Re-emergence of jungle justice... By Akinleye Olusegun

She was naked, bloodied and begging for her life. They were laughing, recording it and hitting her. Like a scene from medieval times, a soul is about to be taken in a cruel manner.  Whether she is innocent or not, no one can tell. 

Jungle justice or mob lynching has reared its ugly head again. Lynching is defined as any act of violence inflicted by a mob upon the body of another person which results in the death of the person.  While the legal justice condemns all forms of extra-judicial killings, jungle justice upholds immediate execution of a suspect in the cruellest manner possible without any form of trial. 

There have been recent killings in Abule Egba environs where a woman was set ablaze for allegedly kidnapping two kids in broad day light and another suspect burnt at Sango Otta. The case of the ‘Aluu 4’ is still fresh in our memories where four promising undergraduates were killed in a barbaric fashion while the Nigerian police stood watch.

This leads to very important questions: why would the people decide to take laws into their hands when there is a body established with that same purpose? Why is this jungle justice re-emerging in our society? 

In the words of the political philosopher/ thinker, Thomas Hobbes “the life of man in the state of nature (human condition without government) is solitary, nasty, brutish and short”. This means that human beings are essentially selfish and without government, humans would hurt and kill each other without hesitation.

 The main reason there is a government is to prevent the state from turning into a killing ground of anarchy and lawlessness as described by Thomas Hobbes.

In one of the videos that were circulated during the lynching of the undergraduates of the University of Port Harcourt, ‘the Aluu 4’, one partaker was overheard saying “don’t let the police take them away, they will release them”.

That is where the problem lies. People have lost faith in the Nigeria Police. Eric Guttschuss, a researcher at Human Rights Watch in an interview with Cable Network News (CNN) said, “vigilante justice and mob justice generally takes place when there is a culture of impunity for crimes and in Nigeria, the Nigerian authorities have failed to crack down on this culture of impunity”. 

Most of the policemen have been known to engage in shady activities. What happens when the agency tasked with investigating and prosecuting offenders turn to aiding and abetting the same offenders they are tasked by law to prosecute? What follows is jungle justice, chaos, anarchy, uncultured and barbaric actions. 

Generally if you are the victim of a crime and you go to the police, you are asked to fund the criminal investigation. If you don’t have the money to fund it and meet the incessant bribe to the police, the case is often dropped. On the other hand, the criminal suspect, if he or she has the financial means, can simply pay off the police.

Recently, the residents of Iju Station in Ifako Ijaye Local Government of Lagos state apprehended a suspect who had been going from house to house defrauding innocent people in the community. When the suspect was taken to the Red House Police station in Iju Water Works area, the community had to bear the brunt of paying and financing the investigation as the policeman in charge said he couldn’t prosecute the suspect with his own (police) money. 

So why blame the mob that sets themselves up as judge and jury?  It takes ten seconds or less for the mob to decide whether to administer its brand of justice. One of the chief characteristics of a mob is its quickness.  It is sudden.  It pounces, leaving the victim little or no time to ‘explain’. 

Tade Ipadeola, the lawyer who described mobs as a “diabolical compression of time,” had also added: “and to think of that we all complain that normal court proceedings are inordinately long in Nigeria”. In a country where the rich commit crimes with impunity and where majority of the people in prison are awaiting trial, it is sad but no great wonder, that citizens so often opt for the false utopia of the mob.

There is a whole lot for the government to do if there must be a stop to these mob actions. Most of the faults come from the inadequacies of our security agencies and the judicial system. The perceived injustice and inefficiencies spur the people on to take the law into their hands. 

On the other hand, the mobs are not exonerated. In the eventual killing of a suspect/perpetrator, they all have committed murder— an offence punishable under the law. The civil thing to do when a suspect is apprehended is to hand over such to the police. Anything devoid of such is a criminal act in itself. For things to change, they say, the culture has to change.