The Aluu Killings – By Clarius Ugwuoha

Posted by admin Articles, Columnists, NNP Columnists, Rivers, State News Thursday, October 25th, 2012

By Clarius Ugwuoha | NNP | Oct. 25, 2012 – It is very disconcerting that a kind of violence-mentality has permeated the consciousness of Nigerians. What informed the gruesome murder of four promising youths on the flimsy excuses of phone and laptop thefts, which were unsubstantiated, remains a puzzle to most social analysts in Nigerian. What we are witnessing is the gradual descent of erstwhile human beings to sub-simian consistencies. Even this comparison appears to be flattering and incommensurate. Animals do not kill for the sport. They kill to eat. Quite recently it has become fashionable for Nigerians to fly off the handle in cold blood or at the very semblance of provocation, and visiting on fellow Nigerians with the worst form of bestial reflexes unseen even among lower animals.

What is the ulterior cause of this zero threshold of tolerance? It is very tempting to lay the blame on economic hardship and increasing unemployment among youths. This is not the fact. The rich and poor are partners in the willful denigration of humanity. There is a gradual attrition of the humanness in us. Our economic level or employment history is immaterial. We are exalting materialism above our neighbours. This callousness was fuelled by the inequitable distribution of wealth in Nigeria, magnified by decades of injustice by the leaders.

There is no need to continue to point fingers. We are all culpable in the bizarre drama in Nigeria. There is the need for redefinition of the term “Jungle Justice”. This presupposes that such kind of animal lynching as obtained in Aluu takes place in a jungle. This is not so. Animals do not descend on other animals except to overpower for food. Again, Aluu is supposedly a community of sane people and not a jungle.

Disquieting is news in the media that some Aluu chiefs had written a protest letter asking the police to release their Monarch, whom they alleged was innocent of the entire incident, blaming everything on marauders who were not indigenes of their community. What one expected from such chiefs was nothing short of apology to the nation. Their monarch as chief security officer of his community is the number one suspect. He was expected to have curbed the unruly crowd or failing to do so, to have reported to the nearest police station for assistance. When the incident occurred, he was expected, if not blameworthy, to have invited the appropriate law enforcement agencies and assisted in thorough investigation. He and his chiefs were culpably complacent. They did not express enough outrage at the ugly incident with their community as theatre. There’s was more of community exoneration than indignation at this happening and at the prospect that some of the culprits of that dastardly murder could be their very kith and kin or were being incubated in Aluu.

Here’s an opportunity to set appropriate deterrents, to make the perpetrators of ‘jungle justice’ pay for their crime with stiff penalties. Here’s the time to prosecute leaders, who, by their complacence or connivance, provide a safe haven for any manner of crime in their domain. The National Assembly should swing into motion to make the enabling laws effective in the nearest possible time. It is not only obligatory to express disgust at the incident but also to create the necessary restraints to recurrence in which ever form. There is no better way to immortalize the Uniport four than to visit commensurate justice on proven culprits and make such crimes unappealing through very feral disincentives.

Clarius Ugwuoha, a public affairs analyst writes from Egbema.

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