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African Centre for Crime and Security Studies
Working Paper
From ‘Ethnic Militias’ to ‘Jungle Justice’? Continuity and Change in
Informal Policing Practices in Nigeria
Dany Franck A. Tiwa
Research Fellow at the African Centre for Crime and Security Studies
11 October 2020 www.accss.cm Working Paper-3
1African Centre for Crime and Security Studies (ACCSS Africa)
Yaoundé, Cameroon
© 2020 by the African Centre for Crime and Security Studies
Les opinions exprimées dans ce rapport ne reflètent pas nécessairement les vues d u African
Centre for Crime and Security Studies, qui ne préconise pas de positions politiques spécifiques.
C'est un document de travail. Les commentaires, questions et permissions de citer doivent être
adressés à l’auteur à dfatiwa@gmail.com.
2À propos de cette étude
Cette étude, « From ‘ethnic militias’ to ‘jungle justice’? Research and change in vigilantism in
Nigeria » a bénéficié du soutien financier de la commission de l’union européenne qui a, à
travers le programme Erasmus Mundus, financé les recherches doctorales dont l’étude est
extraite.
À propos de cette série
Les documents de travail de l'ACCSS Africa sont des travaux en cours non encore édités qui
peuvent paraître dans les futures publications de ACCSS Africa, des revues à comité de lecture
et des ouvrages collectifs édités. Ce produit est uniquement distribué en ligne et n'a pas
d'équivalent papier.
3From ‘ethnic militias’ to ‘jungle justice’? Continuity and Change in Informal
Policing Practices in Nigeria
Abstract
This paper argues that although the existing literature has shed considerable
light on the practice of vigilantism in Nigeria, it has also obscured entire
dimensions of the problem, thereby preventing us from anticipating major shifts
that the practice has undergone. These shifts, it is suggested, call for and justify
a renewed scholarly attention to the criminological aspects of the vigilantism in
Nigeria.
Introduction
The literature on vigilantism in Nigeria is relatively abundant. A search of the words
‘vigilantism in Nigeria’ on google scholar yields “About 7.970 results [in] (0,04 sec)” 1. While
vigilantism in Nigeria was mentioned once in a while in the 70s (see Mazrui, 1976; Rosenbaum
& Sederberg, 1974), 80s (see Ayeni-Akeke, 1968) and in the 90s (see Mwalimu, 1990; Nield,
1999; Senechal de la Roche, 1996), the practice itself only became the independent variable to
be explained in the 2000s. The most cited publication on the issue were released between 2001
and 2008. The moment was particularly suitable.
Following more than three decades of political instability and military rule, Nigeria returned to
democracy in 1999. One of the effects of the shift to democratic rule was the proliferation of
vigilante groups in the country in response to a perceived rise in criminality. Many
communities also established such groups or endorsed them as an instrument to claim their
own share of the country’s wealth and political authority. Among the groups that most captured
attention at the time were the Bakassi boys in the east, the Oodua People Congress (hereafter
OPC) in the West and the hisba—Sharia implementation committees—in the north. All three
groups were very popular, very violent, willing to openly challenge the authority of the federal
government, and, to self-identify with their primordial ethnic or religious communities. As a
result, they attracted scholars (Adamu, 2008; Adebanwi, 2005; Baker, 2002; Harnischfeger,
2003; Human Rights Watch, 2003; Last, 2008; Meagher, 2007; Nolte, 2007, 2008; Nwankwo,
2006; Olaniyi, 2011; Smith, 2004; Ukiwo, 2002 etc.) and human rights advocates (Human
Rights Watch, 2003; Human Rights Watch (HRW/CLEEN), 2002 etc.). These ethnic militias
1
Search made on 23 September 2020
4as they have come to be known, account for the vast majority of the scholarship that has been
produced on vigilantism in Nigeria so far.
Until now, the most comprehensive effort to come to term with Nigeria vigilantism is a special
issue of Africa, the journal of the International African Institute that was published in 2008
under the supervision of the social anthropologist David Pratten. Entitled Perspectives on
Vigilantism in Nigeria, the special issue examined the history of the practice (Fourchard, 2008),
its intersection with gender (Adamu, 2008; Nolte, 2008) and social mobilization in the context
of conflict and enmity between rival groups (Higazi, 2008), its origin in or correlation with
anxiety and feeling of insecurity (Last, 2008), and its politics (Pratten, 2008a, 2008b). Still, the
issue did not manage to examine the phenomenon in all its complexity.
An important dimension they all neglected is the role that spontaneous mobs play in Nigerian
vigilantism. Indeed, despite having preceded (see Mazrui, 1976), coexisted with, and survived
many vigilante groups in the country, spontaneous and ephemeral gatherings of ordinary people
with the aim of engaging in vigilante activities—interpellation, investigations, judgement, and
punishment of alleged criminals—have never come under scholarly scrutiny 2 despite their
comparable toll on individuals and society. Consider the following extract from a motion voted
by the upper chamber of the Nigerian National Assembly:
[…] disgusted that this is not the first time in the country that mobs have
engaged in jungle justice. Some of the instances of jungle justice still fresh in
our memories are as follows
- We can never forget when four young boys, Ugonna Ubuzor, Toku Lloyd,
Chiadika Biringa, and Tekena Elkhanah, all students of the university of
Port Harcourt were lynched in 2012 after they were falsely accused of being
thieves in Aluu, a community in Port Harcourt, Rivers State.
