In a village far away, there lived a young boy who had a name, but the crowd decided to give him another.
He could have been a stranger passing through the market, a boy from the next compound, or even the neighbour whose face had become familiar enough to escape suspicion. But once a woman cried that her purse was missing, the village that has been looking for a need to release pent-up anger don’t care about anything else. The verdict before a hearing; the punishment before a trial. They would gather around him. Some would ask questions; others would supply the answers. Some would demand that he confess; others would punish him for refusing to. If he is fortunate enough, his punishment ends with bruises and shame. If fortune deserts him, the crowd become judge, jury and executioner. And when the deed is done, the village would return home with the comforting feeling that justice had been served. The accused is no longer merely beaten. He is stripped of dignity, paraded before an audience, ordered to dance, made to perform ridiculous acts, slapped, kicked, and humiliated while cameras remain fixed at angles. The video is then circulated until the punishment becomes entertainment and the humiliation becomes content.
There is a not-so-obvious evolution of jungle justice in Nigeria; the instruments may have changed, the medium of propagation may have been digitized but the fundamental idea remains disturbingly familiar, that accusation is enough to make a person deserving of punishment and humiliation, both not bound by the law. Long before jungle justice became part of our vocabulary, communities had their own mechanisms for dealing with wrongdoings. Historical accounts of mob justice in Africa show that extra-judicial punishment existed in pre-colonial societies, although the forms and circumstances varied considerably between communities. The emergence of formal colonial justice systems was expected to replace such practices with institutions, procedure and due process. Yet, old habits die hard.
Instead, they adapted.
By the late 1990s and early 2000s, the emergence of groups such as the Bakassi Boys demonstrated how distrust in formal law enforcement could produce parallel systems of punishment. Created amid valid security concerns and the perceived inability of the police to maintain order in parts of southeastern Nigeria, the group became a notorious example of how the desire for security can gradually morph into a self-appointing role for the execution of extra-judicial violence. The tragedy is that the instinct has remained existent even as technology has advanced. The rope, tyre, stick and bare fist have found companions in the cameras of our million-worth devices. The village square has become the roadside, the hostel corridor, the marketplace and, increasingly, the internet. The crowd no longer needs to care about how justice should be served; they now have humiliating videos to serenade themselves with. And perhaps that is what should frighten us most. Because when a suspected thief is made to dance before being handed over to security, and humiliation is recorded for amusement, we must ask ourselves; at what point did the punishment become more important to us than the justice we claimed to seek? In present day Nigeria, the average suspect is made to move to rhythms, ordered to perform some theatrics, albeit undignifying while someone narrates from behind the camera.
The average mob consists of a majority that joined the scene post-apprehension and a minority that supposedly have substantial claim to nail the act on the suspect. The word ‘alleged’ seems to be non-existent and there can be no more sobering reminder of what that word means than the recent death of Ibrahim Mbaya.
In July 2026, Mbaye, a 25-year-old man in Jos, was reportedly accused of stealing a smartphone. What followed was not a police investigation, a search, a trial or an opportunity to establish guilt. According to the Plateau State Police Command, he was assaulted by a group of people who had accused him of stealing an iPhone 12. He was eventually taken unconscious to hospital, where he was confirmed dead. Three suspects were subsequently arrested, while police investigations continued. The details are chilling. The police said preliminary investigations indicated that the suspects had accused Mbaye of stealing the phone and, rather than reporting the matter to law enforcement, allegedly took the law into their own hands. One of the suspects was reportedly captured in a viral video striking Mbaye with a large wooden plank. And here lies the most devastating irony: the phone was reportedly never recovered from him. A life was lost over an allegation. A family was left to mourn over it. This is the danger of a mentality that confuses suspicion with certainty and not just that, but violently acting on that suspicion to the point of extremes such as loss of life.
In the University of Ibadan…
It would be convenient to believe that this is a problem of the motor parks, the markets, and the crowded streets of Nigeria; that jungle justice belongs to places where the institutions of justice are distant and the mob is the only authority within reach. But the University of Ibadan is not insulated from the instincts of the street. In fairness, the institution is a microcosm of the larger society beyond its walls.. Its halls have their communities, their rules, their systems of security and, sometimes, their systems of punishment. Run after a suspected thief and, in minutes, you have cameras out to record the humiliation that’s about to start.
