In the last few weeks, dozens of persons were lynched or rendered permanently incapacitated through jungle justice. For instance, the Nasarawa State Police Command recently arrested two persons in connection with a mob action that led to the death of a soldier, Ayuba Ali, in Akwanga Local Government Area. The command’s spokesperson, Kennedy Idirisu, said the victim, who was on pass from Maiduguri, allegedly hit a street hawker at Agwan Affi area of the town while riding on a motorbike. The soldier who was in mufti tried to pacify the hawker. An altercation ensued, resulting in irate youths beating him up to a state of coma. The soldier later died in the hospital.
Jungle justice, a situation where some lawless people arrogate unto themselves the powers to punish offenders, has become a recurrent decimal in many parts of Nigeria. The ugly trend is in the form of public extrajudicial killings, beating or humiliation of suspected criminals without recourse to law enforcement agencies. On many occasions, petty crimes are met with severe punishments. There are instances whereby innocent citizens who made mistakes were manhandled while, on many occasions, others were found to be victims of mistaken identities.
Another jungle justice was as a result of the discovery of some suspected ritualists’ den in a drainage channel along Lagos-Abeokuta Expressway, a development that led to the lynching of a suspect. Later on, the police said the victim was just a destitute, believed to be mentally unstable. According to the command’s Commissioner of Police, Mr. Fatai Owoseni, the unidentified individual was set ablaze by a mob simply because a mobile phone was found on him.
We strongly condemn mob action in whatever guise. But we also challenge our security agencies, especially the police, civil defence and the DSS, to see this incessant abuse of the law as an indictment on their credibility. Unarguably, various opinion polls have shown that though not justifiable, mob actions are, to a great extent, the demonstration of loss of confidence in the country’s justice system - the police, courts and criminal justice administration.
Critics of our porous criminal justice system cite multiple examples of how criminals who should be in jail were unleashed on the society from police detention facilities. In some cases, those who provided intelligence information to security agencies became victims of reprisal attacks because some security personnel revealed their intelligence sources to criminals. In this way, many police informants have been killed by criminals who were let off the hook by security agents in unprofessional, corrupt and criminal circumstances.
No doubt, the image of the entire security system is at stake, a development that gives some people the erroneous belief that they should always take the law into their hands. It is the responsibility of our security agencies and the judiciary to fish out the bad elements in the system, punish them, and send them packing so as to sanitise our criminal justice system. No doubt, security personnel know the bad eggs in their commands, but instead of exposing them, officers cover up such crimes in a warped demonstration of espirit de corp. It is time for them to overcome their sentiments and drag out deviants for punishment. This is the best way of restoring confidence in the justice system; it is the best approach in preventing street urchins from taking the law into their hands.
Beyond this, we call on the National Orientation Agency, educational institutions, community, religious, trade unions leaders and other agents of socialisation in Nigeria to educate their members on the sanctity of human life. As jungle justice is becoming a norm instead of an exception, the lives of Nigerians have become cheaper and cheaper to take, as if we have been cast back to the barbaric age. We must shun this evil habit of killing one another at the snap of the finger.
