SO desperate is the situation in which the country currently has found itself that, these days, hardly a week goes by without a report in the media from a corner of the country detailing some terrible action perpetrated by a citizen against a hapless compatriot. The story this week happens to come from Sagamu, Ogun State, where the state police command has arrested two security guards, Segun Sodiya and Segun Abatan, in connection with the immolation of a fellow citizen, 44-year-old Basiru Aliu. According to media reports, Messrs. Sodiya and Abatan, having concluded that Mr. Aliu, who was helping his employer, one Fatai Ifekoya, move his belongings from his former residence to a new site in the Ijokun area of Sagamu, was actually a thief in the process of making away with someone else’s property, colluded with a security guard who was keeping vigil in the area to pour a flammable substance on Mr. Aliu and set him on fire.
The more you ponder this story, the more questions arise. Sure, we can visualise three people (Messrs. Sodiya, Abatan, and the colluding security guard) challenging an individual (Mr. Aliu) about what he was up to, and whether he was the rightful owner of the items he was clearly helping his employer shift. But, really, how does that kind of conversation degenerate so quickly that three individuals then decide that the best resolution is to set a fellow citizen on fire? Is it possible that Mr. Aliu could not readily disclose his identity—in which case, why not give him the opportunity to do so? Why the hurry to set a man on fire on mere suspicion that he was a thief? Or, to pose yet again a question we’ve posed perhaps too many times on this page: When did the Nigerian society become so low on patience that people would rather immolate than temporize? What happened to the sense of fellow feeling?
To ask these questions, of course, is to go to the very heart of what ails the Nigerian society: the collapse of the rule of law and the rapid ascendance of normlessness across every facet of the social life. In the Nigeria of yore, the three men who accosted Mr. Aliu, after establishing the facts of the matter, would, as good citizens, have handed him over to law enforcement for prosecution— if that were needed. The eagerness of the troika to arrest, prosecute, and mete out such a dastardly punishment, all without recourse to the law, is nothing but an epitome of the reign of extra-judicial ‘settlement’ that all Nigerians have been experiencing for some time now, and to say that it is egregious is a massive understatement.
We are heartened by reports that the Ogun State police command has arrested Messrs. Sodiya and Abatan in connection with the burning of citizen Aliu, and the assurances by the command’s Public Relations Officer (PRO), Mr. Omotola Odutola, to the effect that the two will soon face charges of attempted murder. Yet, taking the case to trial is one thing, seeing it to its logical conclusion and ensuring that justice is done is a different matter. Past failure to do this is the main reason why the public now regularly takes the law into its own hands. The Ogun State police command can help achieve a much-needed reset by acting speedily and transparently.
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