What Nigeria needs to curtail issues of mob justice is public safety that is people-centred: community policing that is genuinely local, accountable to the neighbourhoods it serves, and built on relationships. Community policing means officers who know the streets they patrol and the people on them, response times that make reporting a crime feel worthwhile, and oversight structures where ordinary citizens, not just governors and commissioners, have a real say in how their safety is managed.
ALUU4. Deborah Yakubu. The sixteen travellers lynched on the road in Uromi. These names have become painfully familiar in Nigeria’s national conversation on mob justice. While those of us far removed post #Justice4XYZ hashtags, and organisations issue media statements, a family is grieving the loss of a child, a brother or a sister. The dreams of that family are forever quenched, because of a bloodthirsty crowd.
|
|
The tougher families like the ALUU4 families in Port Harcourt follow up as much as they can, getting a conviction only after five years, with a good number of the suspects still getting away because of the lack of evidence. Other families, like Deborah Yakubu’s, have no closure at all. They mourn a daughter without ever knowing what she could have become.
It is noteworthy that Nigeria has no official database of mob justice. Amnesty International, covering January 2012 to August 2023, recorded at least 555 victims of mob violence from 363 documented incidents across Nigeria, of which 57 people were killed, 32 burnt alive, two buried alive, and 23 tortured to death. SBM Intelligence tracked 391 deaths in 279 separate incidents between 2019 and May 2022 alone.
|
|
|
|---|
Legally, the right to life is guaranteed under Section 33 of the 1999 Constitution. Only a court of competent jurisdiction can take a life, and even then, the last death warrant in Nigeria was signed by a state governor in December 2016, almost 10 years ago. The state, faced with heinous crimes, finds it hard to execute someone who has already been tried, convicted, and sentenced by a court of law.
Then there is Section 36, which guarantees the right to fair hearing, the presumption of innocence, and the opportunity for a defendant to defend themselves or appeal a decision. In criminal cases, the burden sits squarely on the state to prove, beyond reasonable doubt, that a crime was committed by the accused.
That process, in comparison to mob justice, looks like this:
The law: allegation – investigation – prosecution – trial – judgment – sentence. The mob: allegation – anger – violence – blood.
There is no burden of proof in mob violence. No objectivity. No proportionality. For some victims like Deborah, it was a message on WhatsApp read as blasphemous that led to her death. For others like the ALUU4, a false alarm. For Ibrahim Mbaya , “Ibee” to his friends, it was an iPhone 12.
However, one point we can make is that perhaps mob justice fills a vacuum that the formal system has left wide open. Take the ALUU4 case, where a conviction came only after five years. In Deborah’s case, her perpetrators, who were captured live on video, were only charged with criminal conspiracy and incitement of public disturbance, a charge that carries a maximum sentence of two years. The two suspects were defended by a team of 34 lawyers.
Ibrahim Mbaya
Ibrahim Mbaya was 25. A University of Jos graduate, reportedly with real momentum in Plateau’s fashion and creative scene, full of life and ambition. On the night of 26 July, he was accused of stealing a phone he was never even found with. A group of young men tied him up and beat him with planks, demanding he reveal the phone’s location. By the time he was rushed to the Jos University Teaching Hospital, he was already gone.
Three suspects have since been arrested. The police have condemned the killing and, as they always do, reminded the public that the justice system provides a lawful process for this kind of allegation. Videos of this horror were circulated online, recorded by persons who have become desensitised to violence and horror. Some of that same footage is what eventually reaches the police and makes an arrest possible, a grim reminder that the very devices capturing the cruelty are, at times, the only accountability mechanism that works.
There is no straightforward reason why mob violence or jungle justice comes so easily to otherwise ordinary people. Perhaps it is the anonymity of a crowd, the sense that no single person is responsible when everyone is. Perhaps it is how quickly the conscience gets absorbed into collective rage. Whatever the explanation, no excuse should be used to justify such evil.
However, one point we can make is that perhaps mob justice fills a vacuum that the formal system has left wide open. Take the ALUU4 case, where a conviction came only after five years. In Deborah’s case, her perpetrators, who were captured live on video, were only charged with criminal conspiracy and incitement of public disturbance, a charge that carries a maximum sentence of two years. The two suspects were defended by a team of 34 lawyers. The court eventually acquitted the suspects, citing the non-appearance of prosecution lawyers. Such is the case of our justice system and the fate of victims of mob justice.
Perhaps, it is not that Nigerians do not know that mob violence is wrong. It is that too many have watched the alternative, the formal system fail, over and over, to deliver anything that looks like justice to them.
Community policing does not need a different bill or law as it is already embedded in our legal framework under the Police Act 2020, sections 113- 119. Until we build that trust, deliberately and locally, no restructuring of who controls the police will stop the next mob from robbing us of our youth.
The Case for People-centred Public Safety and Community Policing
The current national conversation on policing is geared towards addressing the insecurities in the land. The conversation on state police has been on the frontlines for several years, with the bill seeing several iterations. However, the hurriedness with which the current iteration of the bill was passed is troubling. The loudest promise on offer is more police, more state control, more force. What is barely discussed is trust: the thing whose absence may as well be one of the causes of mob violence.
A state police force controlled by governors does not, on its own, close the distance between citizens and the law. It risks reproducing the same problems we already have: politicisation, impunity, a security architecture designed from the top-down, rather than built from the community up, only now with 36 versions of it instead of one.
What Nigeria needs to curtail issues of mob justice is public safety that is people-centred: community policing that is genuinely local, accountable to the neighbourhoods it serves, and built on relationships. Community policing means officers who know the streets they patrol and the people on them, response times that make reporting a crime feel worthwhile, and oversight structures where ordinary citizens, not just governors and commissioners, have a real say in how their safety is managed.
Community policing does not need a different bill or law as it is already embedded in our legal framework under the Police Act 2020, sections 113- 119. Until we build that trust, deliberately and locally, no restructuring of who controls the police will stop the next mob from robbing us of our youth.
Funke Adeoye is an international human rights lawyer and the founder of Hope Behind Bars Africa. She writes from Abuja, Nigeria.
Discover more from Premium Times Nigeria
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
