A World of JUNGLE NONSENSE

If you have ever witnessed the brutal massage that crime suspects face in the third world, you wouldn't be too far from understanding the plague I’m writing about. It is common in developing and under-developed countries on mother Earth and has led to the death of many who were totally uninvolved or indirectly involved in an alleged crime. For a moment, imagine you were the one being brutalized in any of the scenarios pictured here. Whether you are guilty or not, you would still wish to exercise the right to express your opinion.

 As a citizen of the world’s largest black nation, where the cases of people taking laws into their own hands is as usual as rainfall, I have encountered and experienced many scenarios of the plague. I call it JUNGLE NONSENSE. Because, up till this moment, I can’t find any correlation between the words JUNGLE and JUSTICE. For me this is probably the most forceful marriage I ever know of any two English words. Jungle stands for something ‘unconstructed by LAW’ while JUSTICE means ‘going the LAW way.’ I don’t need to have a cousin lawyer to know that the two words don’t agree and who so ever presided over their marriage must have been very unfair.

        According to Tola Omosola he says “This isn't a word per say and doesn't have a definite definition but it’s a form of punishment.” In my own definition, “Jungle Justice Nonsense is an awkward event that gives people whose hands are hitching some ‘relief’ through beating up alleged suspects which is usually done in uncoordinated turns of strike on the victim(s).” From child kidnapping cases to theft of properties. From witches miscalculated landing cases to ALUU 4 and what have you. We annually lose some scores of lives to jungle nonsense alone. This is a count of our own distant friends and family whom we kill with our own hands.

Just recently, in one of my travels, a tanker driver hit a motorcyclist at Oka-Akoko township of Ondo state. The motorcyclist died immediately and the tanker driver managed to get down and escaped. The arear boys, in their ‘intelligence’ decided to set the tanker ablaze to show their anger. Unfortunately, due to little spacing between houses and the road, the fire caught all the surrounding houses and people had to run for dear lives. Who knows if some aged, toddlers and elderly people were trapped in the blazing inferno that ravaged many apartments unannounced?

What has led to this cruel act and approach of people trying to seek justice by themselves? This is a question for the judiciary to ponder on. Despite many campaigns and activism against jungle justice, the cases keep rising. This cannot be too far from a FAILED and CORRUPT man-know-man system we run but professionally call LEGAL SYSTEM. It is the real image of the Yoruba adage on injustice which says “Baa ba ni eni ni igbamo, are laa je”. This literally means “if you have someone in the committee, you will be vindicated.” It is a practice that breeds corruption, nepotism and has made people to, over the years, lose confidence in our legal system. The sluggish rate of response of our police is another story for the gods. We live in a country where the police come to rescue situations only after the wrong-doers have found convenient hidings.

I call on our leaders, political gladiators and my learned colleagues in Nigeria and the rest of the world to rise up to the challenge of making our legal and security systems viable and trustworthy. This is the only way we can #BringBackOurLegalIntegrity. The recent case of the Ugandan maid, Jolly Tumuhirwe, could have been another Jungle Nonsense to talk about but kudos to the parents who sought justice through the law and not through their emotions. This is a culture for Nigerians to emulate as over 85% of Nigerians I interviewed on this case told me they would PERSONALLY kill Jolly for her brutality. I feel for the parents as much as they do but we must agree that, somehow, the Ugandan legal system has displayed a higher level of credibility for them to trust the case into its hands.

Let’s respect the feelings of one another. I challenge you again, put yourself in the place of any of these individuals who are brutally injured and most times killed. Truly suspect is a suspect, that doesn’t make him or her less of a human being. He or she still has right to expression.

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Your comments are highly welcome and will be appreciated, I care. 

Thank you..