I have never fully understood the import of the cliché, "to sleep with one eye open", until recently. I have always considered it a sort of a joke or just a style of expression. Recent happenings that directly affected me made me realise that there is a lot of sense in that phrase.
One of those things was the recent attempt by a burglar to steal in my house in Bakori, Katsina state. He scaled the barbed wall in my house, pulled out completely the burglar proof and entered the main building through the sitting room window. But for the fact that the occupants of the house woke up when he made too much noise trying to break open the kitchen door, it would have been another story altogether. Other houses in that area were not so lucky as they lost quite a few valuables. My house was the eighth to be broken into within a span of about two months or so. It's the same story elsewhere in Bakori - the house of the widow of one of my late cousins was similarly broken into while she was out of town and her valuables were carted away by thieves.
And just yesterday here in Gombe, I was awoken around 1:30 a.m. by the shouts of, "thief!" "thief!" "thief!" and the sound of footsteps of people running after the thief just outside my house.
As if that is not enough, later in the afternoon, going through the news feed on facebook I came across a story someone narrated that the day before, around 11:00 p.m in Katsina, while he was about to enter his house, thugs or thieves or robbers waylaid him and dispossessed him of his phone and money. Because this was the second time it happened to him, he got angry, rushed into his house, got hold of a club, came out and chased the three robbers shouting, "thieves!". Luckily, people came out and helped, which led to the capture of two of the three thieves.
Still in Gombe, not quite long ago, one of our staff was stopped by two criminals on a motorcycle around 10:00 p.m immediately after he had collected money at an ATM and forcefully took the money away.
There is also the story of my driver who was stopped by two people in Maiduguri around 8:00 p.m while he was about to enter his house. They pretended they wanted to ask him about the direction to somebody's house in the vicinity. On getting closer, one of them reached out and pulled out the driver's phone which was in his breast pocket. Suddenly realising that he was being robbed, my driver hit out at the man and the phone fell off while the duo took to their heels.
Then yesterday in one of the newspapers, I read a disturbing account of how people are being waylaid and kidnapped for a ransom round Katari, along Kaduna-Abuja road.
These and many other stories made me realise that the cliché, "to sleep with one eye open", is for real, it's not just a style of speaking nor a joke. For, I now sleep with one eye open - as a matter of fact, I wrote this story with one eye open - it was written between 2:30 a.m to 3:00 a.m because I can no longer sleep with two eyes closed now....