Once upon a time, Lagos was a city as model for gangster robbers. Christmas season was a season of joy for them because they raided banks, markets and homes of the well-heeled. The major arteries like the Third Mainland Bridge, Ikorodu Road, Mile 12, Agege Motor Road and quite a few others were always parked with cars crawling in traffic snarls and rippling with fear.
The hoodlums bore sophisticated arms and defiant hoods or naked faces. They shot into the air, broke into banks, hacked into private homes, held whole streets hostage or a whole swath of a major road. They operated for as long as they wanted and left without dread of any arrests of the police. Sometimes the police knew but recoiled from attack because they were ill-equipped for the sophisticated weaponry of the lawless men.
With the deployment of heavy arms, other surveillance infrastructure as well as personnel, the gangsters have retreated and are rare. But a new set of bad boys now parade the streets and major arteries. They do harm. They threaten, steal, rob, maim, and introduce what was once a history to the profile of the city’s crime.
But this trend has been on the rise in the past year. With the coming of the dispensation of Governor Akinwunmi Ambode, they are trying to take advantage of a government about to settle down. They have been working with relentless defiance in some parts of lagos. They include, Oshodi-Oke and Oshodi –Isale, Mile 12, Iyana Oworo, Mile 2/Apapa axis, CMS, Apongbon and Ijora Bridge.
The bad boys are quite clever and imaginative in their devilry. They take advantage of the general fear of traffic commuters. So they pick a car or van, and they ask the driver and the other occupants of the vehicle to wind down their side glasses. If they do not obey, they threaten to do harm. Sometimes they place their hands in a pocket and threaten to zip out a gun or knife. If the commuter does not oblige, they actually bring out the weapon and brandish it.
This immediately inspires a mortal fear in the victims. Those who yield and wind down their glasses are compelled to do away with their valuables, including money, cell phones, laptops, jewellery and other valuables.
Some of them hold guns and others knives. In quite a few happy instances, they have no weapons and the threats are nothing but bluster. But there is no way of telling an empty threat from a real monster.
Their rhetoric often are loaded with street epithets and delivered in the base register of a warrior and faces of extreme skullduggery. The irony is that this happens sometimes in broad day light in presence of other commuters or at night, also in the presence of other commuters. But the victim bears his or her ordeal alone as though on a lonely street.
The worry about this trend is civil silence. Other commuters are afraid for their own security and so do not help the victim, who is painfully one of them. The other point is that the cases are not reported to the police, and that creates official ignorance of the scale of crime as well as of the hot spots. Knowledge has been spread by word of mouth mostly, and that is how it is becoming common knowledge.
The commissioner of police has started to step up police presence in some of the major places of horror, especially the Third Mainland Bridge. But a lot more needs to be done, as most of the areas are still nests of evil for the vermin of society. The governor will work with the police, and that is how the scourge can go away and Lagos can return to the quiet it deserves.
