By Dr Sazelo Mkhize, Ms Khanyisile Majola & Dr Samuel Fikiri Cinini

Mob justice has been observed in diverse cultural and historical settings. It takes hold when the population deems local government and law enforcement ineffective and untrustworthy, according to academic texts. This phenomenon emerged in many modern post-conflict states such as the post-Civil War United States, post-World War II Eastern Europe, and Northern Ireland.

South Africa became a democratic country in 1994, marking the end of the harsh, protracted apartheid regime. Over many decades, institutionalised racial segregation and state-sanctioned violence eroded trust between communities and law enforcement; and the relationship was characterised by extreme antagonism. Despite efforts to police society more inclusively, high levels of inequality, as well as crime and interpersonal violence, persist.

According to Williams (2012), the word “crime” generally evokes images of murder, rape, drug abuse, drug trafficking, terrorism, aggravated assault, aggravated burglary, armed robbery, arson, theft, or similar dramatic acts. Anyone committing one or more of these crimes is subject to mob justice where law enforcement fails to attend to the matter urgently.

For community members, mob violence is a swift solution that does not consider the criminality of their actions in their bid to resolve an issue. However, gruesome killings and casual use of murder to solve an issue challenge the notions of ubuntu and equality as well as the Bill of Rights that grants everyone the constitutional right to life. Law-abiding citizens are turning themselves into criminals by taking the law into their own hands, making them liable to answer to the justice system. The law states that “the essence of justice is that everyone in society is equally subjected to the law”, making it clear that no circumstances or person should be placed above the law. Perpetrators of mob justice believe that they are solving the problem by eliminating the criminal. However, vigilantism leaves much to be desired in terms of communities’ peace and safety.

A study in (2020) found that, in most communities, mob justice was fuelled by emotions, frustration, and the need to ensure what they assume to be safety. Residents want to regain the peace and combat high crime rates. However, this form of justice calls for introspection on societal relations within the communities. The fight may be against crime, but in some instances it may be driven by hearsay with no solid evidence.

On the one hand, mob justice represents a call for the government to do more to protect citizens from criminal activities, while on the other, it is a warning to those that engage in such activities of what will happen to them if they are caught.

If the police, the courts, and Department of Justice and Correctional Services do not do their work effectively, criminals will always be in our midst. Victim communities are also aware of the leniency with which criminals are treated by the criminal justice system. Offenders who have gone through the judicial process end up being released. This has led communities to believe that criminals are protected by law enforcement or the justice system. Hence, they take matters into their own hands.

Mob justice is not acceptable as, in every organised society, only the state has the right to render justice. This practice should not be encouraged because it will lead to an endless cycle of conflict.

To end mob justice, law enforcement must improve its operations to curb criminal activities. This calls for the strengthening of local governance and the criminal justice system.

Dr Sazelo Mkhize, Ms Khanyisile Majola, Dr Samuel Fikiri Cinini are based within the School of Applied Human Sciences at the University of KwaZulu-Natal.

It began with a tweet on June 1 from President Muhammadu Buhari’s Twitter handle @MBuhari. He reprimanded angry youths who were “misbehaving” and alluded to his role in the civil war, promising to treat the secessionists “in the language they understand”. This tweet was followed by a huge public outcry and condemnation, as many considered it repulsive, and some even deem it as a call for genocide. As a result, Twitter pulled down the specific tweet and its embedded video, in response to which the Federal Government banned Twitter in Nigeria indefinitely (although this was subsequently described as ‘temporary’) and called for other social media restrictions. Like the actions of any leader, the ban has been received with mixed reactions.

It is understandable why the President should be irritated with the country’s deteriorating  security situation, especially with regards to the South-Eastern part of the country. Since the turn of the year, attacks by “unknown gunmen” have led to the death of scores of Policemen, Army personnel, as well as officials of other security agencies in Nigeria. In addition, many public institutions, especially Police stations and offices of the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC), have been razed by the ravaging hoodlums in the South-East.

The Nigerian Police has linked the attacks of public property, particularly in the South-East, to the Indigenous Peoples of Biafra (IPOB), a secessionist group that seeks to restore the defunct state of Biafra. The group, led by Nnamdi Kanu, is believed by security agencies to have commenced an arms struggle with the Nigerian state.

On social media, Nigerians trended the #IAmIgboToo hashtag to express their displeasure with the President’s statement. In addition, Nigerian Twitter users of different ethnic groups have also adopted Igbo names in solidarity with the Igbo people.

What followed was the removal of the President’s tweet by Twitter, with the tech company citing its policy on hateful conduct, which prohibits tweets that “promote violence or threaten” people on the basis of “race, ethnicity, (and) national origin.” The violation of this policy makes Twitter to delete any contravening tweet or compel users to “remove the violating content.”

Although some may believe that Twitter removed the tweets as a result of its violated policy, yet I must point out that the tech platform has not always been neutral in its dealing with Nigeria. For example, during the #EndSARS protests of last year, Twitter allegedly encouraged the demonstrations through a nauseous promotion of the #EndSARS hashtag and advised the protesters on alternative ways of raising funds through cryptocurrencies, to bypass the clampdown on accounts through which the protests were being supported, by the Central Bank of Nigeria.

