Humiliation and violence have long served as the preferred form of punishment in Nigeria, shaping how wrongs are addressed both in the intimacy of daily life and on the stage of public spectacle. Last month, Twitter was consumed by a photograph: a domestic worker accused of stealing wigs — six in total — kneeling with one wig pressed into her hands like contraband seized by a customs officer. Her employer posted the image, as if to confirm guilt, and the platform, restless and eager for distraction, turned its ire first on the employer, who many reprimanded for posting such a degrading picture of her employee online. Then, in a wave of pushback against the assertion that the employer had erred in exposing an employee to mass vitriol, the heat was redirected to the alleged thief. She was mocked, berated and picked apart, her humanity flattened beneath hashtags.
Many saw in this aggressive pile-on, a mirror of something older, more insidious; the depraved logic that underscores jungle justice — punishing alleged wrongdoers through public shaming, violence, and sometimes death, carried out not by courts but by crowds.
On the internet, the spectacle often ends with retweets and ridicule, but beyond the screen, lives are destroyed, violence and death also often ensue. Just last week, in the town of Kasuwan Garba in Niger State, a woman known as Ammaye was accused of blasphemy. She was interrogated and handed to local vigilantes, but before any investigation could begin, young men gathered, restless and inflamed. They wrested her from the authorities and stoned her before setting her body alight, flames licking at what was left of her dignity. A year earlier, in Sokoto, a butcher named Usman Buda was lynched under similar circumstances. In the same state in 2022, Deborah Samuel, a student, was beaten and burned alive for allegedly insulting the Prophet Muhammad. And a decade before, four students of the University of Port Harcourt were stripped, beaten, and murdered in the Aluu community after being falsely accused of theft, their deaths captured in grainy videos that spread like wildfire.
Each of these incidents should have shocked the conscience of the nation into change, yet the senseless killings fuelled by mob action continue, relentless and familiar. Amnesty International counted 555 victims of mob violence between January 2012 and August 2023 — fifty-seven killed, thirty-two burned alive, two buried alive, and others tortured until they were unrecognisable.
Also known as “mob justice,” the occurrence is an extrajudicial form of justice — championed by a group of bystanders, who serve as witness, accuser, judge and executor — where an alleged criminal is humiliated, beaten or killed. It is an unconstitutional form of justice which regards neither the involvement of the police nor that of other law enforcement agencies. To ask why jungle justice persists is to ask why Nigerians have lost faith in the institutions that are supposed to mediate justice.
The Socio-Economic Rights and Accountability Project’s (SERAP) Corruption Perception Survey, conducted between September and December 2018, found the police to be the most corrupt public institution in Nigeria. Suspects handed over to the police are often seen walking free within days, their release secured by money or influence, sometimes returning to threaten those who dared point fingers. Communities that have watched this cycle play out over and over no longer expect justice from the police, and so, when anger boils they simply take the law into their own hands, convinced that if justice is to exist at all, it must be carved from violence.
The judiciary, meanwhile, offers little solace. Trials stretch into years, sometimes decades, adjourned until urgency fades and parties lose hope. By the time judgments arrive, victims are often disinterested, displaced or dead, leaving behind only the bitter taste of futility. In such a system, jungle justice becomes the product of bureaucratic dysfunction — a crude alternative to the long, exhausting corridors of the law.
Ignorance deepens the dysfunction. A nation that has failed to invest in civic education leaves its people with little understanding of human rights, dignity, or due process. In many communities, there is no sense that a person is innocent of any offence until proven guilty. Instead, accusation becomes conviction, and conviction is swiftly rewarded with execution. A woman accused of witchcraft is set ablaze at the roadside, as happened in Cross River in 2023 when Martina Okey Itagbor was blamed for a car accident. A boy caught with a phone in a market is stripped, beaten, and left for dead. Once a person is labelled criminal, their humanity evaporates, and a well-meaning crowd is free to mete out whatever punishment feels fitting.
This impulse is sustained by a culture of disproportionate response, where small offences attract catastrophic consequences. A stolen wig or a rumoured insult to faith becomes the spark for collective fury, the outpouring of which must be public, theatrical. It is as if Nigerians, worn down by years of state failure, have come to believe that the only way to correct wrong is to obliterate the wrongdoer, and the more outrageous the punishment, the more satisfying the justice. Even in enclosed spaces such as an aircraft cabin, as with the ordeal of Ibom Air passenger Comfort Emmanson, Nigerians display a chilling instinct to equate severity with justice, as if cruelty itself could purify wrongdoing.
Religion complicates matters further, particularly in the north where secular law coexists uneasily with Sharia courts. Here, accusations of blasphemy are volatile, often weaponised in moments of personal conflict. Religious leaders, whose words carry immense weight, sometimes endorse mob killings outright or remain silent in the face of them, their inaction interpreted as permission. The state rarely prosecutes perpetrators, and so impunity takes root. In such a climate, mobs believe themselves to be enacting divine will, and executions carried out in broad daylight acquire the aura of sacred duty rather than criminality.
And yet, Nigeria’s legal framework promises protections that stand in stark contrast to this practice; The Constitution promises the right to life, dignity, and fair hearing. The Criminal Code and Penal Code criminalise unlawful killing, while the Violence Against Persons Act forbids physical harm against others. What the legislation lacks is explicit recognition of mob action as a crime in itself. Efforts to fill this gap — such as Senator Dino Melaye’s Prohibition and Protection of Persons from Lynching, Mob Action and Extra Judicial Execution Bill 2017 — have withered in the legislature, abandoned before they could take root. The result is an absurd vacuum, where the law in theory protects life, but in practice offers no deterrent to crowds intent on killing.
Until significant reform is carried out from the police force to the legislature, jungle justice will remain both symptom and symbol of Nigeria’s fractured justice system. It will persist so long as people distrust the police, despair of the courts, and mistake cruelty for correction. From the viral photograph of a domestic worker with wigs to the smouldering body of a woman accused of blasphemy, humiliation and violence have become our theatre of justice. And until the cycle is broken, every Nigerian — innocent or guilty, known or nameless — remains one accusation away from becoming its next victim.
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