NIGERIA: OF CRIME AND PUNISHMENT
Death has become so cheap in Nigeria. Incredibly, life manages to be even cheaper. In many parts of the country, lives are being snuffed out of people with alarming regularity.
On 12th March, the red mist descended on popular Wuse Market in Abuja, when a hastily convened mobile court which tries environmental offenders found a teenage hawker liable for a couple of environmental offence. He was duly convicted and while being taken away by men of the Nigeria Correctional Service, the familiar Nigerian suspicion and fear of the agents of state set in, and he scampered out of the vehicle and took to his heels. The prison wardens briefly gave a chase before fatally shooting him.
The bullet fired by the correctional services official more than snuffed the life out of the hapless teenage hawker for whom life was already tough. It also set off a firestorm in the market, during which no less than 10 shops and eight cars were burnt by angry youths. Over N1 billion was lost as the market was temporarily shut down.
The killing machine also made a stop in Taraba State, whetting its appetite on the stone of festering ethnic crisis in a state where different ethnic groups are locked in a panicked competition which precludes peaceful co-existence. Also on 12th March, a bus carrying about 15 passengers from Zaki Biam to Maihula in Donga Local Government Area of Taraba State was ambushed by criminals. While the driver managed to escape, the bodies of about nine of his passengers were later recovered. The abduction and consequent killing of the passengers have been chalked down to reprisals for previous clashes between Ichen and Tiv ethnic groups in the state.
Gradually, Nigeria is becoming an open market of bodies and body parts, a market marked by the conspiracy of criminals in the country, the complicity of those who aid them and the complacency of law enforcement. They abduct and kill as if Nigeria has stopped being a country where human life is sacred. When people are indiscriminately or systemically killed and nothing is done.
In Nigeria, those who kill and those who aid them make up Nigeria’s hidden offenders, together with those who condone them.
The teenage hawker in Wuse Market must have come to Abuja from his village lured by the sirens of Abuja’s fabled but fatal green pastures. Having learnt the hard way that the roads in Nigeria’s capital city are not paved with gold, he must have taken to hawking to avoid returning to his village, which may be under the iron fist of terrorists. This was until the mobile court came and pronounced judgment on him, a judgment that was swiftly executed in a country where the wheels of justice grind scandalously slowly.
The law kills In Nigeria, sometimes literally. But until it does, all other acts of killing are unconstitutional, illegal, and unforgivable.
Death does not discriminate. The experience of the state has shown that many of those who remorselessly and indiscriminately dispense death are themselves afraid of death.
To protect its monopoly of death, Nigeria must prey on the fears of those who dish death but not under the hand of the state. Bringing them nose to nose with that which they fear most, touching it but not exactly succumbing to it in a way that only the law can, may make them rethink their crimes.
Ike Willie-Nwobu, Ikewilly9@gmail.com
