September 25, 2004
In the House of God
An amazing story about a cell phone stolen in church - in Nigeria and the pastor's (unsuccessful) endeavour to get it back, reported by the Guardian News Nigeria.
"Places of religious worship are nowadays the prime targets of cell phone thieves, the special category of criminals who emerged shortly after the introduction of GSM telephony.
The reason for this is that the struggling Nigerian middle class loves to be seen with expensive phone sets.
The cell phone craze in Nigeria is so sophisticated that I have even seen phone sets from Thailand, China and Dubai, some of them looking like pencils. The wannabe middle class has infected the lower classes with its madness; the effect is that virtually every Nigerian now wants to own a camera phone and I have seen some of these imitation camera phones some with recording machines which serve the ordinary purpose of making the owners feel important.
Unfortunately, every Nigerian wants to be important. The social crisis that the cell phone phenomenon has created is that the poorer classes who cannot have cell phones now see it as a status symbol; they want to lay their hands on one of those toys desperately, and they are ready to stop at nothing."
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