Are The Masses 419?

By Sam Omatseye

The news seems impossible. It is against the grain. The masses stole from the elite as we witnessed in two banks. It is what sociologists and philosophers would describe as counterintuitive. Is it the masses who corrupt the state or the state that corrupt the people? Can the masses steal? Is it not, from time, the province of the elite to put their fingers in the people’s cooky jar? We call them the masses, but we don’t imagine them amassing wealth. Amassing is a filthy word, sentenced to the big man who picks the people’s pocket. But for the scenario to be reversed? That is something unusual.

When the masses steal, they do it against public trust? The public outwitting the public. It is not only suicide; it is also incest in the open square. It is the underbelly undermining itself.

Lotus Bank is one of the new generation banks. It may not have the capitalization of the marque brands of finance. It is not UBA, Zenith, GTB, or even the oldies known as First Bank or Union. But they have come to play. Or, shall we say, come to be played?

But it did not happen to Lotus alone. It is not an epidemic, or else one would have said Lotus, unlike the flower, gave off a foul scent. It happened to another new generation bank, the Taj Bank.

Taj faltered in July this year. Lotus’ was in 2024. For Taj, it was no consolation that its loss was less terrifying at N900 million. The Taj story was too embarrassing for any public tears.

After all, money can bleed, but it does not cry. Taj kept the noise down, the coins jingling sober within its vaults.

There is no public record on how many customers stole, and whether there was any pursuit of such public perverts. But the Lotus story smells like poisoned scent, like a fart in a flower shop.

What enabled this ignoble hour? A glitch upset the banking system into a breakdown. The banking falcon could not hear the falconer. Payments fell apart. Anyone could withdraw how much they wanted and transfer how much they wanted. Mere anarchy was loosed. Innocence was lost in this ceremony of pillage.

So, in the words of Poet W.B. Yeats, “The best (customers may have lacked) all conviction/ while the worst are full of passionate intensity (to steal).”

For Lotus Bank, the sum was N1.13 billion. A nifty penny, even for a bank. The number of thieves? 718 customers. In this era of sanctifying averages, how much did one person steal? N6.3 million. A nifty penny for any civilian not named Dangote or politician. It is astounding because we know that the average Nigerian does not have up to N50k in their accounts. It means some have gone home with as much as N20 million. What a pay day, or what a steal day. Or shall we say, what a people’s day?

What might the people have had in mind when they made a run at their bank. They probably were fantasising about that shirt, that shoe, even that moment in a plush hotel in Ikoyi. Not a plate of pounded yam and egusi soup. By this act, these people failed the poor test.

The poor would steal to eat, to pay rent, for transportation. Not a N10 million pay day. Even if it is rent, the poor does not rent a N6 million flat. So, how are the people different from the elite they gripe about?

That is not the only part. Lotus Bank has sued 45 banks in order to retrieve their money. Is it funny? The elite are fighting the elite to resolve the crime of the people. Usually, when the elite fight, it is to steal from the people.

Like when politicians fight, they claim it is on the people’s behalf. They fight for spoils. The people rejoice over crumbs while the dueling elites fatten. Here, the people’s cheeks are aglow at the expense of the elite who fight over who made away with the loot.

It is an inversion of a morality tale. The good guys are now the bad guys. But who is the good or bad guy? It is what Martha Nussbaum, an American philosopher, calls the “fragility of goodness.” Are we good because it is innate, or because the power of circumstances lionise us, make us saints or heroes or even warriors? Is it the law that tames us into good husbands, good secretaries, good accountants.

Left to ourselves, we might be monsters. These issues obsessed Greek plays like Aeschylus’ Agammenmon and Sophocles’ Antigone. Nussbaum muses often in that book on Aristotelian ethics.

“If there is no God, everything is permitted,” asserted Russian writer Dostoyevsky.

So, in the blindness of a glitch, the people could show their true colour. They could steal and get away with it. Maybe not so fast. What technology takes away, technology can also give back. Maybe that is why the Lotus Bank is suing its competitors. If the people are knocking the heads of the elites against each other, we wait to see when the giants collide. Will the people, as grass, suffer? Lee Kwan Yu said when two giants make love, the grass also suffers. It is true of banks. Routinely, they romance in interbank transactions that happen every second. It is endless coming and going. The people interrupted at Lotus.

Does it mean there is 419 in the people? A few years ago, a protest was a disguise for open robbery. During EndSars, they raided food warehouses, destroyed BRT buses in Lagos, decimated a mall. Those who took bags of rice stepped over those who got nothing. They did not say, ‘let’s share, we are all poor together.’ Even the poor eat alone.

The most intriguing paradox is that the money at the bank is not, technically, the bank’s. It is other people’s money. It is a sacred trust. The people put the money there. The people stole it. They stole from themselves. Blessed be the people.

It only speaks to a trait: the foolish majority. Hence, philosopher John Stuart Mill laments “a few wise and many foolish individuals, called the public.”

Yet, it is the same majority that cries foul at official corruption, at stolen and unaccounted billions. They hide. But if Lotus finds them out after the lawsuit, will they be named? If they run an advert of 718 thieves, who will shame them? No one knows them. If it is a senator, a governor, a minister, it makes screaming headlines. The streets also scream. One prominent politician’s error is a disgrace; the people’s collective folly bears no name or face. This is not a shame society anymore. Since we left the village state, we lost shame.

The public space is mainly urban and, as Claude Ake asserted, it has been privatized by the elite. Positions and offices are prebends, places held in trust for some higher power. If they are held in trust or on trust, they are not for trust. The public do not own the public space and they cannot be held responsible for whatever goes wrong there.

Glitches are no new to modern commerce. We saw them at Heathrow Airport. PayPal was no customer’s pal when a glitch put 10 billion euros in jeopardy a few years ago. An American customer woke up to become a $92 quadrillion man. The zeroes behind 92 dazed him. He then playfully fantasised about clearing the United States National debt and buying his favorite baseball team. Before the glitch joy, the man had had few transactions over a thousand bucks. The bank returned him to his humble dollars.

It is this humility of low estate that the Lotus customers did not have. They became instant megalomaniacs. They always were but the opportunity just opened their eyes to who they always were. Maybe they did not rise up to that self-knowledge, a fatal flaw of tragic heroes.

Some may assert that the poor stole because the elite made them. As novelist Samuel Butler is quoted as saying, “the society prepares the crime; the criminal commits it.” We can expand it to mean, the elite prepares the crime, the people commit it. It is a collaboration. This makes either party guilty.

These glitch thieves are the same people who vote, who protest, who fulminate in the media, who grab the lawmaker for being a thief. What would playwright Bertolt Brecht say today about his poem in which he asserts that the leaders held a meeting and they had a vote of no confidence in the people? They decided to dissolve the people and elect another one.

With these 718, shall we say the masses are 419? Was Brecht right that we should dissolve the people? In his play Coriolanus, Shakespeare’s masses reject their own good. In the Bible, the people grab a king in Saul after a prophecy that Saul will whip their backs sore. Perhaps, hence French philosopher and novelist Jean Jacque Rouseau said, “force them to be free.”

Bottomline: the people are not innocent.

After all, the masses have perennially voted, by their own admissions, thieves and scoundrels. In democracy, it does not make sense to dissolve the people. In tyranny, it does not make sense either. The people are the state, no apologies to Louis XIV.

We have to live with them, hug them, scold them, beat them up but accept them all the same because they are us.