USA Africa Dialogue Series - How backward can Africa Be?

Very very horrible.

Two things: how many of us, if we were on the scene of the mobbing, would have been bold enough to rush and embrace the child and shield him from the blows and bashings? How many of us? Because I think that is one thing that is very hard to come by in our world today: people who will go beyond standing on the sidelines shaking their heads or expressing dismay here on dialogue and other media and put themselves in harm's way for a child. And forget about sanitised responses such as calling the police - those don't work most of the time in such situations in Nigeria; the child would be dead before the police showed up. If one sane adult had entered the fray with the child, perhaps the mob would have changed its mind. Yes, dangerous, but let's consider it.

The second point that comes to mind is that these mobbings are not new in Nigeria and to the best of my knowledge, similar recent mobbings have not yielded indictments or prosecutions, much less punishment for the perpetrators. I remember the four Uniport students burnt alive in 2012. I remember a woman tortured with pepper in her privates for stealing pepper, also in a Lagos market a few years ago too. Nothing will happen again in this case. And I think that this is the more systemic and structural defect that enlightened public administrators need to go about remedying before the next mobbing.

Jumoke.

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