The rule of law is an alien in the land. Nigeria is at war with herself, and the sooner we admit this to ourselves, the better.
A week ago I made a trip out of Lagos, to Ibadan and Abeokuta. I drove. One of the biggest things on my mind, apart from the state of the roads, was the fear of falling into the hands of customs officers, who prowl the highways around these parts.
I was stopped by a gang of them sometime in August, at the Sagamu interchange. They asked for my customs papers. There may be people more knowledgeable about this than me, but I do not think that in any normal country travelling drivers should have to encounter Customs checkpoints within the country. Customs personnel, as far as I know, belong to borders and border posts.
Also last week, I encountered a tweet, from a man who had been “arrested” by local council officers somewhere around Ijebu-Ode, in Ogun State. Apparently based in Lagos, he was driving through the area, and he was stopped by these men, who asked for his TV/radio license, if I remember correctly. He was therefore tweeting in panic; certain that this was yet another extortion scheme by people who should ordinarily exist to make our lives as citizens easier.
And then a few days ago, a uniformed council official tried to stop me, outside the Eti-Osa local government office on Glover Road. He flagged me down, I ignored him, and then stopped at the traffic lights. He walked up to my window and asked me to wind down. I refused, and he threatened to deflate my tires. I think I remember telling him he was mad. There’s a Yoruba proverb that says: “We summoned the sculptor, the woodpecker too showed up.” That’s what I was thinking. In a city where Police and LASTMA and VIO exist to harass, even these purple-uniformed local imbeciles think they can join the feeding frenzy. Nonsense.
That is the state of Nigeria. We all have these stories to tell. Even today, with all the noise about bans on sirens, the roads are still full of big men and women hounding defenceless citizens off the highways with convoys of armed & insane (tautology, by the way) policemen.
Life is brutish, nasty.
Everyone is a law unto himself. The lands teems with gangs of marauders, many uniformed. Some, of course, wear suits and go by the designation of “CEO.” Their primary victims also wear suits, and have the grand misfortune of working for the CEO. I’m talking about those abusive “corporate titans”; CEOs who slap General Managers, or ask them to “shut up” in meetings, Branch Managers who ask Marketing Officers to kneel down for not meeting their targets.
They are no different from the half-literate policemen to whom we have granted the rights to take our lives and dignity whenever they deem it fit.
To be fair to the police sometimes they are as helpless as the rest of us. What’s a DPO to do when, after arresting a suspected criminal, he is bombarded with phone calls from the ‘high and mighty’ (including traditional rulers, who, in Yorubaland, are generally supposed to be deferred to without question) asking for him to let the suspect go.
A colleague once told me that he watched a DPO pull out his service pistol and shoot and kill a “suspect”. The policeman was tired of arresting and releasing the young man, who was already notorious in the area for armed robbery. This happened, not in Aluu, or one of those jungles inhabited by bloodthirsty savages, but in Gbagada, right here in the heart of Lagos.
The rule of law is an alien in the land. Nigeria is at war with herself, and the sooner we admit this to ourselves, the better.
“Whenever the legislators endeavour to take away and destroy the property of the people, or reduce them to slavery under arbitrary law, they put themselves in a state of war with the people who are thereupon absolved from any further obedience.”
These words were written by the English philosopher, John Locke, and published in his Second Treatise of Government, in 1690.
Replace “legislators” with “Big Men & Women”, and the story of contemporary Nigeria is told.
The arbitrariness of law and justice is one of the key characteristics of our democracy. If you have enough money, or guns, or bombs, you will get away with anything.
This creates a crushing sense of helplessness in the citizenry. What do you do when armed Customs officers impound your car on the Ibadan – Iseyin highway? What do you do when your car is stolen, and the police expect you to settle them before they can lift a finger? What do you do when the culture in your office is abusive?
Umar Yar’Adua put “the Rule of Law” at the heart of his vision for Nigeria. He seemed to be serious about it, after the relative lawlessness of the Obasanjo era, when armed thugs could sack a sitting Governor and a president was known for declaring electoral battles “do or die.”
How do we rebuild a sense of justice in this country? How do we build the kind of country described be John Locke (1869), as follows: “First, [the government is] to govern by promulgated established laws, not to be varied in particular cases, but to have one rule for rich and poor, for the favourite at court, and the country man at plough.” Have you got any answers? Should we be thinking of starting with an online mechanism for people to report and seek redress for everyday assaults on human dignity? Will that work in Nigeria?
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Op-ed pieces and contributions are the opinions of the writers only and do not represent the opinions of Y!/YNaija.