CREATIVE THEFT - STEALING THINGS YOU DIDN’T EVEN KNOW YOU COULD STEAL 🇿🇦🇰🇪
Stealing of underground wires is a classic ‘Third Worldism’ - the theft of batteries, wiring, fluids etc. from public electrical infrastructure in order to re-sell it. You have to understand, any infrastructure not locked up is fair game. This kind of theft is very commonplace in places like South Africa, Kenya etc - in the picture below Kenyans siphon off Motor Oil from electrical pylons. Might not even occur to you that the electrical infrastructure ‘just sitting there’ is something you could steal because you generally take it for granted as a part of the human environment that, by default, you afford a certain level of respect to. This is not the case for other groups of people though!
South Africa has reported a nearly eight-fold increase in the theft of certain types of cable in recent years. Any kind of electrical infrastructure not guarded at gunpoint can be looted and stripped down - trainlines, traffic lights, cabling, lighting etc. - a lot of things are stolen that it wouldn’t enter your mind could be stolen. As well as contributing towards further ‘enshittification’ so-called replacing this infrastructure often comes at considerable financial cost. Private security is sometimes hired to protect critical infrastructure now
Asked some friends from Kenya and South Africa “what are the strangest things you’ve heard being stolen?”
• Animals but not just in the regular poaching sense, strange animals like sea lions and penguins as well as pets and farm animals like dogs and ostriches
• Pavement tiling
• Trees
• An entire caravan (detached from connection to electrical, water systems and driven away)
• Body parts from cars, fuel from inside fuel tanks
• Golf buggies from a golf club, golf clubs
• Statues, gravestones
• CCTV cameras
• Furniture - tables and chairs - from outside a restaurant that wasn’t locked up properly
• A meal at a restaurant while the customer was in the bathroom
• Clothes while a person was swimming in the sea
• An entire corrugated iron shack (dissembled for scrap while owner was away - came back to find patch of dirt where his house used to be)
Really creative, imagine the mental space you have to occupy to even conceptualise stealing these kinds of things. Opens new mental vistas about ‘what is possible’
A gang of thieves who stole £50,000 worth of underground cables have been jailed.
The theft knocked out communications for thousands of people in Birmingham city centre.
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