MOB,  JUNGLE OR NO JUSTICE AT ALL
  Taking laws into our hands has become a practice with extreme repercussions which has come to stay in our society, from the creditor confiscating properties belonging to a debtor, to quarrels and misunderstanding between neighbors leading to a party inviting hoodlums to beat up the other party. We have so proclaimed titles of  judges, barristers, security personnel, law enforcement agents all wrapped into one. Jungle justice as it is widely called has succeeded in retiring the rule of law allowing matters to be handled by an angry number of people who have all thrown caution to the wind.
  Injustice is carried out in broad day light and to the dismay of few in presence of  “security personnels”.  A boy who is said to have stolen a few cubes of maggi, a child who picks mangoes from the roadside hawker without paying, a woman who steals morsels of  cassava flakes from a shop and a pickpocket whose day just went soar all are left to the mercy of an angry mob whose rationality at that point cannot be vouched. Burning a human being while still breathing is cold murder, beating a person till death, cutting out parts of people be it hands, legs, ears, eyes and more as a form of punishment is degrading  life itself which is opposed to human rights and its outright violation as even in a law court, a criminal is always innocent until proven guilty.
   The presence of this new epidemic says not well of our legal system, but will you blame the perpetrators of this heinous activity?, the people have lost confidence in its government, they do not trust in its system of leadership. Looters of the nations treasury are brought to light day in day out  but never get punished, what is the message the legal system is sending out to the greater number of the populace, that there is a certain percentage of its population that are above the law OR  that the law is not applicable to a few. The small number of offenders caught by the people and handed over to the justice department are seen the next day roaming the streets free like nothing ever happened, thanks to the loyal services they render to “those” in high places. If you are fully sure that offenders are rightly charged with their crimes regardless of who they are, whom they know, and who they are friends with then, mob or jungle justice will not even have been conceived in the first place. People create and execute their own laws to their satisfaction because they know the laws of the country will not do so for them. Although, it is detrimental to them alone because the tragedy of this so called “justice” is that it is always executed on the lower class, petty offenders, their immediate neighbors who are also searching for their footings in an insincere government and not those they deeply hold a grudge against.
 People act in bizarre ways when pressured or motivated wrongly, which is why a child caught been a delinquent should be corrected as he/she could be under higher influence, adolescents should be sent to correctional facilities, and adults punished according to their crimes by set laws after being heard. We should not just all jump into finding tires, bringing and pouring petrol on offenders, providing matchboxes, canes, or perfect location to execute without hearing their own side of the story, we should not give in to misplaced aggressions and frustrations, believe it or not the world at large is an evil filled place with sadists everywhere. Everyone deserves to be heard and given better opportunities because as stupid as anyone is, they will not in their right minds resort to doing things that got others killed or almost killed publicly. Mob justice or Jungle justice is really NO JUSTICE at all, as it is never fair to anybody so let us all respect the rule of law, charity it is said begins at home.
                                                                                                          Written by,
                                                                                                         Binta Ibrahim.
                                                                                                          U13mm1142