Years ago, I had an unforgettable experience of nearly witnessing a lynching at Iwo Road in Ibadan. It was a typical day, and while standing at a bus stop, a woman two paces away suddenly shouted that her purse had been snatched. She held the clothes of the man standing beside her. Before you knew it, the place had transformed. A crowd quickly gathered around, many of them young men who seemed to have magically sprouted from thin air. From ordinary guys going about their lives, they instantly transmuted into the judiciary and were ready to execute a self-designated mandate. They stripped the accused, kicked him, beat him, and demanded he return the purse.
Perhaps the most amazing transformation for me was a man who had stood beside me at the bus stop. While I was still puzzled at the events unfolding around me, this guy had found a huge stone and was yelling at the crowd to clear a path for him—he was going to smash the skull of the accused! Fortunately, the accused man managed to escape while those who had arrested him were still deciding on how to lynch him. I do not know if he was guilty of stealing the purse or not, but I am thankful that he did not die that day.
Every time I have told this story to friends, I have also wondered how and when that man transmuted from just another person at the bus stop to a potential killer. Was that even a real human man or a gnarled monster walking around at noonday like some mythological fables report? Imagine a man ready to commit murder, maybe just an hour after leaving his home in the morning. If he had managed to participate in killing that man, would he still have proceeded through the rest of his day like nothing had happened? Would he have gone back home to his family at night (if he had one) and continued life like he had not just killed a man?
Since the news emerged about how a vigilante group in Uromi, Edo State, lynched 16 hunters after tagging them kidnappers, I have returned to that incident to once again ask how men become the monsters who set up bonfires to burn their fellow humans. What (and when) is the moment of their transfiguration? It is when a situation like the Uromi incident occurs that we realise that there are many subhuman mongrels among us, some of them able to transfigure into monsters who can lynch a person in an instant. They lynched not one, not two, not three, not even four humans!
One must wonder about the kind of people who would keep throwing one person after the other into the fire (while some equally depraved people thought it was worth recording the pain and agony of the victims on their camera for later distribution). If there was no moment at which any internally controlling ethical code restrained them, then it is also probably not the first time they have lynched people. Those vigilantes must have played at being the law for so long that they started imagining themselves to be truly one. This unfortunate incident is one of the many fallouts of the state recession in the public sphere. When you have a country where security can no longer be guaranteed by the state, all sorts of maniacs will step in to fill the void.
This distressing incident has also thrown up the fault lines of ethnicity and religion between the northern and southern regions of the country. One only needs to read Nigerians from the two divided halves of the country as they bicker over the deaths to see how they are gauging their respective regional civilisation from the responses to the distressing event. It seems to me that northerners see the Uromi incident as an opportunity to take down the smug superiority of snobbish southerners who have typically imagined themselves to be socially superior. Now that the so-called civilised South has displayed a similar primitive behaviour that, if it had happened in the North, would have been filed as one more example of their cultural backwardness, they are practically celebrating their vindication along with mourning the demise of the victims.
For the southern commenters, the incident is not only distressing but also embarrassing as they must justify themselves before people who never apologise for the lynching that happened in their territory. And they are right because the Uromi incident is similar to that of Deborah Samuel, the Christian student who was lynched in 2023 by some religious fundamentalists who admitted their crime on video. Unlike this ongoing case, where the southerners are condemning the lynching and calling for justice, I do not remember the northerners doing the same. Many northerners, including their prominent clerics, justified the killing of Samuel. A presidential candidate who dared to condemn the murder had to withdraw his statement when they threatened his presidential ambition! The Edo State Governor, Monday Okpebholo, is running all over the place and promising the family of the victims compensation, something that is unlikely to happen if the situation were reversed.
The court freed Samuel’s killers, and that woman did not get justice. Nobody in the government dared to touch them because of politics. In the wake of the Uromi incident, some of them are still doubling down on their justification for lynching that woman. If they cannot see her humanity, then on what moral grounds do they stand to demand justice for the Uromi victims? Yet, not wanting to be outdone, they bring up the case of Adamawa woman Harira Jubril, the pregnant woman who was killed along with her children in Anambra State by some unidentified gunmen. It is bad enough that she, too, never got justice; it is also horrible that her story is cheaply weaponised by those who merely want to score political points against a rival group.
Still convinced they are the bigger victims, the southerners start to reel out the many cases of Fulani herdsmen attacks on villages, farmlands, and their communities. They list the deaths and the destruction caused by Fulani herdsmen who have been rampaging through communities in Nigeria, mostly unchecked. This self-justification by matching northern stories of injustice with southern stories of injustice eventually spirals into an endless loop of barbarism, bloodletting, and unleashed monstrosity.
In trading stories of injustice for injustice, these people also catalogue the injustice the nation has committed against our collective humanity. Notwithstanding their motivations, their exchanges are an indictment of a nation that cheaply discounts our lives, and—by failing to pursue the outstanding debts owed to our murdered compatriots—serially indicates that we are simply not worth the trouble of the pursuit of justice. In fact, one can say the reason the Federal Government swooped into action in the case of Uromi is the fear of reprisals by irate northerners, and not because they deemed the lives of those 16 hunters worthy enough to merit justice.
What is saddest about these fiery exchanges is that the compiled evidence is being misdirected and misused by people wanting to balance out tribal wrongs rather than indict the real culprit: Nigeria, a country that has failed to establish a standard of righteousness, of justice, of truth, of integrity, and the ascriptions of full value to our lives. Consequently, we have too many among us who have been driven over the edge, deeply traumatised by the harassments of our Nigerian lives, but have not yet found the mouth with which to tell the story. They think they are normal because they can still type coherent sentences on social media, but the truth is that they are bleeding internally from the wounds of our national existence.
Punch
