Justice and Politics in Africa

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 husbands 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 Akalukas
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 Buharis 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.