Over the last few months, there have been countless verifiable videos on Facebook and other social media where ALLEGED kidnappers, petty thieves, ritualists etc are lynched, bludgeoned, mobbed, maimed and sometimes burnt alive. These very disturbing, gruesome and heartbreaking videos can be accessed without borders!
Why are there so much of these videos on social media of late? Is it that there is an upsurge of crime? I remembered when I watched the jungle justice video meted on 4 Uniport boys at Aluu, a community in Rivers State, I had thought that was going to put paid on extra judicial killings, as there was a nationwide and international condemnation of the act. Alas! I was wrong.
Now, I just left Warri, a commercial and residential town and the taxi I boarded could not advance beyond a certain point because a mob had caused a blockade. We all stepped down. A man probably in his mid-thirties has been beaten beyond recognition. Blood was gurgling out of every imaginable pores in his body and there was a shout of ” tire”, “matches”, “petrol”. I chose a big chested man, who I felt was the leader of the mob:
Me: “Bros, wetin this man do?
Big Chest: “Nor mind this bill idiot, he enter one house go thief last 2 weeks, as we one begin beat am, police come carry am take go station
Me:” So wetin come happen again Bros?”
Big Chest: “The idiot enter the same house again this night, use knife take injure the man and him wife say they call police arrest am. They don rush them go emergency unit for one hospital”
I shook my head in shame and kept walking. From afar, I could perceive the roasting smell of the young man. I kept muttering to myself, so an armed thief was apprehended and the police had the nerves to release him without the accused heading to court? It is a regular phenomenon here in Nigeria though…
The Nigerian justice system has failed the common man. How can one explain situations where the police are asking for settlement for very serious offences like rape, arson, kidnappings, armed robbery and even murder? A failed justice system has probably given a meteoric rise to incidences of jungle justices.
Whenever you watch such videos on social media or you bump across an actual scene, shake your head and shame Nigeria’s failed system.
Esimagboko Oghenegweke is a journalist, writer and a public affairs analyst, He writes from Warri, Nigeria.
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