- Sometime in October 2016, it was reported that a young man trying to steal
a flat screen TV from a football viewing centre in Uyo, Akwa Ibom State,
had his arm chopped off by an irate mob on suspicion of stealing.
- On October 19, photos of a suspected burglar tied up like bush meat
surfaced online. He was said to have been caught red-handed after breaking
into a house and trying to steal some valuables in Sokponba in Benin City,
Edo state. He was beaten blue and black, tied up like bush meat and later
handed over to the police.
- In February 2016, one Akinifesi was reported to have been beaten to death
by a mob in Ondo State for engaging in homosexuality.
2
A notable exception is Salihu and Gholami (2018) who studied the determinants of the recourse to “mob justice”
in Lagos state. They however didn’t expressly study “mob justice” as a form of vigilantism.
5further disgusted at the growing culture of extreme hate and disregard to human
life, coupled with institutional lethargy against prosecution by some State
attorneys general, with the recent case of Mrs. Bridget Agbahime, who was
killed in July 2016 by an angry mob in Kano for having a different [religious]
opinion from those of her attackers;(…) (Senate of the Federal Republic of
Nigeria, 2016, p. 915).
All the incidents mentioned in the motion were perpetrated by people who qualify as vigilantes
but who have not interested scholars of vigilantism in Nigeria. As the motion shows, the impact
of vigilantism carried out by spontaneous groupings goes beyond the individual victims who
are often “falsely accused of being thieves”, extending to state institutions and officials often
accused of “lethargy”. In addition, the motion shows that the practice occurs throughout the
country, including the North (Kano), the South (Rivers and Akwa Ibom states), and the West
(Edo and Ondo states). In fact, incidents such as those mentioned in the motion have become
so common in Nigeria that the National Assembly passed an “anti-jungle justice” bill of law
late in 2017 in an effort to combat the practice. 3 Why has this dimension of vigilantism evaded
academic study and what have been the consequences of this neglect?
This article traces the neglect of vigilantism perpetrated by spontaneous and ephemerous
gatherings to three main factors. The first factor is the little attention given to conceptual issues.
A major characteristic of the literature on vigilantism in Nigeria is that it is unclear where the
practice starts and ends. The second factor is the controversy about the real motivations of
vigilantes in Nigeria. This controversy incentivized most scholars to take a particular side in
the debate and, as a consequence, other dimensions of vigilantism were overlooked . The final
factor is that scholars who studied vigilantism in Nigeria were mostly concerned with issues
located beyond vigilantism itself, including notions of civil society and citizenship. In other
words, they studied vigilantism as a way to understand societal issues other than crime and
crime control that underlie the existence of vigilante groups. In discussing those factors, the
article will examine the consequences of the existing literature’s blindness to some dimensions
of the practice of vigilantism in Nigeria. Specifically, it will point out that the explanations
provided about the motivations of members of vigilante groups do not hold for those who join
spontaneous mobs. In addition, the article will stress that, as a result of the bias for vigilante
groups, scholars have failed to anticipate the shift of the bulk of vigilante violence and killings
from organised groups to spontaneous mobs in Nigeria. Drawing on these observations, the
3
See https://www.nassnig.org/news/item/556 consulted on 23 September 2020
6article advocates for redirecting the scholarly gaze to the criminological dimensions on
vigilantism in Nigeria, that is to study it first and foremost as a crime control technology.
1. Conceptualisation and agency in the Research on vigilantism in Nigeria
The exclusion of mobs from the research on vigilantism in Nigeria can be attributed toa lack
of conceptual clarity. A disregard for conceptual issues has allowed researchers to arbitrarily
choose objects of research while excluding others. In his introduction to the aforementioned
special volume of the journal Africa, David Pratten does not provide the reader with a def inition
of the word vigilantism. Furthermore, he does not explain why he and his colleagues decided
to focus—right from the second line of the introduction—on “vigilante groups .as popular
responses to theft and armed robbery” (Pratten, 2008a, p. 1 emphasis added) in Nigeria.