Reacting to such seeming contradictions and lack of neutrality, the Minister of Information, Lai Muhammed, complained that Twitter condones worse tweets from the IPOB leader, Nnamdi Kanu. This comparison demeans the Nigerian President’s office. How can the Minister compare tweets from the President with that of a secessionist leader known for acerbic and uncouth language, coupled with temper tantrums?

The initial announcement that the Federal Government had banned Twitter indefinitely took many Nigerians by surprise, and it seemed across many quarters not to have been a well thought-out response. It appears that the Federal Government may have taken on a battle it can never win, and the reasons for this view are manifold.

First, the speed and context of the Twitter ban by Federal Government smirks of a hasty and jerky reaction, and retaliatory action against an organisation upholding the dictates of its policies. The reasons proffered by the Federal Government are, at best, conjectural, and unrelated to the issues at hand. Misinformation and the spread of fake news, which may have affected national security, as claimed by some of the president’s handlers, would not fly as the reason for the ban, if this came only a few days after Twitter pulled down the President’s tweet. People are wise to uncover the hidden reason, and many felt the government was not telling the whole truth, and it was disingenuous of the administration to pull such a stunt.

The second reason is that people are suspicious of any fight against the media, which many often interpret as an attempt to muffle their freedom of speech and expression, in a country practising constitutional democracy. On the contrary, Twitter and platforms like it create a public sphere for the expression of divergent views by all. They are marketplaces of ideas and counter ideas, often competing for relevance and acceptance. Everyone with a smartphone and mobile data could air his views on local, national, and international issues, mobilise and fight for a cause, and access and learn about current events. Therefore, a complete ban on Twitter may be seen by many as an affront to their fundamental liberty.

The ban immediately brought to peoples’ mind the draconian decree 4 of 1984 that curtailed the freedom of speech of journalists and public commentators. This decree was promulgated during the military regime of General Muhammadu Buhari, and any assault on the media forces people to recall those days, and specuate about its return.

The third reason is that the Federal Government cannot afford to engage in a war with the international media, especially at this auspicious time. Insecurity, banditry, the poor economy, and secessionist agitations have negatively affected Nigeria’s image, locally and internationally. We need the international media as our friends rather than foes, particularly at this point. Banning Twitter sends a wrong signal that the Federal Government is applying undue high-handedness in dealing with domestic issues. Opposition and non-state actors will milk this to prove that the government is persecuting them for their contrary views, and that the Federal Government is anti-people. Other international media (social and traditional) may likely come together to portray the government in a bad light across the world. We should avoid this at all costs, especially given our current impasse. We cannot multiply the war front.

Fourthly, President Buhari is not the first head of a government to have a face-off with Twitter. Donald Trump, the former U.S. President, has been totally banned from Twitter and other social media platforms for almost two years. As Twitter has become powerful, so have its users become vulnerable to the dictates of the owners and managers. Jack Dorsey, the CEO of Twitter and Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook founder, have become two of the most powerful men in the world. As such, when Twitter decided to suspend the account of Donald Trump after the January 6 insurrection when his supporters stormed the U.S. Capitol, it caused severe reverberations. It meant that a private company could clip the wings of a sitting U.S. President, widely regarded as the most powerful man in the world.

The fifth reason is that Nigeria should be worried about being counted among countries that have banned Twitter and other social media platforms, including China, Iran, North Korea, Cuba and Turkmenistan. How can Nigeria be listed among countries widely accepted as stifling free speech, discouraging dissent, and abusing human rights? These countries do not have democratic values and profiles, and Nigeria should be highly concerned about being placed within the same category with them.

The sixth reason is that social media is an outlet for people, especially young people, to express themselves and vent their anger. Imagine the amount of frustration young people will experience, as they get cut off from the global world they link to through social media. Any parent of young persons can testify to how attached they are to the social media, from where they get most of their information. Young people inhabit this virtual reality bubble created by social media, to the extent that some are addicted to it and may struggle to clearly distinguish between digital reality and social reality. Young people might subsequently rebel against any ban on social media.

Moreover, I am not sure that Nigeria has the technical capacity to shut down social media over the internet. Why then should we make laws or rules that we cannot enforce? Even if we can implement this ban, why waste resources that should solve a panoply of other pressing needs confronting Nigeria on it?

The Federal Government seems to be acting desperately and, therefore, may be making more mistakes. We should remember that once rulers, Hosni Mubarak of Egypt and Muammar Ghadaffi of Libya tried to ban social media during the Arab Spring but this failed. Banning media is an antiquated technique of social control, which adopts a standard military approach that cannot work in a democracy.

However, after posting the tweet and the backlash ensued, which culminated in the removal of the tweet by Twitter, the government should have learnt its lessons and ensured that any tweet to be uploaded to the President’s handle goes through greater scrutiny. Maybe they should have interrogated the President’s social media management team. Instead, suspending Twitter in the country adds more fuel to the fire and depicts the government as being dictatorial.

