Nigerians And Eating What Does Not Belong To Them -By Prince Charles Dickson, Ph.D

“Kowa ya dade yaga dadau“. – Hausa (Whoever lives long, will see wonders).

There is a peculiar intimacy to theft in Nigeria. It is rarely loud. It seldom announces itself with violence. More often, it is quiet, communal, rationalized, and almost always explained away. It is the kind that smiles at you, eats with you, prays with you, and later helps itself to what is not its own—confident that nobody is watching, and even more confident that if someone is, nothing will happen.

Two stories, seemingly ordinary, help us understand this national habit—not just of stealing, but of eating what does not belong to us.

Dele Farotimi speaks sparingly about his wife’s retail business. It is not secrecy; it is restraint. So when, on a Sunday, of all days, his wife decided to visit her business premises, it was not out of suspicion. She rarely showed up even on weekdays. Sundays were sacred, slower, assumed safe.

What she met there was not hunger. It was audacity.

Three crates of eggs had been fried. Ninety-six eggs. On a Sunday shift of about 24–26 staff, that averaged nearly four eggs per person. But that arithmetic is almost irrelevant. The deeper issue was that no one had authority to touch them. They were not staff welfare eggs. They were not damaged goods. They were stock.

Worse still, twelve tubers of yam had been boiled.

Let us pause here. This was not one rogue worker sneaking an egg into a pocket. This was collective agreement. A meeting without minutes. A consensus without conscience. A shared understanding that “it will not be noticed,” that “it will be counted as breakage,” that “everyone is doing it.”

This is how corruption begins; not in billion-naira contracts, but in breakable eggs. Not in offshore accounts, but in boiled yam. It is not driven by hunger, for hunger does not require secrecy among twenty-six adults. It was driven by entitlement, the dangerous belief that if something is accessible, it is permissible.

These were the same Nigerians who would later complain about corrupt politicians. The same mouths that would curse looters in government had quietly chewed through what did not belong to them. This was not desperation. It was wickedness dressed as normalcy.

Years earlier, on an international flight, I witnessed a different kind of theft; more intimate, more theatrical, but governed by the same moral logic.

A woman sat across the aisle from me, occupying four center seats because the plane was not full. Ordinarily, she would have faded into the anonymity of long-haul travel, but a man kept visiting her. He would sit briefly, leave, return again.

At first, I assumed they were husband and wife. But something was off. Each time the man sat with her, he scanned the cabin; left, right, front, back. His body language was tense, furtive. Peace was absent.

Curiosity sharpened my attention. And then I saw it: after surveying his surroundings, he would steal a kiss. Sometimes a cuddle. Romance conducted like burglary.

The man, probably in his fifties, had his own seat elsewhere, but kept returning like a thief revisiting an unlocked door. His behavior reminded me of childhood mischief; those moments when we slipped a few naira from our father’s coat pocket or took change from our mother’s akara money. We always checked first. We always made sure no one was watching.

But as the Ibos would say, ji odu anya ele ya—someone was watching him with the upper eye.

No man steals what belongs to him. No husband approaches his wife like contraband. A clear conscience fears no accusation. A man does not wobble like jelly toward his own possession.

When we disembarked and queued for immigration, the confirmation came quietly. The woman stood alone. The man was nowhere near her. He vanished back into his legitimate life, leaving behind stolen moments.

That was when Proverbs 9:17 came alive: “Stolen waters are sweet, and bread eaten in secret is pleasant. But he knoweth not that the dead are there; and that her guests are in the depths of hell.”

Stolen waters always taste sweeter—until the aftertaste arrives.

What connects fried eggs in a retail shop to stolen kisses at 35,000 feet? The absence of accountability. The belief that secrecy absolves sin. The illusion that if no one sees, nothing counts.

Nigeria has perfected this logic.

We live in a society where certificates are bought, elections are rigged, contracts are inflated, and accountability is treated as an inconvenience. Our politicians eat what does not belong to them with the same confidence as those staff fried eggs they did not pay for. Billions disappear, loans are collected, projects remain invisible, and no one pays the price.

The scale is different. The spirit is identical.

The man on the plane kept looking around because he knew what he was doing was wrong. The workers cooked in bulk because they believed they would not be caught. Politicians loot because they are certain the system is complicit.

This is why corruption thrives. It is not merely institutional; it is cultural. It is rehearsed early, normalized often, and excused endlessly.

Perhaps the most dangerous phrase in Nigeria is “Everybody is doing it.” It is the moral anesthesia that numbs guilt. It transforms theft into participation and silence into consent. But corruption is not sustained by the big thief alone. It survives because of small, daily betrayals of integrity, the eggs, the yam, the kisses, the lies, the shortcuts. These are the training grounds for grand looting.

A nation that steals small will eventually steal big.

And yet, we continue to separate ourselves from our leaders, as though they fell from another planet. They are our cousins. Our classmates. Our former neighbors. They learned somewhere that what is unattended is available, that what is communal is expendable, that consequences are optional.

The tragedy is not that Nigerians steal. The tragedy is that we believe no one is watching.

But someone always is, history, conscience, God, society, the child learning from us. Like the man on the plane, we may think we are unseen, but exposure often comes later, quietly, devastatingly.

You cannot build a just society on stolen eggs and borrowed morals. You cannot condemn corruption loudly while practicing it softly. You cannot pray against looters while dining on what does not belong to you.

Until we confront the everyday thefts we excuse, the grand corruption we protest will remain untouched.

Because nations, like individuals, do not collapse from one big sin—but from many small ones left unchallenged. And so, the question remains, uncomfortably simple: What have we eaten today that was not ours? Only time will tell…