Opinion: Mob justice and the flight of wisdom

by Emmanuel James Ibe-Anyanwu

mob

As an improvised mechanism for arbitration, it flies in the face of procedure and order. Nothing more is needed than the whims of a roadside tribunal whose membership is earned by sheer presence at a scene and a willingness to practise torture.

Within the social fabric of contemporary Nigeria runs a certain evil that flaunts a repetitive impunity, in contempt of the law and public opinion. It is an affliction that started years ago as a cut-and-nail remedy for delayed or denied justice, an extra-judicial alternative that grew from the carcass of dead faith in the justice system. As an improvised mechanism for arbitration, it flies in the face of procedure and order. Nothing more is needed than the whims of a roadside tribunal whose membership is earned by sheer presence at a scene and a willingness to practise torture. Crime is established in its mere allegation. And the tribunal dissolves itself immediately upon the exhaustion of its capacity for sadism.

It does not dissolve into nothing, that tribunal. Members disperse quickly to melt back into society, so as to be punctual enough to contribute their own angry commentaries in the social media and elsewhere, condemning the very act they had just perpetrated.

Mob justice is not really a new evil in Nigeria. As a child in the 90s, I had witnessed a heart-wrenching episode of jungle arbitration in a community in Imo State. A young woman, second wife to a lousy polygamist, had just made a breakfast for herself and her only daughter. Her ten-year-old step-son met them at the table and she offered him some food, out of her magnanimity. It was magnanimous to have fed a hungry step-son whose mother was a permanent enemy. About an hour later, step-son screamed stomach upset. Rather than seek immediate medication, rival wife got busy with threats of hell. And hell obediently came on time: the boy died. Trouble! The woman was instantly imputed with the guilt of murder by the villagers that gathered. She was stripped naked, spat at, and leisurely beaten by energetic sadists as she was being dragged around the village. Her pleas of innocence infuriated rather than placate the mob.  She was banished from that village for life. And yes, it’s what you’re thinking – there was no autopsy on the dead boy!

Her predicament did not end in the banishment. She returned to her maiden home, much to the displeasure of her uncle who was not in the mood for the charity to share farmlands and other resources with the fatherless returnee. Poverty was soon followed by frustration, and then prostitution. When I saw her last year, the matter was still fresh in her mind. “God will vindicate me one day,” she told me amid tears. When and how that vindication will occur, she does not know. Perhaps that is what keeps her going – the thought that someday, Divine justice would prevail. Against whom – that amorphous humanity called mob? If only it were a Nollywood movie in which all villains would confess to crimes, and all truths would be established to mark a happy-ever-after situation….In the meantime she has to make do with her status as a living statistic of mob mayhem.

Her most recent counterpart, just this past Christmas in the same community, is an old woman whose son was wanted for the kidnap of another woman from the same village. The kidnapper was nowhere to be found, so the youths of the community stormed the old mother’s house and burnt it down, making sure that not a pin was taken out before the fire began. When I heard the story, my arguments with some native youths were a waste of logic. They saw nothing wrong in the act, and that is indeed where the problem lies. Heartbroken, homeless and fragile, the woman died just weeks ago.  Many did not show sympathy, believing that “her criminal son killed her… and she killed herself too by not raising her child well.” Mobs are a self-righteous band of blood-sucking ticks!

It does not fail to baffle me how a mob hardly deploys the test of reason in their adjudication of crime. For instance, in the earlier case, the woman had no reason to kill that boy. The rival wife had other sons who would inherit nothing but debts from their randy father. Just why would she kill a little boy she was known to have loved? A mob is an unthinking class of temporary lunatics, and the invocation of reason is far beyond the contrivance of rabid emotionalism. Or perhaps a mob is often aware that crime does not necessarily earn justification to be committed? Well, there have been heinous crimes that lack justification, totally irrational in their own right to evil, to which culprits readily confessed without duress, implicating that stand-by rascal and chief scapegoat of human error called the devil. The culprit admits only a fraction of the guilt, pushing the larger chunk to Unreason.

Only this past Saturday, 23 March 2013, the Tribune gleefully reported the attempted mob of a hermaphrodite in Sapele, Delta State, a report that was in itself an overt sneer at the victim’s predicament, given how his debasing picture  was published without any form of censorship. It reads in part:

“An angry mob was going for the kill when security operatives were quickly drafted to the scene. Their (mob) grouse was that it was strange and unacceptable that a man would possess dual sex organs. Young men near a filling station at the Sapele-Warri/New Road junction tore the man’s clothes, and revealed a very small male organ, allegedly with no scrotum – which to them suggested that he was a hermaphrodite… Men of the Nigeria Police in Sapele, and the other security operatives who were drafted to the scene, quickly dislodged the irate mob, who were taking turns to fiddle with the man’s sex organs, ostensibly to further confirm their suspicions that the man was really a freak.”

