Ummulkhairi: Stop jungle justice now!

IT has become frighteningly easy to kill a human being on the streets of Nigeria. A rumour, a shout, or a baseless accusation is all that’s needed. A crowd gathers. Fists fly. Stones rain down. Tyres appear. Petrol is fetched, a match struck, and within minutes, a fellow citizen, whose life is protected under Section 33 of Nigeria’s Constitution, is reduced to a charred corpse.

No investigation. No evidence. No defence. No trial. Only death!

This is not justice. It is murder. It must stop now.

In every civilised society, the power to determine guilt and impose punishment is vested in the courts of law. Even where the law prescribes the death penalty, that verdict is pronounced only after a fair and transparent trial. Still, a state governor has to sign the death warrant.

Yet in Nigeria today, hearsay, rumour and mere allegations have become sufficient grounds for execution.

That is the terrifying reality behind the gruesome killing of schoolteacher and mother of four, Ummulkhairi Aliyu, last Sunday in Maraban Jos, Igabi Local Government Area of Kaduna State.

She was reportedly on her way to attend a lecture when someone accused her of attempting to steal children. No missing child was produced. No parent came forward to identify a victim. No evidence was presented to support the allegation.

Facts no longer matter when a mob is thirsty for blood.

The crowd descended on Ummulkhairi with unimaginable savagery. Even after the police initially rescued her and took her into custody, the mob reportedly laid siege to the police station, demanding that she be handed over.

Disturbingly, reports allege that some police officers eventually led the terrified woman out of the station, where the mob seized her, murdered her and burned her body. The motorcycle of a man who reportedly insisted she was innocent was also set ablaze.

Ironically, on that same Sunday in Abakaliki, Ebonyi State, another woman narrowly escaped a similar fate after she was falsely accused of stealing three children. She survived only because the police successfully rescued her.

The difference between life and death in Nigeria should never depend on whether security personnel arrive a few minutes earlier.

Unfortunately, mob justice has become one of Nigeria’s oldest and ugliest traditions.

In the 1970s and 1980s, suspected pickpockets and petty thieves in Oyingbo and Idumota markets in Lagos were routinely beaten, sometimes to death, while spectators watched.

What began as crude punishment for petty crime has evolved into a nationwide culture of public executions.

Between 1999 and 2002, the notorious Bakassi Boys operated with official backing in parts of Abia and Anambra states, summarily executing crime suspects in Aba and Onitsha under the guise of fighting criminality. Their brutality earned applause in some quarters because many Nigerians had lost confidence in the criminal justice system.

Perhaps no incident better symbolises Nigeria’s descent into barbarism than the lynching of the Aluu Four on October 5, 2012. Four undergraduate students of the University of Port Harcourt, young men with dreams, ambitions and families, were falsely accused of theft, stripped naked, tortured before cheering spectators and burned alive.

Three years earlier, in December 1995, Gideon Akaluka was beheaded in Kano over allegations of blasphemy, his killers proudly parading his severed head through the streets.

In May 2022, Deborah Samuel, a student of Shehu Shagari College of Education, Sokoto, was beaten to death and her body burned following accusations of blasphemy. To this day, those responsible continue to walk free.

In 2019, a sound engineer was murdered in Umuoji, Anambra State, after being mistaken for a kidnapper.

In March 2025, over 10 travellers from northern Nigeria were attacked and burned alive in Uromi, Edo State, after local vigilantes wrongly believed they were kidnappers.

In January, a clergyman, Dio Idon of the ECWA Church, accused of killing his brother through witchcraft, was reportedly lynched and burned to death by members of his own community in Kaduna State.

The list goes on. The victims differ. The accusations change, but the method remains the same.

Mob becomes accuser, investigator, prosecutor, judge, and executioner.

The Devatop Centre for Africa Development and Amnesty International report that thousands of Nigerians have been tortured or killed in recent years without ever seeing the inside of a courtroom.

A Daily Trust investigation found that within the first four months of 2019 alone, 24 people were killed while seven others were assaulted and tortured in incidents of jungle justice across 17 states, including Lagos and the Federal Capital Territory.

In one particularly horrifying case in Edo State, a woman was beaten and had pepper inserted into her private parts by a mob.

One survey indicates that about 43 per cent of Nigerians have personally witnessed jungle justice in their communities.

Street justice persists because many Nigerians no longer trust the criminal justice system. They believe suspects arrested today will regain freedom after bribing police officers or exploiting delays in the courts.

Police corruption, weak investigations, endless adjournments and slow trials have created fertile ground for lynch mobs.

But the collapse of confidence in public institutions should lead to comprehensive reform, not the replacement of the rule of law with the rule of the mob.

Jungle justice must stop. It makes everyone unsafe because today’s executioner may become tomorrow’s victim. Indeed, anyone can be falsely identified, mistaken for a kidnapper, thief, ritualist, blasphemer or child trafficker.

Angry crowds must not decide who deserves to live or die.

On Sunday, a mob unjustly murdered a teacher, wife and mother, leaving her struggling husband to raise four children alone.

The Aluu Four were not simply names in newspaper headlines. They were university students whose futures vanished in flames.

Deborah Samuel was somebody’s daughter, sister and friend.

Every victim leaves behind shattered families, broken dreams and emotional wounds that never fully heal.

Jungle justice does not merely kill individuals. It destroys generations.

It projects a country where law has surrendered to chaos, and crowds replace courts. It reinforces the damaging perception that Nigerians have failed to evolve beyond primitive impulses.

Every individual involved in Ummulkhairi’s murder must be identified, arrested, prosecuted and, upon conviction, given the maximum punishment prescribed by law.

Equally urgent is the investigation into reports that police officers handed Ummulkhairi over to the mob. If those allegations are established, every officer involved should be prosecuted and punished accordingly.