IT happened a decade ago but time has not quenched the bonfire of the four University of Port Harcourt undergraduates mistaken for robbers, paraded on the streets and finished off in a bonfire of a shocking death immortalized as The Aluu Four.
The story of the Aluu Four is the story of Nigeria—a country still living in the Hobbesian state of nature, a country still in an era of savagery where the rule of law has been jettisoned and our people prefer the Stone Age law of the jungle. What did the philosopher Thomas Hobbes say about the state of nature? According to Hobbes, the state of nature is a miserable state characterized by the “war of every man against every man.” According to Encyclopedia Britannica, it is “a constant and violent condition of competition in which each individual has a natural right to everything regardless of the interest of others.”
I first heard about Thomas Hobbes and his “state of nature” argument in my first year as a student of Mass Communication taking an elective course in Political Science. To pass the course, I had to master this Hobbesian quote which sees life as “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short,” where individuals are in a “war of all against all.” To understand this Hobbesian anarchy where without a strong government, people resort to their primitive nature where they take laws into their hands, I had to read William Golding’s 1954 novel “Lord of the Flies” where a group of young boys, survivors of a plane crash found themselves stranded, alone on a deserted island had to develop their own rules of behaviour which eventually led to violence and brutality. In the words of a literary critic, “the Lord of the Flies explores the dark side of humanity, the savagery that underlies even the most civilized human beings. William Golding intended this novel as a tragic parody of children’s adventure tales, illustrating humankind’s intrinsic evil nature.” Although no particular novel won William Golding his Nobel Prize in Literature, the “Lord of the Flies” stands out as a classic of modern literature.
Many years after God created this world, Nigeria is still trapped in a dystopian world where jungle justice reigns. The type that made Cain to kill his brother Abel. And when God queried him about the wrongness and the savagery of his action, Cain rudely asked God: “Am I my brother’s keeper?”
Today, Nigerians are the inheritors of the murderous legacy of Cain, violating the rule of law, inflicting instant deadly punishment on a crime suspect, not bothering to hand him or her to the police, believing that the police would take bribe and connive with the suspect to escape punishment. Nigeria is that country where the offspring of Cain are holding their brothers and sisters into ransom and asking for billions before they can release them.
From the beautiful city of Milton Keynes in the UK where I am partly spending my holidays, I surprisingly stumbled on Plus TV Africa’s morning show “The BREAKFAST” which features the proficient tag team duo of Kofi Isaac Bartels (the Nigerian-born TV personality of Ghanaian parentage) and the bright, witty, inquisitorial co-anchor Mercy Ebokpo. It’s a programme that has carved for itself the special niche of presenting trending videos on social media as the first course of its two-hour-long marathon breakfast starting from seven o’clock and ending at nine. On Monday, there was this brutal trending video of five men captured by the mob somewhere in Anambra State for allegedly attempting to steal a tricycle—popularly called “Keke Marwa” after Brigadier-General M.B. Marwa (Retd), the Chairman/Chief Executive of NDLEA who as the military governor of Lagos State imported the tricycles from India. For attempting to steal Keke Marwa in broad daylight, the five men, according to the video which went viral, were treated to jungle justice of the unjust type. They were held hostage by a mob, ferociously beaten, planks smashed on their heads and stoned. Next, worn-out tyres were put around their necks, then petrol splashed on their bodies and fire ignited to burn them into ashes. The video was so brutal that the TV station could not show it in full. Viewers had to be warned. As the bonfire raged, consuming its victims, a woman was crying: Jesus, Jesus, Jesus.
A disconsolate Kofi Bartel told his viewers: “Jungle justice has become a worrying thing in this country. People keep taking the laws into their hands…Everyone is presumed innocent until proved guilty in a court of law…Two wrongs don’t make them right…It’s barbaric and inhuman. There is no justification for taking this line of action.”
On her part, Mercy Ebokpo said the whole bizarre episode reminded her of the Aluu Four lynching of October, 2012 when four young undergraduates of the University of Port Harcourt who had gone to threaten a debtor owing one of them were caught in a nightmarish frame-up leading to their horrific deaths in the hands of a mob who mistook them for robbers and therefore gave them the petrol and tyre-around-the- neck treatment in this first brutal video of the internet age. People were watching it, some cheering and some recording and uploading it on YouTube. “This is insanity, inhumanity,” Mercy said, referring to the Keke Marwa mob lynching.
Taking over from his co-anchor, Kofi turned the bizarre scenario into a sermon: “There is so much anger on the streets of this country. People are angry but you don’t know what they are angry at. So much anger in the land. It is not palatable. To now actually smash their heads with wooden plank, put tyres around their neck and light the fire is total insanity. The police should go ahead and track down the people and use them as examples. Their faces are on the video. We want a society where people behave like human beings. Over here, someone shouts ole (meaning thief in Yoruba) and before you know it, there is a crowd and a mob of killers.”
The story of the four tragic undergrads of the University of Port Harcourt is now the subject of a movie, Dark October, produced by Linda Ikeji, released on Neflix on February 3, 2023. It is one mob lynching that has continued to burn into our national psyche, defining us as lawless. To a great extent, Linda Ikeji has well captured the fate of the Aluu Four for posterity. I hardly watch movies but I watched this well-researched tragic movie from the beginning to the end to see how the jungle justice would be meted. It is beautiful in its ugliness and ugly in its savagery. If you can stand it, go watch it!