A
teenager house help, Dare Kundare, who was arrested for stealing his employer’s
N350, 000, has attributed his involvement in crime to his father’s sudden
death.
Preliminary investigation after Kundare’s
arrest revealed that the suspect had applied for many jobs with fictitious
names and eventually got one with such a name. The fake name, City News
gathered, enabled him to initially escape after the crime, but he later
resurfaced when he thought the dust had settled.
The suspect blamed his indulgence in stealing
on the death of his father at an early stage, stressing that the responsibility
of catering for his four siblings and his mother thereafter fell on his
shoulder.
Kundare said: “My first visit to Nigeria was
in 2010 when I was barely 13 years. There is an agent in my country who has his
representative here in Nigeria. Whenever anyone wants to come to Nigeria, he
will contact the agent over there, who will in turn contact his representative
in Nigeria, who in turn contact and link us to any family that needs domestic
workers. We pay N15,000 as transport to come to Nigeria.
“The
first time I came, I worked in a farmland at Ilaro, Ogun State as a farmer. I
was paid N8,000 monthly. I went back to my country in 2012, after I managed to
save N30,000, part of which I gave to my mother to boost her vegetable trade.
“I came to Nigeria again in 2014 and worked
for one Alhaja in the Ojota area of Lagos as a house help and was paid N9,000.
But I left after one year, as Alhaja said she no longer needed a house help.”
He stated further that when he got to Benin
Republic, some friends and relatives began to worry him to build a house for
his mother and siblings since his father could not actualize the dream.
At that point, he said he was brought back to
Lagos by one Iya Ajuwon, after paying the usual N15,000. This time around, he
worked with one Daisy family in Ojota as a cook. The work, he said, started
well until he met one Sunday, a fellow Beninoise, who, according to him, sold
the idea of robbing his boss to him.
He said: “Sunday told me to rob my boss after
I informed him of my intention to leave because of the poor remuneration
(N11,000). On that fateful day, after my boss and his wife left for work, I
took the children to school and called Sunday on the phone to come. He came
with one Abe who travelled in all the way from Cotonou. I entered my master’s
bedroom without breaking the door because the key was left in the lock. When I
got inside, I saw some money on the table. I also broke into his wardrobe and
collected the bundles of naira notes I saw. I also collected his laptop. We all
left for Cotonou that very day. It was when we got there that I discovered that
the money I stole was N350,000.”
He disclosed that his share from the loot was
N100,000 and the laptop, and that Sunday also collected N100,000, while Abe
took N150,000, as the eldest of the three.
Asked what he used the money for, Kundare
replied he spent part of it on his
building project.
The
Nigerian police, collaborating with the international police (INTERPOL) trailed
the suspect to his village where he was arrested.
The police were only able to recover the sum
of N20,000 from him, while his partners in crime escaped. He was released on
bail, with a promise he would pay the balance of the money to the police in
Benin Republic who would hand it over to their counterparts in Nigeria.
But rather than keep to his promise of paying
the money on monthly basis, Kundare was said to have bolted to Nigeria, January
2016, where he changed his name to Matthew Ogundare. He had been employed again
by another family at Isolo, Lagos, when policemen, acting on a tip-off, swooped
on him.
He told the police: “Please beg the man I
stole his money to do me a favour by allowing me to work and pay him with my
monthly salary until the money is complete. Perhaps, if I had gone to school,
life would not have been difficult for me. And this is all because of my
father’s death which left us all to struggle on our own to feed. I am the only
one in Nigeria.”
The
case has been transferred to the State Criminal Intelligence and Investigation
Department (SCIID), Yaba, where efforts to arrest his accomplices, Sunday and
Abe are ongoing.
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