"Where is the tyre? Light him up immediately." The crime we've gotten so used to that we barely see how wrong it is.

Jungle Justice Is Not Justice; It Is a Crime We Applaud

Somewhere in Nigeria today, a crowd is gathering around someone. Maybe he snatched a phone. Maybe he was only standing near the person who did. Phones come out before the police ever get a call. Someone throws the first punch, and within minutes what should have been an arrest has become an execution, filmed from three angles and set to music.

Ask yourself a simple question before you read any further. Who investigated anything here? Who heard both sides? Who decided that this particular punishment fit this particular offence? The honest answer, in most cases, is nobody. And yet millions of Nigerians will watch the video, laugh at it, and move on with their day. That's not just a serious problem but a national one!

What is Mob Justice?

Mob justice, commonly known as 'jungle justice', is the act of taking the law into your own hands without legal authority or regard for the constitution.

Mob justice is, essentially, an unlawful assumption of judicial power by citizens, carried out in total disregard of due process and constitutional rights.

This is not a village problem or a city problem. It is a Nigerian problem, and it shows up at every level of the state.

In October 2012, four students of the University of Port Harcourt were beaten and burnt to death in Aluu community, Rivers State, over an accusation of theft that turned out to be a dispute over a debt.

Three men were later convicted for the murders, five years after the fact. In May 2022, a young woman named Deborah Samuel was killed by fellow students in Sokoto over a message she posted online. In March 2024, a mob in Uromi, Edo State, lynched and burnt sixteen hunters who were mistaken for kidnappers.

Just this year, an Islamic teacher was lynched in Kaduna after a false accusation, and a market woman in Abuja was nearly killed over a transfer she never faked.

The excuse everyone reaches for

Talk to people about this, and the same defence comes up almost immediately. "The law is too slow, too corrupt, too easily bribed, so what other choice does an ordinary person have?"

It is true that Nigerians have good reason to distrust the justice system. Most Nigerians blame the high rate of jungle justice on a lack of trust in law enforcement, and an overwhelming majority still call it a wicked and barbaric act even while admitting they have personally witnessed it.

Both things are true at once. People do not trust the police, and people still know, deep down, that what the crowd does is wrong.

But being caught in the act is not the same as being tried.

Section 36(5) of the Constitution states plainly that every person charged with a criminal offence shall be presumed innocent until he is proved guilty.

What we see are crowds reacting, acting on emotion rather than investigation. And reaction, again and again, has been wrong. The debtor in Aluu was never a robber. The hunters in Uromi were never kidnappers. The woman in Abuja never faked a transfer.

What the law actually says about a life

Section 33 of the Constitution protects the right to life and is direct about it.

A person may only be deprived of life in execution of the sentence of a court after he has been found guilty of a criminal offence in Nigeria. Not after a crowd decides. Not after a video goes viral suggesting he is guilty. After a court!

Section 34 goes further and protects the dignity of every person, guilty or not, stating that no one shall be subjected to torture or to inhuman or degrading treatment.

This matters even when the crowd is convinced the person deserves punishment, because the Constitution does not say this protection is reserved only for the innocent. It says every individual is entitled to it.

So when a suspect is stripped, beaten, forced to dance, made to eat pepper, or set alight in the street, three separate constitutional protections are being broken at the same time, regardless of whether he actually stole anything at all. The crowd is not enforcing the law. It is replacing it.

The irony is difficult to miss: in trying to punish crime, the crowd commits crimes of its own.

When punishment becomes content

Here is the part that should genuinely disturb you. These humiliations do not end when the beating stops. Increasingly, they are only just beginning.

Earlier this year, a man accused of stealing laptops at a National Open University campus was ordered to dance for a crowd of students after already being beaten, while dozens of phones filmed him.

The clip spread across X, TikTok, Instagram and WhatsApp within hours, and a second audience took over, adding jokes, funny captions, and trending sounds to another person's worst day. In Benin City, a man accused of stealing electrical wires was made to twist the wires into a crown, wear it, and rap for the crowd's entertainment while it was recorded.

Scroll through the comment section under any of these videos and you will see the same pattern. Some outrage at first, then laughter, then memes, then the next viral clip pushes it out of memory entirely.

For a growing number of young Nigerians, a stranger's public humiliation has become a genre of comedy content, something to duet, remix, and quote.

Think about what that teaches a child scrolling TikTok for fun.

It teaches that another person's fear and pain are funny as long as the caption is good. It teaches that cruelty earns views.

A generation raised on this will not necessarily grow up more violent, but it may grow up less disturbed by violence, and that is arguably worse. Laughter that used to be reserved for jokes is now being spent on someone else's degradation, and nobody seems to be counting the cost of that exchange.

The psychological wound it's leaving on us

Every single Nigerian who has stumbled onto one of these videos, even by accident, carries something away from it, whether they admit it or not.

Repeated exposure to public brutality does not leave people untouched. It teaches the nervous system that violence is normal, that the state cannot protect you, and that the only guarantee of safety is staying on the right side of an angry crowd.

Worse, it risks teaching us to see the law as optional.

How can we hold the government accountable to the law if we, as citizens, are willing to abandon that same law whenever it becomes inconvenient? How can we build a sane nation if we demand accountability from institutions while refusing to hold ourselves to the same standard?

The government's job, not the crowd's

None of this lets the government off the hook, and any honest argument has to admit that.

Section 14(2)(b) of the Constitution states, in the clearest language possible, that the security and welfare of the people shall be the primary purpose of government. Sections 214 and 215 establish the Nigeria Police Force and place it under the command of the Inspector General, and the Police Act itself lists the prevention and detection of crime and the protection of life and property among its core duties. On paper, this responsibility sits with the state, not with whichever crowd happens to be standing closest to a scene.

When response times are slow, when officers demand money before opening a case, when suspects walk free through weak prosecutions, ordinary people are left feeling like they have to protect themselves. That frustration is real, and pretending otherwise would be dishonest. But a broken institution does not transfer its authority to the street. It simply means the institution needs to be rebuilt, not replaced by whoever throws the first stone.

So where does this leave you?

The next time a crowd gathers around someone and phones start rising into the air, you get to choose what kind of Nigerian you are going to be in that moment. You can raise your own phone and add to the spectacle. You can stay silent and let it happen.

Or you can be the person who says, out loud, that this is not justice, this is a crime, and that the Constitution already settled this question long before any of us were born.

Jungle justice will not end because one article asked it to. It will end when enough people refuse to film, refuse to laugh, refuse to strike the first blow, and instead demand the kind of policing that makes the mob unnecessary in the first place.

Which side of that refusal are you standing on?