Not Too Young To Commit Crime But…

By Bola BOLAWOLE
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Too many Nigerians are too difficult to understand, most especially the educated ones among them, or, should I say, the supposedly-educated! They approbate and reprobate at the same time. In one breath they affirm that they stand for something; in yet another they negate the same thing they claimed to stand for. They condemn corruption but are themselves corruption personified. They rail at bad governance only as they wait for the opportunity to get into government and do worse things! That is why nothing gets better here but gets worse. The corruption of each sitting government becomes worse than its predecessor’s! Ad nauseam; ad infinitum!

Frederick Douglas’s (1857) description best fits the Nigerian elite “who want crops without plowing up the ground; they want rain without thunder and lightning. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its many waters”. But there can be no progress without discipline, law and order. Development is impossible in the absence of fidelity for principles and consistency. Thank God, I long ago gave up on Nigeria; such that the shenanigans of both its leaders and the led hardly get under my skin anymore.

I do not think we can have any people more duplicitous than some Nigerians. The elites especially speak from both sides of the mouth. In the name of politics, they pull down anything and everything just to make dubious claims and score cheap political points against perceived opponents. That way, nothing works and they never will! Scoring cheap political points is higher on their scale of preference than what better serves the national interest. That way, they tied the hands of the President Bola Ahmed Tinubu government when it tried to relocate some departments of government from Abuja for greater efficiency; just as they are also trying to frighten it away from tax reforms that aim at discouraging the “monkey dey work, baboon dey chop” Nigerian system.

The controversy trailing the kid protesters is yet another. Still, these are the same people who, on social media, inundates us each moment with the giant strides that China and Chinese kids are making! We envy them; we wish we could appropriate for ourselves their achievements but detest the discipline and hard work giving birth to their mouth-gaping innovations!

Some Nigerian youths or kids are said to be too young to face the consequences of their action and the entire polity was (premeditatedly?) gutted as a result! My goodness! Yet, the same youths or kids were not too young to kill, maim and commit harakiri! They were not too young to burn down public and private property! They were not too young to ruin lifetime investments, achievements and livelihoods! And we saw them on television do all of this with uncommon gusto as well as with relish. They were not too young to commit those crimes! May you not encounter them and their rage!

The Boko Haram monsters of today were like those youths and kids decades back. They were also the foot soldiers employed in countless religious riots across towns and cities in the North. The bandits and terrorists of today similarly came through the ranks of lawless youths and kids used as cannon fodders and wreckers of destinies by feudal forces that have held this country down for over a century. We have watched them slit the throats of human beings as if they were goats or chicken! We witnessed as they carried the head of Gideon Akalula on a spike, celebrating with it in the streets of Kano.

If Akaluka has receded far into memory, what of the girl Deborah Yakubu who was gruesomely murdered in Sokoto with no consequences following? When, in 2011, Muhammadu Buhari bayed for blood with his incendiary statement of monkeys and baboons being soaked in blood, youths and kids from his section of the country were the executioners. How many Youth Corpers from the South, the hope of their families, had their throats slit in details too gory to recount here!

What I am driving at here is that there must be consequences for every action – good or bad. And not only must there be consequences, they must comply with Isaac Newton’s Third Law of Motion which states that for every action or force in nature, there is an equal and opposite reaction. Not only must everyone pay for their action, the remuneration must be commensurate with the harm or havoc done. Therefore, anyone who knowingly, whimsically, callously and premeditatedly takes the life of another person must also pay with his or her own life. Those who similarly destroy public and private property must be made to face the music.

If you are not too young to commit a crime, you should not be too young to pay the prescribed penalty. Anyone who thinks, speaks, or acts to the contrary is a public enemy. People like them sired the bandits and terrorists of today. Those of them holding the government’s hand and not allowing criminally-minded youths or kids to be brought to book are breeding the bandits and terrorists of tomorrow. In future, the victims of the Frankenstein monsters they are breeding today will be their own children and grandchildren. By then, it will be too late for them to cry! Drink from the elders’ pot of wisdom! It says: “Oka bi’mo si’le – oro!” There is no way the child of a cobra will not grow up to become a cobra!

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Have I said there should be no protests against bad governance? Not at all! There can even be protests against a government that is doing well – if only for it to make its best better. Besides, no government is perfect. There must always be room for improvement. Every sector or segment of society cannot be satisfied at the same time. What ails one may be the pleasure of the other. Hence, Jeremy Bentham and the other Utilitarian philosophers posit that “the greatest happiness of the greatest number” is the purpose of government.

So, there will always be grievances. There will always be protests; more so in a democracy where the people are awarded the liberty of freedom of speech, even if mostly only on paper. Should the government, therefore, allow protests? Yes, it has a duty not only to do so but to also offer protection to protesters. We must continue to drum this into the ears of the government and to insist it is done. The Constitution, which is the ground rule of the country, mandates them to do so. If they fail to comply, then, they flout the Constitution and in saner societies, that is enough ground to impeach the government or vote it out of office at the next election cycle.

Protesters, however, have the duty to keep their protests peaceful. Their rights of protest also presupposes the rights of other citizens to shun protests and go about their own lawful business. Therefore, protesters must not become unruly or violent as to disrupt or endanger public peace. They must not destroy public and private property.

During the last #ENDBADGOVERNANCE protests we witnessed the massive destruction of public and private property. I saw on social media a Pharmaceutical Stores burnt to ashes and the abject owner asking where they expected him to start from! Many lives were also lost. It is trite that your rights stop where that of the other person starts. Otherwise, society becomes impossible to govern and we return to the Hobbesian state of nature – a state of lawlessness and chaos; of the war of all against all; where life is solitary, brutish, nasty and short.

There must be a government – whether we like it or not; and whether or not we like the face of the person in the saddle or we think we know or can perform better than him. And it is in our interest that the government is allowed to govern. The lawlessness ravaging many parts of the country today is as a result of the impunity of the past. The impunity of the present will, in like manner, jeopardise the peace, safety, security and prosperity of future generations.

If the kids in question participated in the #ENDBADGOVERNANCE mayhem in some parts of the country, they should, for goodness sake, be allowed to face the music and learn useful lessons that will make them into better citizens. Those who recruited and coralled them into such dangerous assignments should also be fished out and be made to face the music. Bad behaviour must attract commensurate consequences. The security threats we face today will be a child’s play compared to what our children and grandchildren will face tomorrow if we continue to treat (kid) criminals with kid gloves.

Have we forgotten so soon the horror kid soldiers (criminals) unleashed on hapless citizens during the Liberian and Sierra Leone’s civil wars?

FEEDBACK

I read through your piece on forest rangers and Oyo state’s reported pioneering role in its re-introduction. Kindly note that the Ekiti State governor inaugurated our own version known as Agro Rangers as far back as April this year. They are to focus more on securing Ekiti farmlands – Yinka Oyebode, Chief Press Secretary to the Ekiti State Governor.

My response: Great! Let’s have the details, please! The other South-west governors should please follow suit. Keeping the South-west safe and secure is a task that must be done!

* Former Editor of PUNCH newspapers, Chairman of its Editorial Board and Deputy Editor-in-chief, BOLAWOLE was also the Managing Director/ Editor-in-chief of The WESTERNER newsmagazine. He writes the ON THE LORD’S DAY column in the Sunday TRIBUNE and TREASURES column in NEW TELEGRAPH newspaper on Wednesdays. He is also a public affairs analyst on radio and television.