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By Mike Ikhariale

Today’s piece is a revisit of the one which I did in 2012 entitled JUNGLE JUSTICE: SIGNS OF A FAILING STATE following the brutal murder of four students of the University of Port Harcourt by a gang of people who claimed to have been on revenge mission which was actually a disgusting resort to jungle justice which is not only illegal and primitive but also a serious indictment of our flawed official prosecutorial system that has defaulted on its constitutional mandate to fairly and justly maintain law and order without fear or favour.

One of the philosophical justifications for the evolution of the modern state is the desire by mankind to escape the lawless Hobbesian “state of nature,” wherein life was reputed to be necessarily “nasty brutish and short.” But because the Nigerian State has, by design or by default, failed to live up to those expectations, the society rapidly descended back to that archaic and long abandoned social disorder in which human lives, the most valuable asset of mankind was valueless, cheap and readily disposable.

For years now, we have been inundated with the gory reality of jungle justice in which people take the laws into their own hands with a view to redressing what they see or perceive as injustice to them by criminals and other deviant elements but without any official attempt to intervene on their behalf.

What happened in the traditionally peaceful town of Uromi recently is a painful reflection on what has been happening all over the country. It is a sordid fact that, for years, most parts of Edo State have come under siege from herdsmen who have been recklessly killing, maiming and raping hundreds of innocent inhabitants with the result that farming, the main economic activity of the people, have been virtually halted because they have been unable to live their normal lives without the daily harassment and kidnaping being carried out by gun-toting herdsmen who have taken over their forests and farmlands apparently unchallengeable because of their superior firepower.
So, there was already a combustible situation on the ground occasioned by these unfriendly encounters by the inhabitants with the invading “herdsmen.”

The crucial question now is: why did the authorities allow this volatile state of affairs to endure for that long? They cannot claim ignorance of the increasing spate of killings, kidnappings and the willful vandalization of farms and plantations taking place in these places because there were daily news reports about the menace in the traditional and social media detailing the mounting loss of lives and incalculable amounts of properties there.

It is when the law fails to take its course as it has practically become the case in Nigeria that people resort to self-help or brutish and indiscriminate retaliatory revenge measures. All human lives are precious and they should therefore not be wasted as routinely as they have become in many parts of the country and without serious government intervention.

Every unlawful taking of an innocent life is condemnable and the recent spate of killings in Edo, Plateau, Benue and elsewhere must be equally condemned by all men of goodwill.

A dispassionate consideration of the Uromi incident will enable us to understand where such unusual communal action originated from. The story so far is that the local vigilantes discovered some men with guns and allegedly also holding huge amount of raw cash with them inside a “goods only” Dangote trailer and who were claiming to be “hunters” but did not have any hunted animals on them.
It was therefore circumstantially easy for the already incensed individuals to conclude without further proof that these were the same gun-toting herdsmen that have been brutally hunting them with guns in their homes and farms, kidnapping and inflicting heavy physical and emotional casualties on them. It unfortunately became a typical case of “the witch cried overnight and the child died this morning.”
In that set of situations, irrational mob anger tends to dominate rationality especially when they believe that even if they report the suspects to the authorities nothing meaningful would come out of it. While not by any means justifying their actions, it is at least helpful that the situation is duly contextualized for proper evaluation of the mob’s mindset.

If justice is routinely, fairly and speedily dispensed in society by official institutions duly vested with such responsibilities, there would be no need for any law-abiding person to resort to uncivilized self-help or jungle justice.
Ordinarily, it is the constitutional duty of the State to apprehend and punish criminals. That is why we have the Police, the Judiciary and the prisons services. Unfortunately, what has been happening is that nearly all these government institutions have lost the credibility and the moral wherewithal to do the needful and things are further compounded by the failure of the government that has itself been weighed down by corruption, partiality and systemic ineptitude.
“The everyday experiences of the people who have been victims of crimes in this country tend to make some gruesome accommodation for jungle justice. For example, someone who has been repeatedly robbed goes to the Police Station to make a complaint. He is asked to pay for the paper on which the complaint is to be made, to provide the Biro pen that would be used to write it and he is further told that there is no Patrol Vehicle or when there is one, there is no fuel in the tank. When arrested, upon some corrupt consideration, the criminal is promptly let loose back to the same community to resume his unhindered criminality. Next time there is a robbery, the people would not see the need to go to the Police again. Rather, they would help themselves in resolving their wahala.
The whole issue about prosecutorial “due process” is made useless by the fact that Police officers, in their moments of frustration, allegedly often brazenly resort to jungle justice themselves such as the extreme cases of extra-judicial execution of people in custody. Things are further worsened by the judicial system, an odious auction house where justice is allegedly hawked to the highest bidder.
Those who cannot afford to pay for justice or expect to be accorded the privileges of “plea bargain,” “perpetual injunction” are forced to take the illegal and primitive route to justice.

The steady decline of state authority or the reality of state failure in country made self-help justice an attractive proposition to all those who have been materially and circumstantially alienated from the formal legal system. As far as they are concerned, the Rule of Law is a luxury which they do not expect and which they cannot give.”
With respect to the Uromi killings, the State Governor, Monday Okpepholo, has done what is expected of him and as humanely and speedily as possible in the circumstance, never mind the partisan flaks from those who never really wish him well, no matter what. That is in sharp contrast to the arrogant threats and sable-rattling by some northern elite who are pretending not to know the root causes of these problems. It is their failure to serve their people well that has forced them into criminal dispersal southwards where they now massively inhabit the forests, invading farms and cities of others recklessly to the annoyance and insecurity of the host populations.
Freedom of movement in a federation should not be confused with the wanton invasion of other citizens’ domains for criminal purposes. In fact, the value of federalism is fundamentally diminished whenever people go about causing inter-state mayhem. The federal government must promptly and decisively resolve this menace through the General Danjuma principles of regulated citizens armed self-defense by the victims and similar deterring defensive mechanisms within the framework of balance of firepower. Otherwise, we might just wake up one day and find out that the various nationalities have gone their separate ways for the safety of their own people being systematically decimated under a malfunctioning federal order.