Mob(ile) Violence

“The world needs to stop, I’m ready to get off!” said a friend’s Facebook status on Wednesday evening, and instinctively I wrote, “Take me with you” merely thinking of the endless onslaught of shocking human behaviour we’ve seen throughout the year, from terror attacks and suicide bombs to far-right extremism and anti-immigration sentiments. It seems as if 2016 became the year humanity stopped shrewdly scheming and started blatantly turning against each other. These were my thoughts early Thursday morning when the news of 7-year-old child lynched by a mob and burnt alive on Tuesday in Lagos started circulating on the internet.

Since the news broke, the Nigerian Police has denied claims that a 7-year old boy was mobbed in Badagry area of Lagos for allegedly stealing garri. Head of Complaint Response Unit (CRU) of the Nigerian Police, Abayomi Shogunle, said on Twitter that no such incident was recorded in Lagos State. “Report from Lagos Commissioner of @PoliceNG indicates that NO BOY CHILD WAS MOBBED/BURNT in Badagry or any part of the State as circulated on social media,” Shogunle tweeted. He added that a corpse of an adult male was recovered by the police at Orile in Lagos and that the corpse has been deposited at a morgue.

Regardless of the age of the victim, location of the incident or the reasons behind this act of cruelty, Shogunle’s statement does not change the fact that there is a video of a child beaten up, lynched and burnt alive. Inadvertently I have seen the pictures all over social media. I refuse to watch the video. Each to their own, but watching the video of such an inhumane act of ‘jungle justice’ as it is often referred to, in my opinion, is not much different that watching child porn. It is torture porn.

For many, this also brought back the memories of the fated ALUU 4, four young boys, Ugonna Obuzor, Toku Lloyd, Chiadika Biringa, and Tekena Elkanah, all students of the University of Port Harcourt were lynched in 2012 after they were falsely accused of being thieves in Aluu, a community in Port Harcourt, Rivers State. Not satisfied with beating them black and blue, the mob dragged them through the mud, bound them in car tyres soaked with petrol and set them ablaze. Much like this latest video, the gory video footage of the ALUU 4 lynching also made the rounds on social media for weeks.

On Thursday, Naij.com published a list of 12 high profile cases of jungle justice in Nigeria that have come to mainstream attention since 2012 and all of them are sadly accompanied by gory images of the villain turned victim. Worse still, Nigeria is not an isolated case. Jungle justice is rampant across sub-saharan Africa, with at least one person on the continent every day facing torture or even death at the hands of mobs determined to be judge, jury and executioner.

Make no mistake, it may be called ‘justice’ but it there is nothing just about stripping a human being of their clothes, their dignity and their basic human rights – all in the name of justice.

What has brought back the “I’m ready to get off!” feeling is that wherever it may be in the world there are perpetrators of such vicious crimes, and then there are those who don’t think twice about holding up a phone to play paparazzo to someone’s suffering frame by frame. While we perhaps should be grateful for camera phones and technology that help bring more cases to the mainstream opening this vile practice up to debate from which the would-be perpetrators or bystanders could learn from, there is something chilling to the bone about how desensitised some have become to such violent acts that, reaching out for a mobile phone now seems easier than speaking up against the mob.

A Naija Twitter user who goes by the handle @BrianJDennis shared in a series on Thursday morning about how his cousin was mistaken for a thief by an angry mob at the market and attacked, only to be rescued by patrolling soldiers, and still spent three weeks in hospital once slipping into a coma. “No one had asked him his side of the story,” he tweeted before reminding users “Let no one support evil.”

After all. is said and done, the one behind the phone filming the action may not feel part of the mob, much like all the other bystanders, they stand by, do nothing except film it for the record. Admittedly, digital technology and citizen journalism are making the world a more transparent place, from recording unlawful police shootings in the US to giving voices to the masses under authoritarian rule when mainstream media is gagged; however, in the hands of those too weak to stand up for real justice against a frenzied mob seeking blood, those very portals of enlightenment become yet another weapon of violence.

You may never have witnessed jungle justice, but think of the time you drove past a car accident, walked past a mad man ranting on the street, and your first instinct was to reach out for your phone to document the incident. In our haste to document the moment and share the experience, we forget that on the other side of the lens is a human being – in a state of distress; we forget out humanity.

Granted such heinous acts of jungle justice will continue happening, but maybe, just maybe, if we can learn not to support evil, with our punches, our words, our silence or our mobile phones.