This dual omission, shared by most publications on the topic, is important to note because
spontaneous mobs have never been expressly excluded from any definition of vigilantism. For
Les Johnston , “[s]ome vigilante acts are clearly ‘one off’ events, involving isolated individuals
or larger groups in ad hoc mobilization. In contrast to this minimal level of organization, other
examples involve the relatively long-term mobilization of members for some highly organized
collective end.” (Johnston, 1996, p. 223). According to Kirsch and Grätz (2010, p. 1 emphasis
added) vigilantism is “ an ever-evolving and contested social practice that can be enacted by
different types of social agencies and that takes diverse organisational forms.” In other words,
the difference between “mobs” and “groups” as agents of vigilantism lies in their respective
levels of organization and the duration of their mobilization, and not in their nature or in the
objectives they seek to attain. In fact, by shifting the analytical lens from the participants to the
practice itself, the political scientist Eduardo Moncada (2017) was able to erase the groups-
mobs and organized-disorganized dualities that underlie earlier conceptualizations (Johnston,
1996, pp. 22–24; Sherrington, 2007, p. 7). Instead of focusing on the perpetrators—whether
they claim membership to an organization or not for example—, he focuses on the “degree to
which vigilantism is critical for an organization’s survival [which he calls] the primacy of
vigilantism.” (Moncada, 2017, p. 414 emphasis in the original). He identifies three ideal-types
of primacy levels: high, medium, and low. The ‘high primacy’ level applies to instances “where
vigilantism is both necessary and sufficient for sustaining the organization that carries it out”
(p.414). In other words, the idea of high primacy conceptualizes vigilantism as a kind of magnet
that brings people together and which loses its magnetism once the punishment is ena cted, an
accurate description of how mobs operate.
7Given that so many authors have recognised mob lynchings as an integral part of vigilantism,
how can one make sense of the tendency to ignore it in studies of vigilantism in Nigeria? I
suggest that that this tendency might stem from the propensity among social scientists to deny
participants in mobs any agency. Indeed, when vigilantism perpetrated by immediate
bystanders and witnesses of an act deemed condemnable is mentioned, it is generally to
illustrate journalistic excesses and to claim more complexity and sophistication for the social
practice in reference to relatively structured groups which scholars then move on to study (Buur
& Jensen, 2004; Pratten, 2008a). And when they study mob vigilantes, the underlying objective
is often to demonstrate that individual perpetrators lack agency.
A noteworthy example is Mark Gross’s (2016) description of (mob) vigilante violence as
governed by “forward panic” (see Collins, 2008), a process by which an emotional barrier of
“tension and fear” that prevents most confrontational situations from degenerating into
violence is suddenly overcome, allowing “emotions and actions [to]erupt forcefully” and to
overpower those that carry them (Gross, 2016, p. 243). In the sociologist’s view, the “excessive
and gratuitous violence” (p.240) so characteristic of some instances of (mob) vigilantism is due
to vigilantes finding themselves in an “emotional tunnel” that leads them through an
uncontrollable four stages process of violence escalation, namely, the “build -up of
tension/fear”, the “sudden resolution of tension in favour of one side”, the “piling on” and the
“overkill”. He conceptualizes “overkill” as “the prolonged beating or attacking even when the
conflict is over and won. It is…excessively violent or brutal attacks on defenceless individuals,
attacks far beyond what is required for victory” (p.249 Emphasis added). Elsewhere in the
article, he adds that overkill “is the process whereby people are caught up in the intense and
collective emotional atmosphere or “tunnel” of forward panic and cannot stop their
momentum” (p.256).
Gross’ article thus compares taking the law into one’s own hands to a fight or a sport which
can be won, and which should stop after the victory. That acts of lynching do not follow those
simplistic rules is interpreted as evidence that the protagonists are no longer in charge, that they
have lost control of their emotions. His framing of vigilante violence in South Africa’s
townships is deaf and dumb to the literature on retribution. While he talks quite fairly of
deterrence, he does not engage with deterrence theories, and his use of the literature on
vigilantism is limited to issues of conceptualization. Whether they were negligently or
intentionally ignored—as they would have seriously undermined his arguments—those
shortcomings make Mark Gross’s article, at best, a good description of vigilante violence,
8although one that is unnecessarily and incorrectly locked in a sequential framing—“forward
panic”; but it is not in any way a serious explanation of the phenomenon.
The limitations of Gross’ article, however, shed light on some biases against and an unease
with a form of social agency that, despite its contemporaneity, looks premodern and barbaric.
Gross’ inclination to deny vigilantes any agency recalls the French psychologist Gustave Le
bon (1960) who believed that individuals get transformed and that their su bjectivities get
drowned in and dominated by collective behaviour in mobs. Very influential in the mid
nineteen century, “[t]he myth of the madding crowd” has since been discredited by collective
behaviour scholars who mostly believe that individuals retain their identity and follow their
own objectives while participating in a mob action (see McPhail, 1991). Furthermore, (Tiwa,
Forthcoming) has cogently described the rationale behind the seemingly irrational violence of
(mob) vigilantes. Specifically, he has demonstrated how the illegality of the practice and the
related risk of prosecution, as well as the risk of retaliation by surviving offenders, influence
the form and the quantity of incapacitation that vigilantes apply.
Besides the failure to address conceptual issues surrounding vigilantism and an unease with a
form of collective action that looks premodern, another factor has also contributed to the
exclusion of spontaneous mob vigilantism in research on vigilantism in Nigeria. This factor is
the controversy about the true motivation of members of vigilante groups that mushroomed in
the country in the early 2000s. Next, I show how this controversy forced scholars to engage in
a debate over whether vigilantes in Nigeria are plain criminals or are the defenders of th eir
communities as they claimed.