There was some rumpus when Twitter announced the setting up of its African office in Ghana some months ago. However, many people had expected them to set up shop in Nigeria, as the country offers more significant opportunities than Ghana. With this development, the decision of Twitter to snub Nigeria would be seen as a wise move, as they would have been more susceptible to government sanction if their offices were in Nigeria.

Social media has become an essential tool in the everyday lives of many Nigerians. It is a symbol of free speech and a vital ingredient for democratic rule and governance. The issue of the regulation of social media is a matter for another day. The current administration is a beneficiary of social media, as it used it extensively in the arduous battle to unseat the People’s Democratic Party (PDP)-led government in 2015.

This ban has economic consequences and may damage Nigeria profoundly by creating the loss of jobs of our teeming youths in the digital marketing sector, it could rub off negatively on Nigeria’s image abroad, batter the confidence of foreign investors in Nigeria, dampen our democratic antecedents, widen the communication gap between the Federal Government and the people, and lead to international embarrassment and hostile public diplomacy.

In summary, by banning Twitter, we will be hurting our economy more and the Federal Government risks sending the message that we are back to the old days of military dictatorship, during which the free press was usually the first target. Moreover, it risks undermining the assertion by the President’s supporters that he has fully transformed from a military man to a democrat, and that the current administration is different from the time the President took power as a soldier via a coup d’état in 1984. There are many ways the government can address the unfortunate removal of the President’s tweet or even our security challenges. But, unfortunately, banning Twitter in the country is not one of them.

Dakuku Peterside is a policy and leadership expert.   

Surely, given the state of the nation today, it would appear perverse to be exercised by the 2023 elections. So weighty are the problems that we grapple with and so fluid their composition that many worry that there may not be a country in two years time. Today, as a people, we confront our worst identity crisis since the end of the civil war. Amid a pandemic of increasingly gratuitous violence, just about every sub-national group appears minded to test the notion of self-determination, up to and including secession; and on the way to a possible unilateral declaration of independence, the incentive to demonise others has never appeared more persuasive.

The state, on the other hand, is in a death struggle with the biggest challenge to its competence ever. Both as manager of scarce resources and as allocator of values within the domestic economy, the federal republic has never appeared more bereft of nous and authority than it currently looks. So macabre is the current state of play that official responses to an increasingly brazen potpourri of belligerent non-state actors bent on levying war against the state segue from craven beseeching directed at dissuading the militants from borderline irresponsible war mongering that only further fans the embers.

Yet, remaining a democracy must be the biggest of our many near-term challenges. In part, this is because this might be all that is left for us to anchor the nation and state on after the crises in the social and economic spheres might have exhausted themselves. At a further remove, strengthening our democratic credentials might very easily help point out the path to national restoration. Nonetheless, the strongest case for focussing on the next major bus stop in our electoral cycle is the therapeutic effect on a diverse society from holding regular (in our case, four-yearly) polls in which the people have a more than theoretical chance of turfing out governments perceived as bad.

On this reckoning, the 2023 elections matters in a way in which no election in the country’s history has mattered. From our current vantage, the hope is that it will somehow lend a veneer of normalcy to the present chaos. Anything that eases the current abysmal security situation will be a boon for our beleaguered people. Doubly so if it then makes serious contemplation of the problems with the economy possible. But the next general elections matter even more than this.

For a democracy is much more than the cadence of the ballot. Even the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) held regular elections; as does China, today. What this ballot does is try to validate the conversations that the people have had in the inter-poll period. A democracy, on the other hand, gives space for these preferences to be ventilated. This is one reason why social activists obsess over the freedoms without which meaningful thought is impossible. And why there has been so much hand-wringing over the government’s recent attempt to restrict domestic access to Twitter, a microblogging and social networking platform.

That it has turned out to be anything but, however, indicts the atmosphere in which domestic debate takes place. If the civil war unearthed cracks in our body polity, we have spent the years since, frantically trying to paper over those fissures. Unfortunately nearly all the taboos with the assistance of which much of these dirt was swept under the carpet have been progressively breached over the last five years.

2023 then invites us to properly interrogate these taboos. To admit, for instance, that we might not yet be a nation. That our system and practice of governance up to this point has reinforced the tendency for constituent parts to want to dissociate themselves from an increasingly dysfunctional centre. If we must reappraise just about every dimension of our lived experiences from first principles, then the economy is not a bad place to start.

The nanny state may support the illusion of a powerful central government. But it has held back the diverse creative potential locked up in the country. As we seek to restructure our government such that the Federal Government should have a subsidiary function, carrying out only those responsibilities which cannot be performed at a more local level, we should concede that with respect the production and consumption of economic, if not social values, all tiers of government should have subsidiary roles, carrying out only those responsibilities – education, healthcare, policing, judiciary, defence, etc. – that the market may fail at.

We may have to choose a new cadre of politicians, though, to succeed at any of these. The current crop are self-evidently past their “best before” dates.

Ifeanyi, journalist manqué and retired civil servant, can be reached @IfeanyiUddin.