Sometime ago, I read in the newspaper the story of a naval officer who was mobbed over the allegation that he had ‘stolen’ a fellow’s manhood, a story that exposed the flight of reason in the operations of mob justice. No one had the common sense to inspect the crotch of the alleged victim of manhood loss, to be sure that the prized member had truly been excused from its beat. Nor was any talisman found on the naval officer as an indictment of his diabolical propensity – even as that would not amount to proof. His trouser pockets harboured no genital exhibit. He was instantly convicted on the evidence of a physical contact with his alleged victim, by means of which he purportedly plucked the asset supernaturally. Just as no one asked to see the alleged stolen laptops in the case of the Aluu4.

Meanwhile, the term ‘mob justice’ is actually a misnomer. It is used only for the sake of political correctness. ‘Justice’ has no business being preceded by a lunacy that throws rule of law and fair hearing out of the window. True, the courts may not be the only locations for justice. In fact they can serve the contrary, which is one of the reasons people can resort to taking the law into their own hands. But until society develops something better than the courts, humanity must tolerate the imperfections of the justice system and let it be the legal dispenser of justice.

And it is not totally true that mob justice is a function of the lack of faith in the justice system. Yes, there have been reports of police connivance with armed robbers, a pact that puts whoever reports crime at a great risk. But mob justice goes beyond system complicity. It may also manifest a psychological and socio-economic implication in how a group of people can summon instant hatred for an offender who may not have offended them directly. Some experts in mass psychology have argued that poverty leads to aggression; and that aggression seeks desperate expression in the social environment – so a scream of ‘Ole!’ at a bus stop may provide an instant opportunity to vent accumulated spleen. And, besides catalysing violence, aggression also imposes irrationality on the mind, leaving little room for reflection before action.

Yet it does not stop at system complicity and poverty. There is a general culture of violence in Nigeria, one that flatters bestiality. Rather than feel insulted, we inwardly envy the traffic hooliganism exhibited by our leaders. Note the verbal terrorism, the hate we unleash in the social media on acts that run contrary to our own ideas of morality. We create jokes to glamourise the persecution of gays and women who “dress provocatively,” thereby giving social imprimatur to the volunteers of mob action. There is a blatant militarisation of life across sections of our society – even the rich and educated do not miss the opportunity to halt traffic and insult each other over some venial offence.

While the menace may have a reason, it certainly has no justification – and it is dangerous to confuse the two. We owe ourselves a duty of re-orientation. The people that constitute these mobs are the same people that sing choruses with us in churches, or make prayer calls with us in mosques, our relatives and friends with whom we share humanity. With cases of mob violence on a permanent replay, we have to recognise our collective vulnerability. No one can be perfectly insulated from the consequences of mob hysteria, given that violence is a non-discriminatory force. With the ratio of one police officer to four hundred persons in Nigeria, the police cannot be ubiquitous enough to thwart incidents of jungle justice. We have to sustain the discourse ourselves to disabuse the minds of those among us who have not yet given up their animality. We cannot continue like this. We must keep this issue on the front-burner and continue to demand civility from those whose humanity has a huge deficit. The National Orientation Agency, the media, parents and guardians, and every other person that has a stake in society must insist on social and attitudinal change among the youths. We must bring Reason back on the streets and excise mob from the body of justice.

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Op-ed pieces and contributions are the opinions of the writers only and do not represent the opinions of Y!/YNaija.

Comments (3)

  1. Bravo! This is excellent! Its rare to find such combination of prosaic grace and Intellectual content. That’s what makes a good piece,no a perfect piece! This article accomplishes both.

    Now to the subject of mob justice, I totally agree with the author. It is banal, barbaric and should be severely condemned. Thomas Hobbes talked about anarchic existence which would become humanity’s plight in the absence of an organised government, law and order. In his words, human life would become nasty, brutish and short. I guess what Hobbes did not know was that, even in an organised society like Nigeria, a Hobbessian existence could be ensured by an amorphous mob, those who take the laws into their hands, wring the life out of it, and unleash mayhem on whoever they find guilty. One would want to wonder how they arrive at their verdict, and the author helps us answer the question: They are averse to reason!

    It requires a re-orientation, I agree. It also requires that we revamp our justice system and most importantly, have the courage to resist the mob. If there is a mob dedicated to blatantly disregarding the rule of law, there can equally be a mob dedicated to preserving the sanity of our sanity. I want to be a part of that mob. Sadly, many have stood and watched, as their fellow human beings were mauled and killed, without a fair hearing.

    In the words of Soyinka, The geography of the oppressed shall expand to accommodate those who thought they were previously protected by their silence. I believe in the power of the voice and the author has delivered in eloquent prose, a most resounding blow on barbarism and Injustice.

  2. hmm i sopport you my love but….. Major magaji was convicted by a court of sodomy not only that but of raping boys and distroying thier sence of desency. Very immoral you would say but he was pardoned aliyamiesaiyha is one thief but was pardoned, jimaji bankole inflated prices of good to an extent that i can call that a sin but was aquited, yusuf who stole 23billion was given a slap on the wrist and hmmm you sit and say no justification for mob justice cause its immoral? Somone said ”if immorality is pardoned then there is no incentive for morality” you say there are inperfections in the judiciary also people would say there are inperfections in mob justice. And until you adress those inperfections thatt allow thieves work free….dont talk to me about morality.

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