Iron-Condemn and Lootocrats: The Small-Time Thieves and Big-Time Plunderers by Austin Isikhuemen

Austin Isikhuemen | Contributor on politics and business-related topics.

At first glance, a ragged street scavenger hauling scrap metal through a dusty neighborhood and a polished politician stepping into a private jet have nothing in common. One walks in torn clothes, calling out for “iron-condemn”; the other glides through gated estates in a starched agbada. Yet look closely at the destruction left in their wake, and the illusion dissolves.

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From missing rail tracks and exposed manholes to abandoned hospitals and looted state budgets, both operate on the same logic of plunder. In this incisive piece, Austin Isikhuemen dismantles the boundary between petty street vandalism and high-level political theft, exposing how Nigeria’s “lootocrats” and scrap scavengers are merely two sides of the very same evil coin.

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I know many readers will wonder if there is any word like iron-condemn, and some will jump to the conclusion that this writer is probably inebriated! Well, that word only exists on Nigerian streets for now. If you live in the gated estates of Lekki, Magodo, Ogudu GRA, Asokoro, Banana Island, or those pristine highbrow estates along Abuja Airport Road, you are unlikely to be familiar with this word.

The craft and its practitioners are screened out by your uniformed guards at those massive gates.  Ditto those who reside behind high walls watching through CCTV eyes who drive in through the electrically operated gates of Abuja Ministers’ Quarters or the twenty-four-storey high-rise apartments of Ikoyi and Eko Atlantic City.

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The word has two meanings depending on use. It can mean scrap metal that is no longer useful to the owner who is desirous of getting rid of it at the earliest opportunity. It ranges from household utensils, electronics, replaced car and generator spare parts, air-conditioners, disused fridges and freezers, or borehole pumps.

The buyers, mostly from a particular section of Nigeria, move around with square barrows with two tyres, calling out “iron-condemn” while hitting a piece of metal against their barrows to attract the attention of residents. They tell residents that they are looking for iron-condemn to buy.

Residents call these scrap merchants “iron-condemn” too. And if you ask the man what business he does, he is likely to tell you “iron-condemn”. I have been in a neighbourhood meeting where residents complained about the menace of iron-condemn and wanted them banned from the estate.

This is the first word I know which is at once the name of a merchant as well as the name of his profession and merchandise! The iron-condemn comes to your gate to ask if the gateman has any iron-condemn for sale. You ask your guard who is at the gate, and he says it is an iron-condemn who is looking for some iron-condemn to buy! Very interesting indeed.

The iron-condemn plays a very useful role in the areas where they operate. Many middle-class and poorer neighbourhoods would be cluttered today by scrap metal if not for these scavengers. They not only evacuate such scraps, but they also pay for them. Many gatemen and house-helps make a tidy sum from such sales.

In a way, they also help ensure metals are removed from household waste that municipal agents collect on a commercial basis. By channeling such metals to agents of metal smelting factories, they WW2 provide cheap raw materials to such companies.

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Today, however, I am more focused on the deleterious impact of some of these iron-condemned folks who pose serious security and safety risks to society.

There is evidence that some steal, disconnect cables from fully wired homes, remove roofing sheets from completed buildings, steal air-conditioners and building materials, and break into homes, especially when they notice that residents have gone to work. These incidents affect individuals and organizations and cause a lot of financial losses.

What they do to public transport infrastructure is the worst of all. They remove cast-iron manhole covers on township roads and highways, leaving gaping holes whose edges cut vehicle tyres into pieces. Unsuspecting people have accidentally fallen into such manholes during heavy downpours.

They remove drain covers too, causing serious losses to security service providers.  They cause road accidents, some of them fatal. Some very daring ones even remove rail tracks, their steel sleepers and locknuts from sections of rail lines, thereby causing derailment that puts hundreds of lives at risk. They remove these items from working rail lines as well as disused ones running through forests across the countryside.

The iron-condemn and their collaborating buyers, as well as the final smelting factories who know what these items are and yet buy and smelt them, deserve the most severe of penalties. They are worse than armed robbers, who are, by law, punished by the death penalty.

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Think of the lives put at risk, those who die, and the monetary cost of repairs to such damaged infrastructure and rolling stock. The cost is enormous and some irreparable! Those involved in this evil value chain should be easy to track, arrest, and prosecute. The legislature ought to review the law to make the sanction commensurate with the offence.

What is the relationship between lootocrats and iron-condemn? Indeed, who are the lootocrats? In our democracy, those who believe in, and take part in the processes of governance in line with democratic principles, are democrats.  They serve in the interest of the people.

They make sacrifices and provide leadership that makes lives worth living. Among the leaders in such a democracy are some who are there for their pockets alone. They enter leadership positions relatively poor or mildly comfortable but become millionaires or, in the most bizarre cases, billionaires after a few years in government. Those are the lootocrats. Looting of the people’s commonwealth is their own directive principle of state policy!

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Lootocrats and criminal iron-condemn are two sides of the same evil coin. There are cases of some leaders who cornered the money budgeted for the construction and furnishing of a hospital but abandoned the carcass of the building at the roofing stage.

Did we not see a governor in one state who declared an unfurnished hospital open, with a borrowed bed and a hired patient, claiming on TV that tens of patients have already been treated there before the inauguration day? The people of the cheated community revealed the deceit. Such a one is playing holy today while trying to cast a puritan as a villain!  

Some would supply sub-standard equipment and medications in order to make unwholesome margins.  Meanwhile, patients die or get ineffective treatment that makes the remainder of their lives a miserable grind.

Others build roads by laying asphalt over compacted sand that, in a couple of years, gets washed out, leaving potholes that become death traps for the commuters they were meant to serve. A huge part of the budget is cornered. 

What of those who have been fingered by the EFCC as having stolen billions of naira out of their state’s resources while children have no chairs to sit in their leaking classrooms? Many of those children abandon school and end up as touts, bandits, and kidnappers.

They kill and get killed. They make society less secure for everyone except those they cannot reach while airborne or guarded with the people’s guns. Their pensioners gnash their teeth while some die awaiting their pensions that will never come.

Meanwhile, the lootocrat buys a private jet to fly around, buys a primary election, and goes back to the senatorial playground where the chess pieces are ghana-must-gos.  Is it not just to go there, say aye or nay, and approve loan requests?

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Please tell me the difference between a criminal iron-condemn and a lootocrat. They look the same to me. Or maybe I am not smart enough to see the difference. One wears well-cut suits or a well-starched babanriga; the other, a torn shirt with multi-coloured stitches in several places. But the evil deeds of both create tears, pain and death.

One can even argue that the iron-condemn’s impact, though utterly condemnable, is more benign.  The lootocrat kills people and their dreams today while stealing their tomorrow as well. Meanwhile, he carefully plants his offspring in all the sumptuous tables left in order to ensure the perpetuation of his lootocratic legacy.

What lootocrafts do not know, may not care about, and cannot correlate is that those stolen millions, those unexecuted projects, the bad roads that kill and maim breadwinners and cause deaths from burning fuel tankers, are consequences of his condemn-iron behaviour. 

The gun-wielding bandits and bush-based kidnap kingpins are those children he refused to train, whose school budget he drained. So are the many who, as condemn-iron professionals, cause road crashes and derailment accidents that kill many.

Because he refused to educate them, they named condemned iron (scrap metal) iron-condemn, just like the bridge head area at Onitsha, which is now called head-bridge.       

18th September 2026