Sometime in April of 2013, I was faced with the task of picking a topic for my PhD. I had spent the prior fifteen months in the UK doing a master’s in law and was, at this time, terribly homesick. But before jetting back to Nigeria for a well-deserved holiday, I had to complete my PhD application. I already knew what I wanted to research on. The topic only needed some elaboration and finetuning.
See, I’ve always been interested in human rights. Perhaps this is largely because of the many injustices I witnessed first-hand growing up with my father. Interestingly, however, and despite the peculiar situation of Nigeria, human rights did not constitute a part of the primary and secondary school curricula. One would have thought that a nation soaked in human rights atrocities would at least take the basic step of teaching and sensitising its populace and agencies to the meaning and need for human rights. No. Not Nigeria.
I personally do not remember being taught anything about human rights from primary to secondary school. It wasn’t until my fifth (and final) year at the university that I had the option—yes, it was optional—of choosing human rights as a module. And, of course, I chose it. The implication of this flawed curriculum is that many lawyers and even judges you see in court have never learnt anything about the substance of human rights. And these are the same people supposed to argue and interpret them.
In my final year at the university, we were required to submit a final project on any law-related topic. I chose to write on women’s reproductive health rights. I still recall the surprise of some of my friends and tutors at my choice. As the son of the Biafran strongman, I had been expected to pick a more macho topic. Perhaps a constitutional treatise on the balkanisation of Nigeria or some legal dissection of the Nigeria-Biafra war. Not women’s reproductive rights. I remember one administrative member of staff saying something about how they had looked for my proposal among the slush pile with anticipation, only to be disappointed when they saw my topic.
Then I became a lawyer and became even more exposed to the level of lawlessness and corruption exhibited at both the executive and judiciary. As a human rights enthusiast, I was amazed at how abuse and executive subjugation had come to be accepted as the norm. The culture of abusing government positions, juxtaposed with endemic corruption, even by magistrates, was the order of the day.
I will share two examples.
One evening I was called to a police station somewhere in Festac, Lagos, to help out a relative who had been arrested with a friend whilst legally parked on the side of a road. I was only nineteen at the time and still enrolled at the Nigerian Law School, Lagos. Upon getting to the station, I was led to a room where some police officers were clearly cajoling one of the ‘suspects’ to add more details to his ‘statement’. When I asked what crime the duo had been arrested for, one of the police officers very confidently narrated how he had chanced upon them parked on a quiet street and sitting alone in the car.
‘What are two adults doing alone in a car at such a secluded place?’ He queried.
When I asked which provision of the law prohibited two adults from sitting in a car, one of the officers started yelling at me and ordering me to leave the room, but I stood my ground. To cut a long story short, after much gragra, the officers agreed to release the hapless victims.
Just think about it. They arrested two people just for sitting together in a car. At some point, during the heat of our argument, one of the officers began to insinuate that the suspects were being romantic in the car. Just imagine that! I asked them to show me where it was forbidden to be romantic in a car in the Criminal Code. It was really crazy. I vividly remember one of our aides, a middle-aged man, saying to me on our way back: ‘This is the first time I have left a police station without paying a bribe. I never knew it was possible to go to a police station and not part with money.’
Yes, we left there without paying a dime.
My second example very sadly involved a magistrate at the then newly constructed magistrates’ court at Igbosere, Lagos. It was 2001. I was a fresh barrister at the time under the tutelage of Festus Keyamo, SAN. I was to represent a client who was charged with a bailable offence. I stood up when the case was called and applied for my client’s bail, which the magistrate routinely granted, albeit with some conditions, which included providing certain documents and sureties. Not wanting to be returned to jail, my client rallied round to meet the bail conditions, and in a short while, we had all the necessary documents ready. All that was needed was for the magistrate to endorse them and sign for my client’s release.
At this time, the court had finished sitting and the magistrate was in his chambers. The procedure was to hand over the bail documents to the court clerk who would, in turn, pass them on to the magistrate. While vetting the documents, the clerk expressed strong pessimism that the magistrate would endorse the application given the absence of monetary inducement. He informed us that it was customary for clients to include a gift of ₦10,000 as an essential part of the bail documents.
I was shocked. No one had told us at law school that you had to bribe magistrates. Naturally, I rejected this proposition confident that the magistrate would approve the bail as we had provided the necessary documentation. How wrong I was! The clerk re-emerged a few minutes later from the magistrate’s chamber, informing us ‘officially’ that the Magistrate was not satisfied with one of the sureties provided. It was completely unbelievable and farcical. There was nothing wrong with the surety. The magistrate had simply rejected him.
Not wanting to return to jail, my client (it must be said, without my endorsement) handed over ₦10,000 to the clerk, who slipped it into a brown envelope and disappeared into the magistrate’s office with the same application that had earlier been rejected. He reappeared a few moments later with a signed bail bond. I hope you read that correctly—the same application as the first. No new documents, no new sureties, no changes whatsoever.
I had another strikingly similar experience with another Lagos magistrate who demanded a bribe. In hindsight, I should probably have confronted or petitioned against them. But I was simply shocked at the time. It was my first year as a lawyer. I was still very young, and no one had prepared us for this. I remember recounting my ordeal to some of the other senior colleagues at the office who didn’t appear very surprised. It was the norm, it appeared.
