When our choices begin to dictate our actions, and condonation masquerades as justice, we slip quietly into what can only be called jungle justice.
A viral video now making the rounds shows an attack on a Tinubu supporter in Delta. Mr. Tempo Mudi, described as a Protocol Officer to the Delta State Governor, was set upon by some youths while campaigning for President Tinubu’s re-election at the Petroleum Training Institute Conference Centre in Effurun. The clip spread not because Nigerians needed information, but because outrage travels faster than context. It spreads because some people have learned that fear is a currency. Instill withdrawal, paranoia, and the illusion that liberty can be revoked by a crowd, and you do not need a courtroom to govern. You only need a mob.
What we are witnessing is less a protest and more a contest for supremacy. State actors and non-state actors are both reaching for the same weapon: coercion. Each wants their version of truth to stand as absolute, and each is willing to use self-help to enforce it.
Political theorists from Hobbes to Weber warned us about this exact drift. Hobbes called it the state of nature, where life becomes nasty and short once the monopoly of violence fractures. Max Weber reminded us that the state is legitimate precisely because it claims that monopoly. When citizens and officials alike abandon that boundary, we do not get more democracy. We get a marketplace of intimidation where physical strength, ridicule, and bullying are sold as patriotism. Sociologist Charles Tilly once observed that politics is organized crime with better branding. In Nigeria today, the branding is slipping.
The irony is brutal. Many of the same voices who demand free speech, fair hearing, and due process, who accuse leaders of capturing the National Assembly, the judiciary, INEC, and the security agencies, are quick to pick up the same tools of strongman rule the moment they feel strongest. They become accuser, prosecutor, and judge in one breath.
The problem is not simply that a Tinubu supporter was attacked. The problem is that we have normalized a logic where popularity becomes evidence and sentiment becomes sentence. Research on vigilantism across Africa by scholars like Daniel Smith and Lars Buur shows a consistent pattern: when people lose faith in institutions, they do not abandon justice. They privatize it. And privatized justice is always cruel, because it answers to no appeal.
Consider the condemnation that followed. Even ADC presidential aspirant Atiku Abubakar rightly denounced the Delta attack. Yet condemnation alone cannot cauterize the deeper wound, which is the chaos that convinces ordinary people to act as courts. If we enshrine this standard, how do we then protect an Atiku supporter in a place where he does not command popular sentiment? How do we protect a Peter Obi supporter where the crowd has decided otherwise? The rule cuts both ways. And at the center, the APC controls the police and security architecture. If state actors choose to mirror the same logic of force that citizens use on the streets, the result will not be order. It will be escalation.
Jungle justice is never honorable, whether it comes from the street or from the state. It is the same impulse in different uniforms. The tragedy is that many groups have come to believe they benefit from an atmosphere of anxiety, paranoia, and subjugation. Political scientist Jean-Paul Azam’s work on conflict economies explains why: chaos creates opportunities for extraction. When institutions are weak, violence becomes a shortcut to relevance. And so a norm is inherited. Citizens learn it from leaders who bypass procedure. Leaders learn it from citizens who bypass the law. Each teaches the other how to win without rules.
Three days ago in Jos, that lesson turned fatal. The Cable reported on July 29, 2026 that Ibrahim Mabaye, a 25-year-old political science student and model at the University of Jos, was tortured to death around Ring Road in Jos North over an alleged stolen iPhone 12. Two of four suspects told police they beat him with planks and canes after tying him with ropes. Emmanuel Newyear said he hit Mabaye three times because he wanted the phone’s location. Teslor Joshua said he only held the legs. The owner of the phone, Rinji Daniel, said Mabaye had slept in his room after an event and disappeared by 4am. By the time colleagues rushed him to JUTH, he was gone. Social media erupted, but outrage did not resurrect him.
Weeks earlier, a schoolteacher, Maryam Usman, was attacked in Kogi for disciplining a child. In Kaduna state, a woman was burned to death on suspicion of child theft. These are not isolated outbursts. Criminologists call this “expressive violence,” where punishment is performed publicly to reassert community control. It feels like justice to the crowd, but as legal scholar Jeremy Waldron argues, it strips individuals of the dignity of being judged by law rather than by rumor.
And the state is not innocent. On July 30, 2026, Platinum Post reported that a House of Representatives Ad Hoc Committee probing the Presidential Foreign Investment Promotion Council found that the signature on Adeniyi Adeyemi’s appointment letter as DG did not match nine other correspondences from the Office of the Chief of Staff. Hon. Yusuf Adamu Gagdi told the hearing, attended by Head of Service Didi Esther Walson-Jack, that only that letter looked different. Adeyemi was arrested on July 14 by the Police IRT in Osun. The Accountant-General, Shamseldeen Ogunjimi, testified that a response letter was intercepted before it reached the State House. Meanwhile, a viral video quoted President Bola Ahmed Tinubu expressing absolute confidence in Chief of Staff Femi Gbajabiamila and urging critics to stop the “campaign of calumny,” even as a committee investigates. If the head has already delivered the verdict, what room is left for the report? If that is not state condonation mirroring jungle justice, what is it?
Even in Kano, the private and the public collapse into each other. A Kano High Court sentenced Saudat Jibril to death by hanging for allegedly killing her husband nine days after their wedding in Farawa. The prosecution called three witnesses; the defense called only her. Justice Maryam Sabo found the evidence sufficient. In another case, police arrested 25-year-old Maimunatu Idris for allegedly attempting to sever her boyfriend’s genitals at Durbar Hotel after learning he planned to marry another woman. The law moved here, slowly, formally. But the public imagination had already tried and sentenced both women long before the gavel fell.
All of this points to one uncomfortable truth. When we allow choice to dictate action without law, we do not get freedom. We get fear dressed as freedom. We do not get accountability. We get performance. The social contract frays not with a bang, but with a thousand small permissions: a slap here, a forged signature there, a viral video that decides guilt before trial. Political theorist Achille Mbembe describes this as “necropolitics,” the power to decide who may live and who must die in public view. That power is no longer reserved for the state. It has been democratized, and that is precisely the danger.
This is how our choices dictate our actions. This is how condonation becomes indistinguishable from jungle justice. And until we return the authority to judge to institutions bound by evidence, appeal, and time, any of us can become the next suspect, the next video, the next name read out in a press statement.
Bagudu can be reached via bagudumohammed15197@gmail.com or 07034943575.
