Conductor nabbed with phone

Last week, a conductor could not control his weakness for stealing people’s property and was totally embarrassed. We were in a taxi on Jinja Road when Aziz, a conductor to Mustafa, decided to steal a phone from a passenger who was seated next to him. The passenger, after realising that he had lost his phone, searched some of the passengers who were seated next to him. The conductor told us to stand up and be checked while the phone was actually in his pocket. “Muyimirire babakebere kubanga tentwagala bubi,” he said, meaning “stand up and you are checked because we don’t want thieves,” retorted the conductor. We had just moved a short distance when a young man in the back seat remembered that he had seen the conductor put a phone in his back pocket. “Conductor, what have you put in your back pocket?” asked the young man. Stupidly, the conductor challenged the young man by asking if the phone was his. We stopped the driver near Jinja Road police station and ordered the driver to drive back and find the owner of the phone. We found the owner at Caltex Filling station Wampewo, telling his friends about his bad morning. He just looked at the conductor and just said, “You have survived today, tomorrow you might look in the face of death itself”. On the way back, our conductor smelt danger and started begging us not to beat him because “it was poverty eating him up”. The taxi was now getting stuffy because the conductor was releasing gas because of fear and guilt. Most of the passengers got out because of the discomfort. ends