Abisola Fatokun

It seems as if Kachi Ozumba’s “The Shadow of a Smile” has alerted the BBC to Police Brutality in Nigeria. Now, we have reports of extra-judicial killings and almost a hundred corpses being dumped in a hospital morgue for mass burial.

An extrapolation of this to include all major hospitals in Nigeria would indicate that thousands of people are being killed in ‘on the spot’ justice by the Nigerian Police without being given the right to defend the accusation of being criminals.

I remember vividly during my first year in University, at about 5 in the morning, there were shouts of “ole, ole” – “thief, thief” and sounds and thuds of scrambling feet in hot pursuit of the alleged thief. I – not being the most courageous person – declined to leave my room to join the pursuit. A masterstroke of a decision, it turned out eventually when it was discovered that the person in front of the pack – who was also chasing after the alleged thief was caught and beaten severely.

His saving grace was that he claimed to be the son of a Professor on campus and on further enquiry, it turned out to be true. There have been several reported cases of accused thieves, witches, wizards, etc being burned to death on the spot by vigilantes and this is a sorry state that Nigeria is in.

Yet, we very proudly beat our breasts and proclaim how religious we are and how we are a nation blessed by the Creator Himself. I hope further investigations by the international press (as our local media don’t have the balls to take these types of tasks on) will  expose more of these extra-judicial killings and embarrass our Government into taking steps to fix this.