Over a year ago, a sleepy community in River State known as Umuokiri-Aluu gained notoriety in the international crimes lexicon as one of the worst places where the most brutal and gruesome dastardly criminal act of lynch mob and/or jungle justice took place when four innocent Nigerian youngsters who were undergraduate students of the University of Port Harcourt were rounded up over trumped-up allegation of stealing some laptop computers and lynched.

The four innocent students who suffered the most atrocious mob killing were Mr. Biringa Chidiaka Lordson, Ugonna Kelechi Obuzor, Mike Lloyd Toku, and Tekena Erikena. Sadly, the killers of these innocent students have not being successfully prosecuted and convicted because of the slow and inefficient justice delivery system in Nigeria which in the first instance is cited as an excuse by most people who participate in dishing out jungle justice to suspected offenders of the law, including petty thieves.

Also, over a year ago, a post-graduate student of Nasarawa State University and a daughter of a retired Army General, Miss Cynthia Osokogu, was lured to a Lagos hotel by some male strangers she met on the social network (Facebook) and slaughtered even as her property were stolen. These bandits were arrested by the Lagos State Police Command but, again, the slow criminal justice administration in the nation’s court system hasn’t allowed these alleged killers to face the full weight of the law on time bearing in mind of the saying that justice delayed is justice denied.

In a bid to find answers to questions being asked regarding the persistent application by mobs of what is today called jungle justice on suspected offenders, I tasked my research assistant, Miss Sylvia N. Okonkwo, who is a lawyer, to hit the ground running and uncover some intellectual reasons for this anomaly and suggest possible panacea. Her findings were as enriching as they were thought-provoking. They are also a wake-up call on the Federal Government to put in place legal processes to stamp out this evil practice because jungle justice is antithetical to democracy and the rule of law.

Mob/vigilante justice is said to be rationalised by the idea that legal mechanisms for criminal punishment are either nonexistent or insufficient. Vigilantes typically see government as ineffective in enforcing the law; and such individuals often presume to justify their actions as a fulfillment of the wishes of “the community”, so say experts.

Crime statisticians say that persons alleged to be “escaping the law or “above the law” are sometimes the victims of vigilantism even as vigilante behaviour involves various degrees of violence. Vigilantes may assault verbally or physically or may vandalise property or actually go as far as killing individuals as have happened severally in different parts of Nigeria over the years.

What then is justice if lynch mob and/or jungle application of the law becomes the overriding practice in a democracy? Black’s Law Dictionary, eight edition, edited by Bryan A. Garner, defined justice as “the fair and proper administration of laws.”

The understanding of justice is said to differ in every culture as cultures are usually dependent upon a shared history, mythology and/or religion.

For Ancient Greek Philosopher Plato, justice is the having and doing of what is one’s own. A just man to him is a man in just the right place, doing his best and giving the precise equivalent of what he has received.

In a constitutional democracy such as Nigeria, extra-legal killing is illegal and therefore must be punished and if not punished then impunity and anarchy will set in.

As followers of faith-based religions, there is a general belief that attributes of the divine is present in the formulation of what constitute laws and since life which is created by God is sacrosanct and inviolable, the taking away extra-judicially of that life is absolutely forbidden and offender must be punished in accordance with the due process of the law.

At this juncture we may as well remind ourselves of the famous paradox called the Euthyphro dilemma which essentially asks: Is something right because God commands it, or does God command it because it’s right? This theological aspect of the societal laws are better handled by theologians.

But on vigilante justice, in a number of cases vigilantism has involved targets with mistaken identities.

Historically, several groups and individuals had been labeled as vigilantes by historians and the media. Vigilantes have been central to several creative fictional works and in some cases have been depicted as heroes (e.g. Batman, Superman, wonder woman) and retaliatory forces against wrong doers.

Vigilantism and the vigilante ethos existed long before the word vigilante was introduced into the English Language. There are conceptual and psychological parallels between the Dark Age and medieval aristocratic custom of private war or vendetta and the modern vigilante philosophy, in the thinking of analysts.

From the historical archives, we can find that recourse to personal vengeance and dueling was considered a class privilege of the sword-bearing aristocracy before the formation of the modern centralised liberal-bureaucratic nation state (See Marc Block, trans. L.A. Manyon, Feudal Society, Vol. 1, 1965, P. 127).

In the 20th century, vigilantism has dominated major discourses among legal historians because of the wider application of this sort of unconstitutional practices whereby suspected criminals are subjected to instant punishment even to a point of being killed for minor offences like theft of bread.

Some notorious vigilantes in Nigeria since the advent of democracy in 1999 includes the Bakassi Boys (Aba/Onitsha) who were viewed as instrumental in lowering the region’s high crime when police were ineffective.

In Maiduguri, Borno State, the Joint Military Task Force has set up a loose vigilante group composed of young community civilians to hunt down members of the dreaded violent armed Islamic Terrorists – Boko Haram, who are thought to be embedded among the villagers. So is the Nigerian Government in support of vigilante justice since the Armed Forces in Maiduguri now reckon with the so-called civilian JTF accused of carrying out lynch mob justice on suspected Boko Haram terrorists? Those experts with considerable knowledge of constitutionalism have warned severally that the Federal Government of Nigeria’s romance with various kinds of vigilante groups could backfire and endanger the long term objective of institutionalising respect for the fundamental human rights of citizens and the enthronement of respect for the principle of rule of law which are the key cornerstones of democracy

Those who engage in vigilante violence justify the acts as being in aid of fighting crime as is now being done in the north-eastern Borno State with the full backing of the civilian and military authorities to flush out armed terrorists responsible for murdering over 5,000 innocent citizens.

Some scholars with considerable background of media law say that there is a causal assumption conspicuously promoted in the popular media that mob violence is an inevitable consequence of high crime and the perception of inadequate and/or inefficient policing.

The truth is that vigilantism is bad for democracy and unless checked, scholars fear that it can induce a dangerous self perpetuating spiral.

Mob/Vigilante justice is characterised by violent methods, often resulting in death. Vigilantes are therefore contributing to crime and lawlessness themselves and are threatening the very human rights culture upon which our new democracy is built. Rather than curb crime, vigilantes are exacerbating it. This means that the limited resources of the police are stretched even further by having to investigate vigilante violence in addition to the initial crime that brought it on. This weakening of the criminal justice system can in turn contribute to increased levels of crime, according to crime statisticians.

Miss Okonkwo found out that whilst government can make progress in increasing the efficiency of the criminal justice system, comprehensive transformation of this sector cannot be achieved over night. In the interim positive participation from communities is imperative.

Frustrations with the police and courts are real and ever present danger to the survival of democracy and therefore must be tackled professionally with zeal, speed and accuracy. However the culture of violence in Nigeria cannot be eradicated or reduced by resorting to further violence as a solution-it only a spiral for further lawlessness, increased levels of crime and disrespect for human life which is very sacred. Even the Holy Bible stated that he who lives by the sword shall die by the sword so we must generally look for solution to the growing spate of vigilante justice in Nigeria if we ever hope to sustain the democracy that we currently are in the collective drive to perpetuate and build.

•RIGHTSVIEW appears twice a week on Tuesdays and Saturdays. The Columnist, popular activist Emmanuel Onwubiko, is a former Federal Commissioner of Nigeria’s National Human Rights Commission and presently National Coordinator of Human Rights Writers’ Association of Nigeria (HURIWA).

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