NORMAN KATENDE: Dressed-up theft is still theft

By Norman Katende

Some of life’s most important lessons about integrity are learnt in childhood. Mine came from two clusters of bananas, a woman selling produce by the roadside, and a grandmother who believed dishonesty had to be corrected before it became a habit.

When our mother was going through a difficult time, she sent us to live with our grandparents in Bukono, a small village a few kilometres from Ivukula. Then it was Iganga district. It felt like one of the last untouched places on earth, where life moved at its own pace and trust did not have to be negotiated.

A People’s Transport Company bus came through once a day. You learnt to recognise its engine from a distance, and had minutes to bathe, dress and reach the road. You did not even have to wait: a bag left by the roadside told the driver someone wanted to board, and he would remember where to stop as he made the U-turn back to town. Children rarely paid. If you could reach over your head and touch the opposite ear, you were old enough for a fare; if not, you rode free, often on someone’s lap.

That was Bukono, a place where small arrangements worked because people trusted one another.

The roadside was also the village marketplace. Homesteads sat far back from the road, and nobody could stand there all day waiting for customers. So people placed a sample of what they were selling on a small stool by the road: bananas, sugarcane, eggs, pancakes, or mubisi, the local banana drink. Passers-by would call out or walk up to the house to buy.

There was no CCTV, no attendant, no security. There was only an understanding that what belongs to someone else is not yours to take.

And then there were five of us, young children in lower primary.

One afternoon, walking home from school, we came across two clusters of bananas set out for sale. A friend suggested we eat them. We did, and walked on as though nothing had happened.

We were not hungry. My grandparents had a farm, a garden and an orchard, and more than three bunches of bananas were waiting at home. We took them simply because we could.

But I could not settle. I had been taught that theft was theft, whether a pen, a crayon or something to eat. I began to imagine the woman who had put them out. Perhaps she needed the money to take someone to hospital, or to buy paraffin for her lantern. The more I thought, the heavier my conscience grew.

Eventually I walked back, admitted what we had done, apologised and offered to work to make it right.

She smiled. She had seen all five of us, and she named my friends one by one. What pleased her was that I had come back. She accepted my apology and, generously, gave me extra bananas.

I thought that was the end of it. It was not.

She later met my grandmother and praised the way we were being raised. I still do not know whether my grandmother was more troubled by the theft or impressed by the apology. I do know that at around three in the morning I was woken for a memorable spanking, and one question: why would you steal someone’s bananas when we have plenty at home?

As a child, I resented it. Now I understand. My grandmother was not worried about two clusters of bananas. She was worried about who I might become if I learnt to excuse taking what belonged to others. Remorse, she knew, does not erase the wrong itself.

That lesson has followed me into adulthood. Whenever the Watoto Children’s Choir comes to perform, I host some of the children and take them out on their free days. At the supermarket, they almost always ask the same question about the self-checkout: what happens if someone just walks out without paying?

I tell them security is often less visible than people imagine. Cameras record, transactions are tracked, and theft can be investigated and referred to the police. A criminal record can follow you for years, complicating jobs, study and background checks. They quickly see that walking out without paying is not a clever shortcut.

But their question makes me ask a bigger one. What happens when people grow up without anyone teaching them that taking what is not theirs is wrong? What happens when dishonesty becomes so ordinary that nobody questions it?

We seem to be living in such a time. People grow comfortable taking private property, public resources, someone’s livelihood or an opportunity that should have been fairly earned. People even borrow and do not care to pay back.

The methods are more sophisticated than raiding a roadside stall. Some hide behind other people’s names, uniforms, offices, money or connections, and use legal and financial arrangements to make it all look legitimate.

But changing the packaging does not change the substance. Forcing a vulnerable elderly woman off her land without fair compensation is not just business. Using a moneylender’s leverage to take someone’s property through questionable means is not an ordinary transaction. Fabricating allegations to have someone arrested so you can seize their business is not enterprise, and so is getting an excuse or political power to steal public land.

Each case must be tested on its facts through proper legal process. But where dishonesty, coercion or abuse of power is established, we should call it what it is: theft. A suit, a title or a powerful friend does not make wrongdoing respectable.

My grandmother’s lesson was simple. Even when nobody is watching, even when the owner seems unlikely to notice, even when you can get away with it, what is not yours remains someone else’s. Today it is bananas; tomorrow it could be a goat, a salary, a neighbour’s land or the public purse. The habit of taking grows alongside the skill of justifying it.

The woman in Bukono could have lost faith in people that day. Instead, she recognised the child who came back. My grandmother made sure the lesson stuck. Between them, they taught me that trust is precious, and that it comes with responsibility.

We can put flowers around wrongdoing, wrap it in legal language, decorate it with success or tell ourselves everyone does it. None of that changes what it is.

Normalising theft is not roses. It is the slow erosion of the values that let us live together and trust one another. And when taking what is not yours becomes normal, nothing is ever enough.

And that also refers to our country.

Norman Katende is an award-winning journalist and the author of Parenting: A Universal Language.