not a basic need. Do what you can with what you have. Use it well and your efforts will pay off in the end. 

You might even get a better laptop with better specs than the one you are planning to steal. Laptops are made to expire in as few as three years. This is based on a little maxim we call Moore’s Law. Obsolescence will hit you in the face before you have erased the legal owner’s data. While you are bent on eyeing that poor girl’s laptop in the library (one equipped with 2GB of RAM, 32-bit Windows 7 and 160GB disk space), another bright individual is making ends meet to buy an awesome Core i7, complete with Windows 8, 6 GB RAM and 640GB of disk space).

There is nothing as pathetic as blaming your background for the thief you have become. You are a shameless individual who delights in seeing other people suffer. You reap where you have not sown, akin to the hyena, which waits in the shadows for the lion to make a kill on its behalf. (And by the way, hyenas have been found to hunt for over 50% of their meals. Turns out you are the only real scavenger out here.) Don’t blame your parents. You are old enough to know that what you’re doing is entirely wrong.

It’s also likely that you are stealing laptops for a bigger syndicate in campus. That’s just sad. It gets sadder; that moment it hits you that you are just a minion. You are stealing to enrich the big boss up in your little ‘organization’ while you attain the label thief. It cannot get any sadder than that. 

Meanwhile, we will lock our doors a little tighter, hug our bags a little tighter and keep our eyes peeled for any move you make. You are one of those people who should be banished to Mars or Pluto if it still exists. You can also reform while there’s still time. It’s all up to you. Your days are numbered.