IN a criminal and morally reprehensible manner that underscores deeply entrenched lawlessness and the diminished primacy of the rule of law in the country, yet another jungle justice culminating in the gruesome murder of an innocent young man, Joe Phillip, has happened. Citizen Joe Phillip, also known as Aboy, was killed recently by some lawless operatives of the Anioma Security Watch Network, a vigilante group, in Agbor, Ika South Local Government Area of Delta State. Vigilante groups going by various names in many communities in Nigeria are usually established to bridge the patently yawning gap between the society’s demand for effective law enforcement and security from the regular police and the reality on the ground. Unfortunately, the vigilantes, who as a rule are expected to hand over any crime suspects they apprehend to the police, have been found time and again taking the law into their own hands and generally acting outside their remit. It was in continuation of the exercise of powers they do not possess that Joe Phillip lost his life in a most pathetic fashion.
The narrative is sordid and it evokes emotional torment, especially the unjustifiable fate that befell the young man because he clearly didn’t deserve it. Phillip had reportedly put on his power generating set while a woman said to be his neighbour came to charge her Nokia phone in his room with the intention of coming back to pick it up later. Meanwhile, the woman’s son reportedly came to remove her mother’s phone in Phillip’s room without his knowledge, ostensibly because he was asleep. Thus, when the woman came for her phone, it was not available and Phillip, who had no idea that someone had come to remove the phone while he was asleep, was as astonished at the turn of events as the owner of the phone. However, the woman who Phillip graciously allowed to charge her phone in his room insisted that he should produce her phone. Even when he volunteered to replace the missing phone, the woman reportedly insisted on having back the exact phone that was thought to be missing. And rather than reporting the matter to the elders in their neighbourhood, or the police, she reported it to the vigilantes who, perhaps having been incentivized by her, unleashed violence on Phillip, and the young man passed on, apparently when the torture became unbearable. And by the time the Nokia phone was found in the possession of the woman’s son, the irreparable damage had been done.
The unfortunate incident necessarily raises some posers. Why the swift recourse to jungle justice? In other words, why the seeming proclivity for anarchy? Are the people who easily resort to self-help so primitive and ignorant that they do not know that jungle justice is bad and unlawful? Is it not elementary knowledge that you do not resort to self-help or jungle justice even in situations where criminals have been seemingly caught red-handed? Is it not the place of the court to mete out sanctions on criminals to the exclusion of any other authorities? And now that an innocent life has been lost in a most unjustifiable circumstance, can anyone replace the life lost? Why take a phone from a sleeping person’s room? And why didn’t the son inform his mother that he had taken her phone from where she was charging it? Why did the woman insist on the exact phone that was missing even when her benefactor-turned-victim promised to replace the phone? And where was the woman’s son when Phillip was being tortured by the lawless vigilantes? And is torture an interrogation method under the law? Or did the law even permit the vigilantes to torture the deceased? The questions are literally endless and answers to them point in the direction of the pervasive recklessness and lawlessness, virtually across board, in the society.
In this country, so many groups go about in uniform doing what they like and that shouldn’t be the case. Certainly, the coming into being of vigilantes and other civilian outfits currently involved in security matters in the land would have been unnecessary if the official security agencies had lived up to their billing. It is still baffling that the activities of vigilante groups are not being strictly regulated and monitored or sanctions applied to errant operatives who go overboard because this is not the first case of gross breach of the law by civilian security outfits in the country. There had been a litany of cases of lawlessness involving vigilantes in the past. Why have the police as the lead agency on internal security and to whom other security agencies defer in that regard failed woefully to whip civilian security outfits into line so that they can be their worthy partners in progress? Or could it be that the police want them to fail so that vigilantes can be scrapped as they never approve of their existence in the first place? Or is it because the police also indulge in extra-judicial punishment of crime suspects that shifted the moral ground from under their feet that they are unable to rein in the atrocities of vigilantes? Whatever the case is, it bears stressing that the various forms of civilian security structures in the country may have come to stay, because they certainly fill a void and it is in the interest of the police to work hand in gloves with them and ensure that they operate within the ambit of the law at all times. It is by doing that that the civilian security structures can effectively help the regular security agencies to tackle the heightening security situation in the country.
It is really saddening that the woman in this story resorted to self-help and caused the death of an innocent person. We urge the police to charge her along with her lawless vigilantes. We have always called attention to the fact that the general absence of rule of law in the country is a recipe for disaster as it enables every person to resort to self-help in resolving issues. Or how else could suspicion of theft/loss of phone lead to the death through torture of a person by a so-called vigilante group? Were the members of the group not aware that they were operating outside of the law by getting involved in what should ordinarily not concern them? And more significantly, why, in the first place, did the woman think that sending vigilantes on an illegal operation was the best way to retrieve her missing phone? Is this not all about the sense of impunity pervading the entire society?
Truth be told, a lot of the acts of lawlessness verging on self-help within the polity are down to the absence, or at best half-hearted observance and application, of the rule of law. It is the case, and sadly so, that in many instances, the aggrieved party in a dispute, especially the ordinary Nigerian, trusts neither the police nor the judiciary to get justice, and as a result often makes a recourse to self-help. It is the responsibility of the government to restore sanity in the system by ensuring, starting from itself and its officials, that there is a concrete return to the operation of the rule of law over all activities in order to rebuild and restore citizens’ confidence in the country’s justice system. And one way of doing that is by launching a painstaking inquiry into the instant case and ensuring that those who breached the law are brought to book.
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