Some Nigerians have been attacked by mobs based on suspicions of criminal acts. Some of the victims survive and have stories to tell, but others are gruesomely murdered VICTOR AYENI writes
“At the time, I had just graduated from the university and was living in Enugu while my parents resided in Lagos. My dad visited our hometown and asked me to come to see him because there were some documents of his shares he wanted to hand over to me.
“We escaped the crowd but after a while, we encountered them again on another route and this time around, they were running towards us. It was then it struck me that the mob was chasing us,” Obi said in a voice tinged with disbelief. “As the mob pounced on me and started beating me, the bike man started shouting, ‘He is not a thief, I picked him up in front of my in-law’s house; he’s innocent!’ They took my bag and found a few clothes and the documents my dad gave me in it. I held the documents up and started to scream, telling them to look at my name.”
“It was years later when I saw the video of the mob lynching of the students in Aluu, Port Harcourt, that I realised the magnitude of what happened to me. I narrowly escaped death,” Obi noted.The public killing or humiliation of a victim over an unproved criminal act is barbaric behaviour that routinely happens across the country.
On May 12, 2022, Muslim students of the Shehu Shagari College of Education, Sokoto, stoned and battered a 200-level Home Economics student, Deborah Yakubu, to death.A few days after this incident, commercial motorcyclists in Lagos State lynched and set ablaze a sound engineer, David Imoh, in the Lekki area following a misunderstanding between Imoh and a motorcyclist over a N100 balance.
During an interview with our correspondent, he urged the government to take serious action against issues bordering on self-help justice by dealing decisively and swiftly with offenders. On his part, the Executive Director of Rule of Law and Accountability Advocacy Centre, Mr Okechukwu Nwanguma, said the prevalence of mob actions reflected the depth of lawlessness the country had descended to.
Nwanguma also pointed out that citizens were only required to apprehend a crime suspect and hand him over to the police who had the duty to investigate and charge the person if found guilty. “Another reason is the indiscipline of security agencies across the country. They have PoS machines with which they extort those they consider to be ‘Yahoo boys’ or Internet fraudsters or hardened criminals in millions of naira. These vices cut across all security agencies, even traffic officers. Until our security apparatus is overhauled, citizens will continue to resort to mob justice.
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