False accusations and jungle justice

Hello everyone, how was your day? I didn't write an article yesterday because I was handling some personal issues and before I could have the chance to write an article, it was already too late 😩 which means I have officially missed a day without publishing an article for this month.

But moving on, I will be talking about jungle justice in today's article and I got an idea to write about it after reading @Theblackdoll article titled a tiger's faith. It's about a tiger that got killed because the owner did a wrong judgment and took action before investigating, which kind of reminds me of a lot of things going on in my country.

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First off, what is a false accusation? According to Wikipedia

A false accusation is a claim or allegation of wrongdoing that is untrue and/or otherwise unsupported by facts. False accusations are also known as groundless accusations or unfounded accusations or false allegations or false claims

False accusation is a very big problem because aside from the emotional trauma it causes to the victim, it can sometimes lead to physical assault and in the worst-case scenario; death (in form of jungle justice). And once this accusation has been made, showing any form of fear, anger, or denial (which are normal human responses to being falsely accused) might be seen as evidence of guilt.

Then, what is jungle justice? According to the same Wikipedia

Jungle justice or mob justice is a form of public extrajudicial killings in Nigeria and Cameroon, where an alleged criminal is publicly humiliated, beaten, and summarily executed by vigilantes or an angry mob.

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Most of the time in Nigeria, once a person has been falsely accused especially of stealing or kidnapping, the next thing that follows is jungle justice. There's a story of false accusation and jungle justice that shook my country in 2012 and it was codenamed "aluu 4 lynching". It is a story about 4 university students that were falsely accused of robbery and subsequently burnt alive.

Four of them were all first sons of their family and they went to collect money from someone that owes one of them at night, but then it got physical. A lady saw the fight going on and raised an alarm that her neighbor was been robbed. Youths in the community chased after the four boys, caught them, and beat them till they became unconscious.

The worst thing is that they were policemen present when they were been beaten but they just stood and watched as the mob descended on the 4 innocent boys. They were necklaced (which means motor tires were put around their necks) and then burnt alive. Someone recorded the whole thing and the video was uploaded online.

When I heard about this news back then, fear gripped me and I prayed to God to always prevent me from ending up in the wrong place at any time. That's one of the things that leads to false accusations; being in a place at a very wrong time. Sometimes, people don't deliberately accuse someone wrongly, the person might just look like the accused and he will be accused wrongly (mistaken identity).

After coming across news and videos of jungle justice, it made me realize that a lot of people actually enjoy this sort of thing. Whenever they hear someone being called a thief, they don't even wait to hear any explanation or investigate further, the next thing they do is to take action by quickly descending on the person and killing them.

Sometimes, the person may not be guilty and will try to defend himself but he won't even be heard because his voice has been suppressed by the cries of the angry mob calling for his head. One or two persons might care enough to hear what the accused has to say, but they are overpowered by the mob who are bent on drawing blood.

Some people in the crowd might have been a victim of a robbery in the past and that is part of what is fueling their desire to lay hands on a suspected thief. I remember a case in my university when a thief was caught red-handed during night class, a friend of mine who have been a victim of theft in one of those night classes joined the crowd to beat up the boy.

He told me that as soon as they caught the person, memories of his stolen phone flooded his thinking and he just had to vent his anger on the caught thief. The alleged thief was handed over to the university security, which is how it is supposed to be done.

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Do you actually know why jungle justice is done? According to Wikipedia, jungle justice is prevalent in countries where a dysfunctional and corrupt judiciary system and law enforcement have "lost all credibility", which I can say is very true in my country.

We have heard cases of criminals being released to the public after spending a few weeks in prison. They end up bribing their way out of prison and going back to society to continue their atrocities. This is the main reason why society no longer waits for the law to take its course, they rather take the law into their own hands since it means the judgment will be swift and done for everyone to see.

But it still doesn't make it right to kill a human, especially when the whole story isn't known. Some persons have lost their lives after being wrongly accused and killed by the public. Even though the judiciary system in the country is very corrupt, I feel it's still better to leave them in the hands of law enforcement agencies and if they don't deliver justice, then karma will take its course.

Thanks for reading 💖💖💖

Thursday April 14, 2022