This Thing Called Jungle Justice

                                

Joe went to the market one balmy afternoon to shop for his girlfriend’s birthday party but had the worst nightmare of his life. He had barely arrived at the market when people started running helter-skelter. He took refuge in a woman’s shop and when he inquired from her what the problem was, he was told that a robbery had just taken place.

The robbers, according to the woman, snatched the hand bags belonging to two women who were haggling over the price of a gown in a shop. The shop owner angry that such thing should happen in his shop gave the robbers a mad chase.

The market vigilante group was immediately alerted of the robbery and in seconds, the air in the market was raided with the siren of their Hilux van.

The boys had been caught and the people were excited.

The vigilante men were all dressed in a way that spoke terror. Rumour had it that most of them were men from the rested Bakassi Boys that hunted down criminal elements in both Aba and Onitsha some years ago. They were the Lords of these cities and their authority was un-contestable.

Two young boys were sighted in the floor of the van with hands bound to their legs like they were goats driven to the slaughter house. Their faces were white, white with agony and horror. They had the looks worn only by condemned criminals who were given few seconds of respite before hitting the guillotine. One had an open cut in his head and blood poured out. The other boy was dark in complexion and should be in his early twenties. He stared blankly at the vigilante men. His body was covered with his own blood. He begged and pleaded with the men to give him a second chance but they shut him up and kept slapping him with the face of their machete.

An upbeat crowd had already gathered when they arrived at where some of the traders called execution ground. It was a ground that had gulped down the blood of countless alleged criminals.

The vigilante men jumped out of the van commando style, their eyes blood shot from smoking too much marijuana. They paced proudly in the semi-circle made by the onlookers like a group of kitten that had suckled enough breast milk from their mother. One of the men who had no shirt on made a momentary show of his chest to the delight of the onlookers before going back to the van. He dragged the boys from the van like pieces of wood and gave each of them a hot slap in the face. The dark boy was still pleading and crying for mercy, his tears mixed with his blood while his colleague kept mumbling something inaudibly to himself.

They were taken to the centre of the crowd and forced to sit on a heap of soot- the remains of charred men-and without warning, the dark boy let out a shrieking cry. His tears poured down in torrents but he was a lonely ghost uttering sounds nobody ever heard. The judges had decided and when they do it is final.

“I am the only child of my parents, please have mercy on me,” the boy said in a voice shredded with emotions.

“Have you just realized that?”One of the men said and backhanded him with something that looked like a hand trowel. Every molecule of air disappeared from his lungs, leaving him fighting for a breath. He held his mouth and when he opened it again only blood came out. 

The man untied his hands from his legs and twisted one of them with all the strength he has. The hand cracked audibly, like the snap of dry chicken bones. Blood pooled and caused it to bulge at once. The boy passed out and woke up in a few seconds. He was determined to live. He begged and made resolutions to never steal again if given a second chance but all his pleas fell on deaf ears.

“I am going to make sure that when you contemplate stealing in your next life you would realize that you have no hands to do so,” the same man who had been torturing him said and grabbed the other hand in his but stopped when a group of police officers came in. 

The boy breathed a sigh of relief; at least he had a chance to live now.

After the police officers were told what the boys did, they patted the vigilante men on the back and drove off.

 “This is barbaric,” Joe shouted, but he was the only odd one in the crowd.

The man gave the boy a pity look. He pretended to be sorry for what he had done to him.

“Are you sure you won’t steal again?” He asked him, smiling mischievously.

“I swear to God, I won’t,” the boy replied and twitched his face. The pain from his broken hand was excruciating but that was the least of his worries now.

“Then your case is settled, we will let you go back to your parents.”

“Thank you, sir,” he stuttered and spat out blood when his voice came out incoherent.

“Don’t thank me yet I will have to inform our Oga first, he has the final say.”

“Okay sir. Thank you, sir,” he said and spat out blood again. He was hoping that his life would be spared but he failed to see that he was on a path of no return. These men never give any condemned criminal a second chance. Once their mind is made up it was like a rock wall.

The man moved away from him and pretended as though he was going back to the van and then his colleague came from behind the boy and cut his throat with his machete. The head went off smoothly in one full blow and rolled towards the other boy. Blood gushed out from the headless neck while the rest of the body danced its last. In a fraction of seconds, the body went cold. 

It was now the turn of the second boy.

The second boy looked up to the sky and began to pray. “I am dreaming,” he told himself. “...any minute from now I will be awake.”

When the killer vigilante man approached the boy with his raised blood stained machete the crowd cheered him up excitedly and urged him on.

The boy ignored him and kept his face in the sun still praying. Meanwhile, another member of the vigilante group was behind him ready to execute him when the time comes.

“In your next life, don’t ever think of stealing even a pen from anybody,” the killer vigilante man retorted to him with asperity.

He moved away from him still waving the machete in the air and when the boy saw this, he broke down and began to cry.

“Please don’t kill me,” he begged as tears poured down from his swollen eyes.

 He heard quick steps behind him and when he tried to find out what it was his head jumped out of his body and landed on the ground.  Blood gushed out from the pipe of his neck and his body shook the way the body of the dark boy did and then went numb.

Another set of men brought in tyres and fuel and in a few minutes the lifeless bodies of the boys went in flames.

And it was all over in a twinkling.

Jungle justice

 Jungle justice is when a group of irate mob or an undefined group of persons (like in the case of the vigilante group), takes into their hands the right to execute punishment on alleged perpetrators of grave crimes.

Jungle justice is trouble with a capital T that does none of us no good. The bad thing about it is that the people who are executed by this means may not be guilty of anything. In life, they could have insisted that they were not guilty and a thorough investigation would have proved them right. In death, they are whatever their killers wanted them to be.

Causes of jungle justice

There are countless causes of jungle justice but I am going to outline a few of them.

• Unemployment 
• Illiteracy 
• Ineffective legal system
• Failure of our leaders 
• Anger and frustration 
•    Ineffective law enforcement agencies

Solutions to the problem

• Jobs should be created for the teeming unemployed youths 
• Timely and appropriate punishments to defaulters of the law 
•  Effective communication network between the masses and the law enforcement agents 
• An ineffective legal framework should be established 
• The government should be sincere in its fight against corruption 
• The masses should be educated on the rule of law and the implications of taking laws into their own hands.
• Religious leaders should preach against jungle justice since their followers listen to them more than anybody else.

Disclaimer: 
THE STORY IS A WORK OF FICTION BUT BASED ON A TRUE LIFE EXPERIENCE. THE CHARACTERS, THE INCIDENTS, AND LOCATIONS PORTRAYED AND THE NAMES HEREIN ARE FICTITIOUS, AND ANY SIMILARITY TO OR IDENTIFICATION WITH THE LOCATION, NAME, CHARACTER OR HISTORY OF ANY PERSON, GROUP OF PERSONS OR IDENTITY IS ENTIRELY COINCIDENTAL AND UNINTENTIONAL.