It was a sordid drama in two parts. Firstly, there was the November 1 arraignment in court, where about 119 youths, including some 29 minors, were charged with treason and nine other offences. They looked gaunt and malnourished, and as if choreographed, a few of them collapsed in court, perhaps due to exhaustion and hunger. The collapse and their famished looks gripped the attention of the media and the world, which slammed the notoriety of the Nigerian government for mistreating little children. That is the sad declension Nigeria has been confined under the All Progressives Congress (APC) administration, wrote many media and legal analysts feigning horror and anguish.
The second act was even more outlandish. Having been released to go and sin no more, all the charged protesters were bathed, spruced up, and presented before the high and mighty in the State House auditorium in Abuja just days later. Rather than run the gauntlet as their offences richly deserved, they were met with a guard of honour, passed between rows of dignitaries, some of them governors, others principal officers of the National Assembly, all brimming with smiles, surprisingly shaking the hands of the freed protesters, and in one or two cases, even engaging in backslapping. Of course, nearly all of them were subsequently released to their governors who would go on to contend with identifying or locating their guardians.
In both Acts I and II, the estimated N300bn damage wreaked by the released protesters and others not arrested during the August 1-10 protests was easily forgotten. The victims of the violence, including shop owners and government offices, will take time to recover or heal. But in the meantime, the protesters not only received pardon, they were treated with tenderness through what the country’s chief law officer Lateef Fagbemi and Vice President Kashim Shettima described as the magnanimity of the fatherly and grandfatherly President Bola Tinubu. Some analysts compound the public’s misery by threatening to sue the government if some of the protesters, particularly the minors, were not rehabilitated. They cite constitutional corollaries to underpin their threats.
Two observations flow from the absurd theatre that played out over the arraignment and discharge of the 119. One, unlike countries serious about law and order as well as public safety and the image of their countries, it took about 90 days to decide to charge the youthful offenders. That tardiness is not unusual. It takes far disturbingly longer in other circumstances to charge and prosecute other offenders, given the ponderousness and gross inefficiencies of the Nigerian justice system. In comparison, the charging of the August 1 protesters was almost a record. Indeed, had the youths been charged expeditiously, most of them would by now be doing penance for their crimes, the adults among them in correctional centres, and the now celebrated minors in welfare or borstal homes. Instead, the court incident and the surrounding drama needlessly became a cause célèbre.
Two, it took the judgemental fury of Nigeria’s undiscriminating social and traditional media to magnify the ghoulish appearance of the minors as if only the 30 or so minors were involved in the sordid story. The federal government may have panicked and released everyone involved, but the problem began with the tardiness of the investigators, prosecutors, police officials, and the Internal Affairs ministry all of whom had a role to play in feeding and looking after the detainees, particularly the minors. The Nigerian justice system is notorious for mistreating suspects, many of whom are wrongly detained and treated as convicts, while congestion and underfunding have complicated and slowed the administration of justice. That these youthful protesters were released does not imply that the underlying anomalies that fed the uproar over the minors will be looked into and corrected. The hysteria has come and gone, and the federal government has rid itself of the curious gaze of the global public, its primary concern. The suspects were arrested from Abuja, Gombe, Kaduna and Kano, among others; would the right political and legal lessons be learnt all over?
By approaching the case of the 119 protesters so shambolically, if not offensively and amateurishly, the government and the rest of the country must brace up for the inescapable consequences. As a matter of fact, since religious riots began to pockmark the region, some northern governments have for decades been consistently loth to prosecute rioters and violent protesters. The police would arrest offenders, but the state governments would show little interest in prosecuting them, until they were released. That culture of dangerous permissiveness, compounded by poverty, has permeated the region and predisposed it to the massive insecurity wracking the North today. Kano governor Abba Kabir Yusuf told reporters in Abuja last Tuesday he was not even aware of the arraignment of the minors. Kaduna governor Uba Sani seemed pained by the whole affair, probably musing over the implication of letting off suspects without even the customary and ineffectual slap on the wrist. After pondering the massive damage done by the protesters in the state, Borno has proceeded deliberately to charge some of the protesters. At least for now the state gives no indication it would brook nonsense or pull its punches. Hopefully, it will stand its ground and prosecute the suspects as well as jail those found guilty without any consideration for Abuja’s lily-livered approach to law and order.
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Apart from exposing itself to more instability and social chaos by its indulgent approach to lawbreakers, the North, which is now believed to be in the throes of another jihadist group, the Lakurawa, could very well be the undoing of Nigeria if it continues its decades of poor attention to socio-economic development of the region. Northern governors have met repeatedly over the crises inundating their region, but it is not clear how appropriate their diagnoses and remedies have been, not to talk of whether they can muster the political will to apply the law and put their money where their mouths are. In releasing the protesting youths and minors unconditionally, the federal government has not helped the North by failing to force the region to hold itself accountable for its inaction, inequities and a sad history of ethnic and religious discrimination alien to the regions foundational politics under Ahmadu Bello.
The Nigerian media may have overdramatised the case of the famished minors charged in court on November 1, and the government may have set up inquiries to find out what went wrong and what should be done to remedy the problem, but until there is a conscious effort to reform the entire gamut of the justice system and diligently apply ACJA, the judicial and political mishap enacted early November to the embarrassment of all Nigerians as well as the challenge to law and order would persist. It is possible that the protesting youths and minors knew little about the implications of calling for a military overthrow of Nigeria’s elected government, or flattering Russia by asking them to be involved in Nigerian affairs, or even being nothing more than ignorant and dispensable tools in the hands of powerful interests, but nothing suggests in Nigerian laws that they cannot or should not be held accountable.
The federal government should have retrained itself from intervening in the case at the trial level. It could intervene to get the children, and indeed all suspects, treated with dignity, to be well fed and looked after, but to arrest the trial as it has done by withdrawing charges against them midway will be an incentive to mount constant challenge to law and order. If after the trial had been summarily concluded the government pardoned the prisoners or reduce their sentences, that would have been less disruptive to the justice system. But to discharge the defendants imperatively does not inspire the rest of the country to obey the law. As far as Nigerian laws are concerned, there are ways to deal with adults, and there are also ways to handle minors. The government should let the law take its course first before rushing in to placate an indignant public.
