The Normalization of Jungle Justice in Nigeria
On my way to the market one afternoon, I noticed a police van. In the back of the van, on the floor of the vehicle lay a gory sight. A man with grey matter leaking out of his head was being held in position by hands of the men in uniform.
I looked away quickly, trying to unsee what my eyes had encountered.
Up ahead, huddled together in groups were people whispering. Apparently the man had stolen a motorbike and had gotten caught.
A mob had gathered and he had been beaten. Very badly. To death or to permanent brain damage.
For these people, it was a run of the mill event. Stealing was met with the justice meted out by the nameless faceless mob. It was right. It was not to be questioned.
But I questioned it. I went home, wrote a poem about it and even a short story. Then I was going to lay it to rest, just like the other incidents I had heard or seen in my university days.
But the image has not left my mind and I started thinking about all the other times I had seen jungle justice being meted out on people.
Boys accused of stealing laptops or phones in the male hostel whipped and beaten by their colleagues.
A worse fate awaited an outsider as the crowd usually fell on them with less restraint.
I believed that it was commonly expected that jungle justice should not exist in our society. I have found that many people do not agree with me. But even if we are reducing our expectations and standards, it should not exist in our institutions of higher education. But education does not negate the bloodlust of a mob in Nigeria.
Amaka in When Trouble Sleeps by Leye Adenle
It should be surprising that a friend of mine, an undergrad student at the time would vehemently insist that it was right for him to want to break the leg of any offending thief that he runs into. But many others around me share this belief.
It should not be normal that our people see the only solution to the problem of theft to be resorting to jungle justice, staining their hands and consciences with blood rather than to call the police.
It shows a disaffection with the way our structures and institutions handles crime. More often than not offenders do go unpunished. I have seen a handful of thieves walking free just hours after incidents of theft involving them have occurred.
It is a mockery in the face of the common people. So they use the anger they feel at the system to dehumanize the thieves.
I say this because the amount of venom and hate poured out at that moment when a mob is let loose is more than the situation warrants. Frustrations from elsewhere and pent up emotions from other issues are released on “innocent victims”.
What worries me the most about mob justice is that no one thinks that human life is worth anything at that particular moment. Bloodlust diminishes the value of a life to nothing and as the mob dissolves into thin air, our collective conscience struggles to stay alive, drowning in the depravity of our actions.
All our hands are stained, from the one that lit the match, to the one that held the camera, to the one that stood by and watched the lynching of our conscience.
Our hope lies in the law taking its course and gaining the lost trust of the people. It is when as a society we know that criminals will be punished accordingly that we will be able to stop jungle justice. But until then both innocent and guilty lives will be lost in the fire of our anger.