2. Angels or devils? Controversy and research on vigilantism in Nigeria
While vigilantes across the world may claim that they are concerned with fighting crime that
the state has failed to address (Berg & Wendt, 2011), many of those who studied vigilantism
in Nigeria have doubted that fighting crime is what motivates the thousands of young men who
have formed vigilante groups in the country since the late 90s. This suspicion has arisen from
the fact that many vigilantes work hand in hand with and often for corrupt politicians (Baker,
2002; Harnischfeger, 2003; Nwankwo, 2006; Reno, 2005, 2005; Smith, 2004; Ukiwo, 2002),
from their tendency to fight among themselves as well as against external competitors over
lucrative turfs (Duruji, 2012; Guichaoua, 2009, 2010; Nolte, 2004, 2007, 2008), and for the
quality of their membership, often made up of thugs, hoodlums, and other dreaded individuals
that populate Nigerian cities (Gore & Pratten, 2003; Guichaoua, 2009; Nolte, 2007). The group
9that has encapsulated most of these paradoxes is the ‘Bakassi boys’which emerged in the south-
eastern region of the country in 1998.
Before it was disbanded in 2002 by the federal government following growing accusations of
serious human rights abuses, the Bakassi boys had extrajudicially killed hundreds of alleged
criminals (Baker, 2002, pp. 225–227; Harnischfeger, 2003, pp. 23–24; Human Rights Watch
(HRW/CLEEN), 2002; Meagher, 2007, pp. 93–94; Nwankwo, 2006; Smith, 2004; Ukiwo,
2002). The inhabitants of the region initially welcomed the Bakassi Boys as saviours because
of the perceived effectiveness of their methods—torture, occult practices to determine guilt,
extra judicial killings etc.—and their alleged incorruptibility which contrasted sharply with the
widespread practice of bribe-taking by policemen. In fact, the vigilante group was so popular
at first that the demand for its services quickly expanded beyond Aba, the capital city of Abia
state where it was formed spontaneously following an umpteenth attack by armed gangs at a
marketplace that left a businesswoman dead (Meagher, 2007). Neighbouring states, namely
Anambra, Ebonyi and Imo, where the level of insecurity had forced many “residents into a self-
imposed curfew after 7pm” or to seek refuge in churches at night (Baker, 2002, p. 225), invited
the Bakassi Boys to do in their cities what they had achieved in their hometown, that is, a swift
and complete elimination of armed robbers and other violent street gangs.
The problem, however, was that, besides dealing with ‘criminals’, the group’s members were
also used by local politicians to settle personal scores with their opponents. Arguably the most
politically motivated extrajudicial killing attributed to the Bakassi boys was the murder in
September 2002 of the President of the Anambra state—where the group was renamed
Anambra State Vigilante services—chapter of the Nigerian Bar Association. The prominent
lawyer happened to be very critical of both the Anambra State Governor and of the activities
of the Bakassi Boys as well as the ties between the two (Human Rights Watch (HRW/CLEEN),
2002, p. 16). In addition to politically motivated killings, the members of the group had also
been accused of preying on the local population through “levies they imposed on businesses of
every size - fees increasingly viewed as protection money”, or by intervening in disputes as
‘paid muscles’, or even worse, by kidnapping people for ransom (Smith, 2004, p. 448).
Criminal or immoral activities were not exclusive to the Bakassi boys, however.
In the southwestern part of the country, a vigilante organization has attracted attention for
similar reasons. Originally an ethnonationalist organization formed in the aftermath of a failed
transition to democracy in 1993 to defend the political interests of the Yoruba nation within
10the Nigerian federation,4 the O’odua People’s Congress (OPC) embraced vigilantism both as a
response to a crime wave, and as a strategy to secure legitimacy among the residents of the
major cities across the region (Guichaoua, 2009, p. 528). Like the Bakassi Boys in the eastern
part of the country, the OPC quickly demonstrated tangible results thanks to extra-legal lethal
violence and the use of magical practices that allegedly helped them both speed up
investigations and avoid killing innocents. The ‘successes’ of the OPC in the fight against crime
contrasted with the police’s perceived failure in this domain. A legend of the group claimed
that, whereas the police had deserted entire neighbourhoods in some cities because of the
superior firing power of criminals, OPC members, more courageous and supernaturally
powered, raided those “no-go areas” and either killed the criminals inhabiting them, or forced
them to flee to neighbouring cities and states (see Guichaoua, 2009, p. 528; Nolte, 2004, 2007,
2008). Perhaps, the best evidence of the ‘successes’ of the OPC in its vigilan te activities is the
fact that the organization has managed to remain, to date, one of the major providers of security
to individuals, small businesses and to marginalized communities in southwestern Nigeria.
