"Jungle Justice: Let’s not sugarcoat it, Nigerians are barbarians"

Nigerians have a double standard in dealing with poor people who commit crimes and rich people who commit crimes.

The story of a 7-year-old boy beaten and burnt to death in Lagos points out the fact that we are animals in this country.

Jungle justice and the mob mentality is still prevalent in this country and it is a sad thing. Yes, there is another version that claims the boy wasn’t 7 years old, and he was trying to steal a phone and not garri. It was also said that he tried to kill one of his victims.

The murdered boy’s crimes might have been longer than a West African warlord but that doesn’t mean he deserved to die in such a barbaric manner.

Our society is barbaric, it kills the poor and praises the corrupt. Tyres and a keg of petrol are quick to surface when someone yells ‘thief, thief!’ in a neighbourhood. Within a few minutes, a crowd gathers and descends on the ‘suspected’ thief. His skull is cracked and his are broken before his almost lifeless body is tossed into the flames.

This has happened so many times in Nigeria. It is very rare to find a Nigerian who has not seen the charred corpse of a suspected thief killed by a mob.

The famous example of this perverted form of justice is Aluu 4. Four young men, Ugonna Obuzor, Toku Lloyd, Chiadika Biringa, and Tekena Elkanah were falsely accused of theft in Aluu, a village in Port-Harcourt, Rivers State in 2012. They were subsequently lynched to death.