Independence Hall has seen this script play out repeatedly.
In December 2025, an alleged non-resident clothes thief was apprehended in Independence Hall. The incident, reported by IndyPress, described the suspect being caught after allegedly taking clothes belonging to residents. By April 2026, another report emerged of yet another alleged clothes theft involving a non-resident suspect. The recurrence was itself telling; the anxiety over theft within the halls was, and still is, valid.
Reports of theft incidents in the halls have repeatedly described suspects being subjected to physical punishment by students while they await the arrival of security personnel. The authorities are eventually called; the suspect is eventually handed over. But between the moment of apprehension and the arrival of those whose duty it is to handle the situation, there is often an uncomfortable interval in which the crowd assumes a power it was never given. The difference between what happened to Ibrahim Mbaye in Jos and what could happen in a hall of residence in Ibadan is not the mentality behind it; it is only an outcome that, so far, this University has been fortunate enough to avoid.
At Mellanby Hall, a 2025 report similarly documented a student caught over a laptop theft. Again, the subject is not to debate the wrongfulness of theft; It simply is wrong. We have only appointed ourselves judges, juries, and executioners on cases. This is not peculiar to Independence and Mellanby Halls. Zik Hall, Alexander Brown Hall, and others have all had their encounters with allegations of theft. And in each case, there is a temptation that we must confront.
Perhaps our fascination with jungle justice has never really been about justice. Perhaps it is about power. There is a peculiar satisfaction in punishing the person we can reach; the suspected thief who has no convoy, political office, expensive lawyer or influential connections to hide behind. And so we punish him, simply because we can. Yet our enthusiasm becomes strangely selective when the alleged thief is powerful. Nigeria has seen public officials accused of diverting or misappropriating resources meant for millions, with the consequences of such alleged thefts measured not in one missing phone or laptop, but in hospitals without equipment, schools without adequate facilities and roads left in perpetual disrepair. These are thefts whose victims may number in the thousands, yet those accused often continue to move freely, protected by office, influence and connections. May taste as a bitter pill, but the average person is power-drunk on who they can exert power on. It’s a food chain that everyone forgets not to eat when they can afford to.
This is not an argument to allow petty thieves to roam freely because they didn’t steal millions . Theft is what it is, whether it is a shirt outside a hostel room, a student’s laptop, a mobile phone or public funds. Every allegation deserves proper investigation, and every proven offence deserves appropriate consequences. But our outrage becomes morally suspect when we reserve our most violent expression of justice for the person least capable of resisting it. Although jungle justice partly reflects the anger of people who have lost faith in institutions that are too slow, too distant or too easily manipulated, it doesn’t automatically create a place for it in our society.
The irony becomes even more interesting within a university where people study Criminal Law as a course for full semesters. Perhaps we understand justice perfectly well but applying it becomes the herculean task. If we are genuinely angry about theft, however, our anger should not end when the thief is caught. It should also demand answers about why students’ belongings remain vulnerable and why similar incidents recur. These questions require accountability, better security, functional systems and prompt responses. It is far easier to make a thief dance than to demand that the system which allowed the theft to happen be fixed. It is easier to punish the individual than to confront the institution. And perhaps that is why the dance is so popular: it is the lower-hanging fruit. The death of Ibrahim Mbaye, and others like him must therefore be more than tragic headlines. If a young man can be beaten to death because an accusation was treated as a conviction, then the danger lies not only in the hands that struck him, but in the mentality of the many others that see no problem with jungle justice.
For the University of Ibadan, this distinction should be non-negotiable. When there are cases of theft, students should preserve evidence, protect the victim and hand the suspect over to the appropriate security authorities. Where security systems fail, the response should be to demand better security, stronger accountability and more effective institutional action, not to turn hallways into courtrooms and crowds into execution squads.
Concretely, this means two things. First, hall administrations must commit to, and publicise, a maximum response time for reports of theft, so that no crowd is left waiting long enough to convince itself that punishment has become its job. Second, the Student leaders must ensure that there are appropriate deterrents for thieves. Let the thief face justice. Let the victim receive justice. Let the authorities do the work for which they exist.