However, the vigilante group has also been accused of using criminal violence against non-
indigenous groups—the Ijaw, Igbo, Hausa Fulani etc.—generally to take over lucrative turfs
such as market places or rent-friendly activities such as the Dockers Union (Guichaoua, 2009,
pp. 530–531; Human Rights Watch, 2003). In addition, OPC members have also been accused
of organizing a “protection racket” (Guichaoua, 2009, p. 529) and OPC members were very
hard to distinguish from plain criminals. Many of them were believed to be “street gangs and
ex-areas boys” (Adebanwi, 2005, p. 348; also see Guichaoua, 2009, p. 527), that is the same
individuals that many Nigerians believe are criminals. This tendency to enlist disenfranchised
youth and criminal minded individuals has been reported among many other vigilante
organizations across Nigeria (For Benin city for example, see Gore & Pratten, 200 3, p. 226),
raising the question of the real motivations of these groups’ members. In fact, this question
appears to have dominated debates about vigilantism in Nigeria.
Indeed, the increasingly apparent involvement of young vigilantes in ordinary economic crimes
as well as in politically motivated criminal activities led to opposing arguments among scholars
who disagreed on how to understand these trends. Three main theories emerged from those
4
On 12 June 1993, a presidential election supposed to return power to civilians after decades of military rule took
place in Nigeria. Although it was adjudged free and fair by many who also believed the Yoruba candidate, chief
Abiola, had won, the election was annulled a few days later by the sitting head of state, general Babangida. The
Yorubas saw the move as another evidence that the northerners who controlled the government at the time would
never allow one of them to rule the country.
11debates. The first theory believes that what motivates most young men to become vigilantes
are the economic and political benefits they anticipate. In other words, increasing vulnerability
to crime and widespread feelings of insecurity which followed the retreat of the Nigerian state
from security provision created opportunities countrywide for disenfranchised youth with
nothing to lose and with competency in violence to force “their way into the social system from
which they are excluded” (Reno, 2002, p. 839).
According to the political scientist William Reno (2002, 2005), the leading proponent of the
self-interested opportunists thesis, the criminal mindedness of vigilante organizations in
Nigeria must be read in the context of the overall failure of reformist insurgencies in failed
states. He attributes this failure to patronage politics through which most such countries are
ruled as a way for their rulers to control people by monopolizing economic opportunities (Reno,
2002, p. 837). His major claim is that when the system of patronage politics collapses at the
centre, and is being challenged by progressive mass movements, including grassroots mass
initiatives for the provision of security, local political entrepreneurs seeking to maintain their
hold on local commercial opportunities mobilized their criminal allies and supported them with
weapons and protection against rivals thereby enhancing “the orga nizational position of
members who pursue individual economic interests” while undermining that of those “with
more overt ideological agendas” (p.837). The result of these developments is the dominance of
what he calls “economic insurgents”:
In this context [of collapsing patronage networks], the best skills to have as a leader are a
willingness to use exemplary violence… and a preference for supporters who are also primarily
motivated by economic gain. Thus, the most typical supporters are young men (and s ome
young women) who use violence and disorder to enrich themselves. They are the most vigorous
segments of most societies…Many conclude that possessing a gun and the support of a local
strongman offer them the best chance to remedy their difficulties. Eco nomic interest is thus
joined to the political, since personal gain is compatible with settling scores and acting against
local injustices (Reno, 2002, p. 854)
The second theoretical account has taken the opposite direction. While recognizing that
vigilante members have gotten involved in criminal activities, this outcome has been attributed
not to their initial criminal mindedness, but to their vulnerability to local authorities who,
foreseeing the political gains they could make from the popularity of tho se groups, successfully
‘hijacked’ them. In other words, while Reno’s account of the emergence of vigilantism in
12Nigeria claims that bandits and other miscreants formed security provision organizations to
enrich themselves, this second school of thought argues that vigilantes were originally
concerned citizens appalled by the levels of crime in their communities.
The leading defendant of this line of thought is the British sociologist Kate Meagher. In an
article she published in 2007 entitled “Hijacking civil society: the inside story of the Bakassi
Boys vigilante group of South-eastern Nigeria”, the product of months of ethnographic research
in the city Aba where the group was founded in 1998, she pleads in favour of the ‘boys’. In her
view, they were all but “collections of thugs and marginalized youth struggling for their share
of patronage and preying on the communities they claim to protect.” (Meagher, 2007, p. 92).
Rather, they were “informal shoe producers concerned with basic security” (p.111) and who
“took up their matchets…and declared war on criminality…for several weeks, in the course of
which the vigilante group took shape.” (p.97) and whose popularity “lay in their demonstrations
of honesty…accountability and lack of corruption” (Meagher, 2007, p.99; also see Nwankwo,
2005, p.103). Regarding accusations of human rights violations, especially the use of gruesome
and lethal violence by the Bakassi boys, she believes it was instrumental to resist “bribes and
political pressure”, to restore security and that for “local people… in the context of rampant
armed robbery and police corruption, it was better than the alternatives” (p.100). In other
words, both the Bakassi Boys and their supporters saw the recourse to violence as a necessary
counterforce (Baker, 2002, p. 242).
