In October, it was reported that a bill to protect people against jungle
justice had scaled second reading in the Senate and might soon become a
law. Considering that there are already laws against wanton killings in
place, such a bill is superfluous. Nigerians practise jungle justice,
not for a lack of laws but because our institutions are too tepid to
enforce existing ones.
Lately, in the cosmopolitan city of
Lagos, a young man was lynched by a mob for the alleged crime of
stealing a mobile phone. There are conflicting accounts of the incident
and up till now, nobody has sorted through the murky details to produce
the identity of the victim. His killers depersonalised and dehumanised
him to justify his gruesome murder. Even if he truly stole a mobile
phone, his death was unwarranted. There are reasons human societies
institute laws commensurate to a crime and we need to find the language
to explain that to a mob; people who have already consigned themselves
to the status of animals so they could legitimately rip another one of
their kind at the jugular.
In Nigeria, it does not take much more
than a mere accusation to be a victim of jungle justice. Most people who
participate do not even stop to ask questions before rushing to mob a
victim.
In the wake of the Lagos’ unfortunate
incident, the Senate is hastening the passage of the bill into law.
While it is almost gratifying that the lawmakers are demonstrating
responsiveness, a law is a reductionist solution to a complex problem.
How many more laws would have protected
the four undergraduates of University of Port Harcourt who were lynched
after being falsely accused of theft in Aluu community? What gave their
killers gumption if not a conviction that the law is largely impotent? A
couple of years ago, an older woman probably suffering from dementia
was lynched in the same Lagos by retarded folks who were convinced she
fell from the sky when she transfigured from bird to human. Her killers
do not need more laws to stop their Inquisition crusade.
Likewise, the 74-year-old Mrs. Bridget
Agbahime of Kano State mobbed by those who believed she had blasphemed
against an indifferent god. I read her husband’s interview where he
described the incident in vivid details and I could not help but weep.
Imagine how devastating it must be for him to have witnessed the death
of his wife, lost his livelihood, and on top of all the trauma he has
suffered, learnt that those apprehended by the police had been set free.
What good would have been more laws for the National Youth Service
Corps members who perished in the heated aftermath of the 2011
elections? It has been 21 years since Gideon Akaluka’s decapitation;
today, the guilty parties swagger around and about the metropolis, their
freedom a middle finger to the law.
I will concede though, that due to
socio-cultural changes, and the upgrade in the tools we use to navigate
daily existence, existing laws need to be tweaked. These days, it is not
uncommon for folks to gather around lynching sites to take selfies,
posing against a scene of gross inhumanity and using the dead as a
backdrop for their narcissism. There are those who are quick to whip out
their phones to record mobbing so they can share it on social media and
generate traffic for their pages and blogs. There are those whose
presence at such scenes engineer the expectation of perverse
entertainment; they wilfully egg on the perpetrators, hyping a lynching
so they can derive some catharsis from ritualised violence. At varying
levels, these people share culpability with those who carry out the
actual lynching.
What psychologists have previously
described as bystander apathy has a fresh traction in the age of social
media. People are no longer content to simply stand around expecting
others to take responsibility and stop the crime. No, they want to see
the lynching carried through so they can record a spectacular footage
and share later. By processing such grievous acts into fodder for bored
eyes, they might also be establishing the evidence of their own
involvement in the crime. We can argue that people who record such
scenes provide key evidence of human depravity but analyses of such
eyewitness activities have revealed that people also create the news
they eventually report. Combating mob justice should involve
interrogating the role the hand behind the camera played; whether by
divesting themselves of responsibility and watching the crime happen
through their camera lenses, they are accessories to murder.
If the Senate will carry on with the
bill, they will do well to remember that jungle justice in Nigeria does
not happen only on the streets, it is in fact a staple of our judicial
system. Fighting jungle justice should therefore start from
understanding the processes of its social and psychological formation;
the cultural undercurrents that make it possible for people on the
streets to abjure legal processes and proceed to administer justice as
it suits them.
We cannot talk about the jungle justice
that takes place on the streets without talking about President Muhammdu
Buhari who, on live TV, displayed his lack of regard for court orders
on the leader of the Independent People of Biafra, Nnamdi Kanu and
former NSA, Sambo Dasuki. We should also talk about Buhari’s tacit
endorsement of the death of the Shiites who stood in the way of the
Chief of Army Staff, Lt. Gen Tukur Buratai. About 350 of them were
buried in a mass grave. What about the death of the pro-Biafra
protesters who were cut down by police bullets as they ran for their
lives? Like Pontius Pilate, the rest of us – including voices in the
civil society who used to be active right up until the last
administration – simply wash the blood from our conscience.
From Buhari, we should move on to the
Economic and Financial Crimes Commission whose idea of justice now is
largely hunting down people, subjecting them to public ridicule, and
quietly letting them go afterwards. Right from the time Buhari became
President, the EFCC has spent more time entertaining us with confession
narratives coming out of their gulag and little else in the actual fight
against corruption. We are expected to simply lap it all up like those
who use their phones to record lynching. Afterwards, they send us on our
way, tense with our aborted pleasure of witnessing justice done. With
such level of erosion of public confidence in judicial institutions,
making more laws to combat jungle justice is disingenuous.
These days, being tried in the “court of
public opinion” is the closest we get to see justice done in the
anti-corruption fight. We can take it for granted that much of the
hoopla about arresting people, detaining them, and granting them bail is
a cycle that is meant to merely make us dizzy. Yet, there are people
out there who hail this ugly development; they further beg for the
constitution to be suspended so the President can “properly” fight
crime. If the so-called educated people consider the law as an
encumbrance to their idea of justice, why would those on the streets who
are quick to lynch feel any differently?
Tackling jungle justice or any of its
variants will do well to catch those in government who use extrajudicial
means to overcome what they consider the shortcomings of the legal
systems.
The proponents of the bill may have good
intentions but they cannot circumvent the reality: mob justice is not
merely about the spectacle of public lynching; it goes all the way to up
to the leadership. The Senate should do more than merely munch on facts
in a parliamentary session, they need to properly address the lapses of
administrative infrastructure that make even the state resort to jungle
justice.
Source: PunchNg.
Comments