Now think about it. A magistrate. A member of the bench. A person charged with deciding the fate of alleged criminals is the same person demanding a bribe from a suspect. What a farce! What a shame!
What makes it worse is that the magistrate is demanding a bribe from a poor victim who, if they don’t pay, will be remanded in prison. Now, this suspect, having satisfied his bail conditions, has a right to be released from detention, but a magistrate is willing to sit on that because of ₦10,000. So, this is not just corruption, it is also callousness, sitting on a person’s human rights—the rights to liberty and fair trial—because of bribe money.
What these examples show is that there is a frightening lack of respect or regard for human worth and dignity by those in the corridors of power and justice. And this is not limited to government officials. It extends to the people. I go on to demonstrate this through my concept of floating shadows.
Floating shadows
What is the value of a Nigerian life?
See, there is this thing I want to draw to your attention.
Before I do, permit me to share some news stories with you.
In November 2016, Amnesty International reported that over 150 persons were killed in a vicious government crackdown on members of a secessionist movement, the Indigenous People of Biafra. There were widely circulated videos of police opening fire on the unarmed protesters. These viral videos notwithstanding, there was not a single public inquiry into the deaths of these protesting men and women. During an Al Jazeera interview, the presenter tried to show the videos to Nigerian President, Muhammadu Buhari, under whose administration the killings had taken place. And what did the president do? He simply dismissed the video with an angry wave of the hand. He couldn’t even be persuaded to look at the footage.
In the same year, a judicial inquiry concluded that Nigerian troops be prosecuted for the 2015 killing of 349 Shia Muslims in the northern city of Zaria. The Shiites were reportedly killed and then buried without the permission of their family members. A military source had reportedly explained that the heavy crackdown and killings were ‘intended to teach the Shia a lesson’ after members of the sect had stopped the convoy of the army’s chief of staff in Zaria.
Yes, you read that right. Three hundred and forty-nine lives were wasted in order to teach some people a lesson. How more worthless can life get? I wouldn’t even kill mosquitoes just to teach them a lesson, but there you have it.
Now, despite the deaths, despite the 349 lessons, not one army officer lost his job. There was not one publicised trial. In the week that I first wrote this paragraph—sometime in November 2018—some two years after the above massacre, the Shiites had just buried forty-nine of their members who were shot down by the Nigerian army during a protest in Abuja.
And I am yet to come to this thing.
The numbers are even more telling when one looks at the protracted battle against Boko Haram. In one example, the Associated Press reported that, in a single month (June) of 2013, the Nigerian Army delivered 1,795 bodies to a single mortuary in Maiduguri, in its bid to flush out the militant group.
That wasn’t a typo. One thousand seven hundred and ninety-five bodies.
Now let’s come to this thing.
What is particularly worrisome in all the examples above is not simply the ignoble number of unexplained deaths at the hands of the state. The concern also goes beyond the pitiable absence of meaningful inquests or, more importantly, prosecutions of trigger-happy soldiers and policemen.
What is even more befuddling is the anonymity—insignificance and nonchalance—of the dead—of the unjustly killed.
These people have no names. All 1,795 of them.
They are unknown.
They are simply shadows.
Think about it. How many newspaper headlines have you read that go something like these: ‘Police, IPOB clash: 80 feared dead’, ‘Over 200 feared dead in Police – Shiite clash’. ‘Boko Haram overruns Army barrack, 20 soldiers killed’. Always, there are no names—no identity. The victims are just a number.
They are floating shadows.
By comparison, let us, for a second, compare the treatment by the US of the victims of the 9/11 attack. First, these nearly 3,000 victims all have names. As a matter of fact, their names are inscribed on bronze parapets at the site of the attack and illuminated at night. There are heavily attended memorials held every year, and a huge museum has been built in their honour.
I recall a book I read in the first year of my PhD. It was by an English journalist, Tim Butcher, who was recounting his journey through the heart of the Democratic Republic of Congo. In the book, Blood River: A Journey to Africa’s Broken Heart, Butcher laments the failure of the Congolese government to prosecute the mass killings on the Ubundu-Kisangani road that resulted in loss of life ‘on the same order of magnitude’ as the 11 September attack in the US. He was left bewildered as he traversed the area that, despite the thousands of deaths recorded at that site, there were no repercussions, memorials, court cases, or even official historical accounts of what had happened there.
As I read that part, I just thought: Ah! Nigeria has a brother.
To the reader, if you are Nigerian, or perhaps just a keen observer, have you wondered why those ‘73 people killed in herdsmen attacks’ do not have names? Do you know that those ‘2000 feared dead in Boko Haram’s deadliest massacre yet’ will not be remembered in history? And I didn’t make that one up. Two thousand persons were reportedly killed in a matter of days in 2015 by Boko Haram insurgents. Sadly, there are no memorials for them. No events. No names. No publicity. No bronze parapets. No museums.
They are only shadows. Floating shadows.
The same goes for the hundreds killed in the 2018 herdsmen attacks. The hundreds of Shiites gunned down by the Nigerian army. The thousands of soldiers who have died in the line of duty at the hands of Boko Haram. The thousands of unarmed Biafran protesters that have been killed at the hands of the police. The hundreds of Shiites that were shot by military men. The list goes on.
And these are lives we are talking about here. It has come to the point where the worth of a Nigerian life is no more than that of a KFC chicken.
But even chickens are not killed to teach other birds a lesson.