However, the achievements of the Bakassi proved to be their undoing as their growing
popularity attracted the attention of local politicians—state governors—long deprived of the
right to have their own police by the constitution. They saw in the Bakassi Boys the long-
awaited opportunity to establish a balance of power vis-à-vis the federal government’s
countrywide control of the police and “set in motion a process of political hijack” (Meagher,
2007, p.100) that the sociologist traces meticulously through a series of events that took place
simultaneously in many states across the region. One such event was an internal dispute among
the Bakassi Boys in July 1999 following which, “[t]he vigilante group…came under the control
of the Abia State government, …were renamed the ‘Abia State Vigilante Service’, moved to a
new office…and placed under the control of a committee chaired by a state appointee… The
state government provided the group with a fleet of cars and buses, placed the vigilantes on the
state payroll, and supplied the chairman of the Bakassi Boys with a Mercedes Benz…Activities
were expanded, and new recruits [black legs] brought in under the new leadership. ” (p.103)
13Ultimately, Kate Meagher argues, the involvement of local politicians in the activities of the
group, resulted in the loss of popular control over the organization which then became
increasingly bound up with thuggery, extortion and political killings, a situation which
contrasted with the fact that there was almost “no reports of unjustified killings during the first
fifteen months of Bakassi’s operation” (p.98). In short, unlike William Reno who saw
vigilantes as vandals, Kate Meagher saw them as vanguards.
This Manichean view that tries to discriminate among the ‘good’ and the ‘bad’ vigilantes has
been criticized as normative and artificial by the proponents of what can be termed a third
perspective on Nigerian vigilantes (Pratten, 2008a, p. 6). This perspective emphasizes the
situated practices and moral imperatives that drive young men to engage in vigilantism. Its
leading representative is the social anthropologist David Pratten. In the abundant scholarship
he produced over a decade about vigilantism in Nigeria and elsewhere (Gore & Pratten, 2003;
David Pratten in Kirsch and Grätz (eds) 2010, pp. 118–138; Pratten, 2008b, 2008a; Pratten &
Sen, 2008) he has sought to “understand the [local] imperative to protect and punish” (Pratten,
2008a, p. 4) through a historically-informed analysis of indigenous cultures and the avoidance
of artificial oppositions—such as state versus society, law versus disorder, genuine versus non
genuine civil initiatives or legitimate versus illegitimate violence—on which he believes
“vigilantes are ambiguously sited” (p.11). He argues that vigilantism in Nigeria is “the
articulation of claims to a set of rights based on the historical and spiritual legitimacy of young
powerful men, ‘sons of the soil’, defending the community under the protection of local
religious injunction and protection” (Pratten, 2008b, p. 65 emphasis in original). In other
words, while they use vigilantism to make demands on society and on the state, young men in
Nigeria are also morally compelled by history and traditions to stand up for their “temporal and
spatial communities in which [they] are vested with the rights to exercise justice” (p.68), even
violently. The conflation of vigilantism with traditional institutions such as secret societies,
charms, traditional medicines and oaths that dominates David Pratten’s scholarship about
Nigeria (see Gore & Pratten, 2003) has been criticized for othering the civil initiatives of these
communities as a reversion to the past (Meagher, 2007; also see Adebanwi, 2005).
As it should be obvious by now, the unique features of Nigerian vigilantism have required
scholars to spend a great amount of time and effort trying to understand the real motivations
of vigilante members. Virtually all publications about vigilantism in Nigeria contribute to one
or many of the above theses which led to other dimensions of the problem being overlooked,
especially the role of spontaneous mobs. A question one might want to ask is why it was so
14important to scholars to identify the drivers of youth enrolment in vigilantes groups. In other
words, what drives them to engage in and to sustain the debate on the real motivation of
vigilantes in Nigeria? I argue that vigilantism in Nigeria provided scholars with the opportunity
to test various hypothesis about civil society, citizenship, and democracy in Africa . In other
words, research on vigilantism has typically been driven by concerns located beyond
vigilantism itself and understanding how vigilantes justify their existence as a form of crime
control was not what attracted scholars towards the phenomenon.
3. Vigilantism in Nigeria: dependent or independent variable?
Both the self-interestedness model of vigilante motivations and the hijacking thesis were
formulated with issues broader than crime fighting and Nigeria in mind. The former was
elaborated at a time when many countries in Africa—Algeria, Burundi, Republic of Congo,
Democratic Republic of Congo, Angola, Liberia, Somalia, Sierra Leone, Sudan, Nigeria etc.—
were either undergoing, were at risk of, or had just come out of civil wars or rebellions. Many
of those conflicts, far from the more ideologically-driven liberation wars of the cold war period,
had been dominated by economic interests in the form of ‘looting’, ‘banditry’, ‘greedy
warlords’, ‘diamond trafficking’, ‘well-heeled arms traffickers’ (Reno, 2002, 2005). In
addition, many other countries across the continent had shown signs of collapsing or decaying
state institutions for over a decade, a situation which, in the view of many observers, should
have awakened revolutionary impulses among those populations. This was, however, not the
case and, as a conflict scholar, Williams Reno wanted to understand why. Vigilante groups in
Nigeria—specifically the OPC and the Bakassi Boys—, also called ethnic militias because of
their agitations for the autonomy or independence of their ethnic communities, gave him the
opportunity to study why such groups, despite their ample capabilities, failed to transform into
revolutionary mass movements. As I have mentioned earlier, his conclusion is that
disenfranchised and daredevil-like youth ally with local patrons to—criminally—better
themselves to the overall detriment of the wider population. For this reason, he expressly
disqualified vigilantism in Nigeria as a civil initiative (Reno, 2002, p. 839) because they “bear
little resemblance to ‘civil society’ in its liberal ideal” (Reno, 2005, p. 129 emphasis in the
original).
