What do enlightened parents do to their children when the children misbehave, fight or steal? They check their children’s conditions, the company the children keep and other factors that could have influenced their children. When a person is good, he becomes everyone’s relative: my sister’s friend’s cousin’s nephew’s roommate’s uncle is Chinua Achebe. Yet, when he turns out bad, it seems that he has no living relative. Only few people try to understand and reorient the erring citizens just like enlightened parents do. The most recent treatment for people who display bad behaviour is lynching abi na jungle justice dem call am.
Around 2005, a young boy was burnt alive for stealing a phone in Onitsha. Another young man was beaten, stripped and killed for stealing a packet of Maggi seasoning at upper Iweka. At the same time, other erring youths were lynched by the righteous people in other places like Aba, Lagos, Benin, Calabar and Kano. After lynching them, the state or nation’s economic condition still did not improve. Instead, their former friends devised smarter ways of robbing and revenging on the society for the demise of their unlucky friend.
Since the wages of sin is death, it could be justified to kill them immediately. This will prevent any chance of their escape or release when handed over to the police. “Yes it is good to pay them back and teach them a lesson. They are poor, unskilled and without jobs; and so what?! Are we their mothers who could train them at home? Are there no other people who have worse situations but are doing menial jobs to survive?”
The society is a pool from which everybody fetches water to drink. The level of development of the human beings in a society determines the level of peace and progress to expect in that society. We seem to justify the selfishness and social irresponsibility behind the jungle justice. Their inability to get education, skills and means of livelihood is not their problem alone, but a problem for the whole society. Unfortunately, the churches, politicians, philanthropists and others hide behind their condemnation as irredeemable devils to neglect the duty for which they are part of the society; this is the duty of creating a system of harmonious growth.
The first evil was done by colonialists who created an exploitative system; a structure that robs the resources that the people could have used for research and industry.
The second evil is done by the local successors – politicians who uphold the colonial system of exploitation.
We commit the third evil of cowardice by tolerating the exploitative system when we get our own small share. Recently, we see the exorbitant lives of the colonial successors, we hail them in churches, cities, songs and dramas to get more share.
We commit the fourth evil by failing to develop the lower victims of the social structure at the tender stage, only to lynch them at the higher stage.
“There is no man so worthless that he cannot be made good for something. We have a right to kill only those who cannot be preserved without danger.” Jean Jacques Rousseau
Unfortunately, we have not made meaningful and justifiable efforts before giving them up to jungle justice. “Social justice cannot be attained by violence, violence kills what it intends to create.” John Paul II