Kate Meagher on the contrary, was unsettled by the transformation of discourses about
“African civil society” caused by the eruption and “proliferation of brutal militias” on the
continent (Meagher, 2007, p. 90). In her view, “unrestrained enthusiasm” for its social,
15economic, and political transformative potential had been replaced by pessimism and
“disappointment” (p.90). Her objective therefore was the reversion of this seemingly miserable
fate of civil society on the continent (also see Nwankwo, 2006). Accordingly, she argued that
the issue is not the uncivil character of the civil initiatives in Africa (Fatton, 1995; also see
Ikelegbe, 2001) but the lack of institutional protection for “the case of the Bakassi Boys
demonstrates…remarkable resilience [for three years] in the face of neglect and abuse by elite
forces and international policy agendas” (Meagher, 2007, p. 112). She subsequently warned
commentators against the risks of blaming “African social institutions for the failures of neo-
liberal reforms and weak states.” (idem) and invited commentators to renew efforts to identify
“genuine civil impulses in the fluid and fractious institutional environment of contemporary
Africa” (Meagher, 2007, p. 111 emphasis added).
Scholarly interest in those issues had at least one major implication and one important
consequence. The implication was scholars needed clearly identifiable research participants
whose agency they could easily scrutinize and compare with those found elsewhere, a
requirement that disqualifies participants in mob vigilantism. Indeed, although methodological
challenges associated with the study of spontaneous mobs—e.g. there is no way to know where
and when a lynching would occur—might explain their absence in studies of vigilantism in
Nigeria, it can also be argued that a concern for a ‘liberal ideal’ of African civil societies among
scholars has meant that only ‘autonomous’ groups—and not ‘formless’ mobs—were worth
their attention (Meagher, 2007; Reno, 2002, 2005).
The major consequence of the focus on vigilante groups is that scholars have missed the extent
to which the bulk of vigilante violence in Nigeria has shifted, over the last years, from vigilante
groups and ethnic militias to mobs. While it is difficult to trace precisely when this shift
occurred, it is possible to link it to the dual strategy of repression -incorporation by the state
against organized vigilante groups. With their members persecuted, imprisoned, or killed by
the police, and the groups disbanded, as was the case of both the Bakassi Boys and the OPC,
vigilante groups have had no other choice than to become the informal substitutes of the police.
In practice, this has meant that each local Divisional Police Officer in the country knows
exactly which group is active in each street or neighbourhood of his division and its leader.
While this outcome certainly delighted the academic community, many of whom have
advocated for “domesticating vigilantism in Africa” (Kirsch & Grätz, 2010), it has also resu lted
in tremendous powerlessness for many vigilante groups that now have to follow the same tight
rules—e.g. assumption of innocence, burden of the proof, right to a fair trial, proportionality
16of the punishment etc.—that they used to subvert, a crucial reason for their ‘successes’ and
popularity in the late 90s and early 2000s.
The consequence of this outcome, however, has been that ‘ordinary’ people, claiming
allegiance to no groups, have become the leading perpetrators of vigilante violence across
Nigeria. In the process, they often confront not only the police but also their “substitutes” in
communities, that is vigilante group members tasked with day-to-day policing. 5 These
developments have not been anticipated by the academic community, perhaps becau se most
scholars were more interested in issues located beyond crime and crime control than
vigilantism itself. It is only by redirecting our attention to the criminological dimensions of
vigilantism, that is, to vigilantism as a crime control mechanism, that we can truly understand
its dynamics and perhaps anticipate its next move. Relocating the gaze is even more important
because none of the explanations provided for the motivations of organized vigilantes can
actually help us understand what drives people to join spontaneous mobs.
Consider the youth looting-model. It holds that the involvement of disenfranchised young men
in vigilante organizations across Nigeria is an attempt by these men to better their social,
economic, and political lot, including through criminality (Reno, 2002, 2005). This explanation
cannot account for people’s—young or otherwise—involvement in “jungle justice” insofar as
participation in such collective activities does not seem to produce any social, economic, or
political betterment for the participants. Put differently, while young men who form vigilante
organizations across Nigeria might be motivated by the money that people pay for their
security, the same argument cannot apply to those who perpetrate ‘jungle justice’ because there
is no money involved: not only are they not paid by anybody, they also do not seek
remuneration from anyone. Similarly, it is difficult to argue that they are seeking political
‘advantages’ in the form of increased influence in their communities becau se as both a mob
action and a semi clandestine activity whose authorship no individual can —nor is willing—to
claim, it is difficult to see how it can possibly bring any political dividends to the perpetrators
who, in theory, meet and work together only once (Moncada, 2017).
5
On 16 March 2018, I happened to be in the office of a senior police officer in charge of homicide investigations
when his junior colleague brought in a group of individuals implicated in a case of mob killing. The incident had
happened on 27 February 2018 at about 9:30pm in Ikorodu, a town in the outskirts of th e city of Lagos. A
commercial bike driver had been fatally stabbed by armed robbers who attempted to rob him of his motorbike;
sometime later, a man was apprehended with blood on his clothes by a member of a local vigilante group. Once
informed, bike drivers stormed the vigilante post and beat the suspected criminal to death. In the process, they
also beat the vigilantes present because they sought to prevent them from killing the suspect. A vigilante, however,
managed to arrest one of those he claimed had beaten him.
17The second theory argues that vigilantes in Nigeria should be seen as concerned citizens pushed
to the brink by criminal victimization and who have decided to combat it for the good of all
and despite an unfavourable institutional environment (Meagher, 2007). While Meagher’s
explanation seems more equipped—compare to the youth looting model—to account for young
men’s participation in jungle justice as they can indeed be described as concerned citizens’, I
want to suggest that it is not enough either. A closer look at the identity of vigilantes exposes
the limits of her argument. Indeed, from her explanatory model, one should expect that those
in the frontline of criminal victimization lead the revolt against criminals. This, however, has
never been the case as vigilantes are typically recruited among the most impoverished segments
of Nigerian society—jobless youth and unemployed young adults. There is no reason why they
should be more concerned than other sections of the society because the y cannot be the main
targets of criminals given that they have very little property. This is not to say, however, that
the very little that they have cannot be stolen. What I am suggesting is that because they are
marginal crime targets, according to Meagher’s model, they should not be leading the fight
against criminals. The second problem with Meagher’s model is that it ignores to the fact that
most vigilantes—if not all of them—across the country are men and that this fact requires an
explanation of its own. Again, these shortcomings can be attributed to Kate Meagher’s interests
in the mechanisms through which ordinary people’s civil initiatives are hijacked by corrupt
politicians. This has arguably led her to develop tunnel vision (Lund, 2006, p. 678) and to lose
sight of the composite identity—they are at the same time men, poor and young—of the actors
through which vigilantism itself takes shape, spreads, and is normalized.
The final perspective on vigilante motivations in Nigeria holds that young men in Nigeria use
vigilantism to make demands on society and on the state—to address their predicaments—but
are also compelled and legitimated by traditions to use violence to defend their communities
against criminal threats (Gore & Pratten, 2003; Pratten, 2008a, 2008b). In other words, they
are at the same time opportunists and citizens committed to fulfilling their traditional
obligations vis-à-vis their communities. The limits of the ‘opportunist youth’ model has been
discussed above but the role of moral imperatives is also limited when it comes to explaining
mob lynching. For example, David Pratten’s claim that historically constructed moral
communities are defended by groups of powerful young men modelled after precolonial secret
societies (Pratten, 2008b) does not apply to most cities in Nigeria which are cosmopolitan in
nature, many of them hosting populations not just from neighbouring cities and tribes but also
from neighbouring countries. In fact, most of the evidence to support his claims comes from
18ethnographic journeys among the Annang, a tiny and remote rural community in the equally
small and remote south-eastern state of Akwa Ibom.
Conclusion
This paper has argued that although the existing literature has shed considerable light on the
practice of vigilantism in Nigeria, it has also obscured entire dimensions of the problem,
including the increasingly important role of spontaneous mobs. The paper showed that
scholars’ neglect of this dimension was caused by many factors including the failure to engage
with conceptual issues and the tendency to deny mobs agency, the focus on the controversy
surrounding the real motivations of vigilantes and scholars’ interests in issues located beyond
vigilantism itself. The most important consequences of these biases that the paper has
highlighted are the failure to anticipate the shift of the bulk of vigilante violence from so-called
ethnic militias to spontaneous mobs; and the inability of existing theories of vigilantism in
Nigeria to help understand this new situation. Based on these remarks, the paper argued for
redirecting the attention to the criminological dimension of vigilantism in Nigeria, that is to
how perpetrators and supporters assume the practice help fight crime which justify its
existence. Such an epistemological shift might help scholars come to term with the dynamics
of vigilantism and perhaps also helps them anticipate its next moves.
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À PROPOS DU AFRICAN CENTRE FOR CRIME AND SECURITY STUDIES
Le African Centre for Crime and Security Studies est une think tank indépendant créée par de
jeunes chercheurs africains et afro-descendants sous la houlette du Dr. Dany Franck A. Tiwa.
ACCSS Africa finance ses activités grâces aux cotisations de ses membres et aux grants
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