Of course, on Sunday, when Malama Umulkhair, a mother of four, left her home in Maraban Jos, in Igabi Local Government of Kaduna State, to attend a religious school event, she certainly had no inkling that she would be the victim of a lynch mob and a drama that unfolded like a slow-burn movie that ended with her gruesome death.

Somehow, we have managed to cultivate a culture of mass violence in which the simple act of asking for directions from children, in the afternoon, in public, could trigger hundreds of angry people baying for your blood, ripping—or receiving—you from the hands of the police and lynching you.

The brutal incident at Maraban Jos is one that is shamefully all too familiar to Nigerians. A person is accused of a crime. A mob gathers and demands justice. The suspect is caught, beaten, tortured, dehumanised and burnt to death in the streets, often with hundreds participating, often with hundreds watching.

This practice is so pervasive that it has become an acceptable way of dispensing justice to suspected phone snatchers, thieves, kidnappers and the like. In this clime, we often hear about them when the victim does not turn out to be quite the criminal that they were branded to be. And this is far too often.

The latest victim, Malama Ummulkhair, was not quite that victim. She was a resident of the town, was a known and respected seeker of knowledge and teacher within certain circles, had been invited to attend a religious event at a madrasa and had lost her way. Because the town had experienced a rash of unsolved cases of missing children recently, when a woman draped in hijab, her face veiled with a niqab, was seen talking to children, townspeople jumped to the conclusion that she was a kidnapper on the prowl.

The irony, of course, was that when the mob set upon her and started torturing her, she was rescued by the police who should have conducted their investigation and prosecuted her, if she was found to have committed any crime. Despite her friends, family and neighbours rushing to the scene to attest to her identity and her innocence, a witness claimed the Divisional Police Officer (DPO) was the one who had allegedly stripped her of her hijab, taken her out of the police station, marched her to the irate mob, pushed her to them and reportedly said, “Here she is, kill her.”

And the mob did.

It is a baffling occurrence, only to one unfamiliar with our justice by fire culture. While in some cases, the police have been known to intervene and rescue the would-be victims, often they had just passed by, turned a blind eye or even stood aside and watched. And sometimes, they had participated.

That was exactly what they had done in 2012 in Aluu when the quartet of undergraduate students, Ugonna Obuzor, Toku Lloyd, Chiadika Biringa and Tekena Elkanah were being tortured and subjected to a “public trial” by a mob. The four had gone to collect a debt owed to one of them. In the ensuing dispute, the debtor alerted the community, branded them thieves and had the mob set upon them. They were beaten, tortured, dehumanised in the streets, not far from two police stations, and set ablaze. The crowd cheered as they burnt to death.

A team of police officers had driven by during the torture. They could have rescued the victims. Instead, they basically waved on the mob and went about their way. Later, in the trial, they had claimed the crowd was overwhelming. They could have called for back-up but they didn’t.

The biggest indictment was that a former police sergeant, Lucky Orji, was found guilty of joining the mob instead of rescuing the boys. Orji, alongside another officer, stumbled upon the crime in progress. While the other officer, according to court documents, acted professionally and tried to rescue the boys, his colleague, Sergeant Orji, decided to join the mob and participate in the killings. For this crime, he had been sentenced to death by the court and now, alongside two others, awaits his meeting with the hangman.

The trial judge, Justice Nyordee, noted that the tragic outcome was an indictment of the police, stating that it was completely unacceptable that multiple local security networks and police commands failed to protect the lives of the citizens they were sworn to defend.

Given the recurrence of these dangerous practices, it is surprising that the police have not developed a protocol to deal with mob actions like these. Since the Aluu 4 mob lynching, one of the most prominent in recent years, there have been many others. In 2022, Deborah Samuel was lynched by an angry mob in Sokoto for blasphemous comments. A mob of students stoned her to death and torched her body. Also that year in Lekki, Lagos, David Imoh, a professional sound engineer, attempted to mediate a dispute between his friend and an Okada rider over a N100 change. The Okada rider raised an alarm, branded them ritualists, and a mob of commercial motorcyclists seized David, beat him unconscious and set him on fire. Over N100. In 2025, 16 persons travelling in a truck through Uromi in Edo State to the north for Eid were waylaid by armed vigilantes and a youth mob. They were accused of banditry and kidnapping, beaten, drenched in petrol and burned alive. In 2023, Martina Okey Itagor of Cross River State was minding her business when two men on a motorcycle had an accident. The youth accused her of witchcraft and causing the accident through the sheer proficiency of her supernatural powers. She was beaten, publicly humiliated and burned alive by the roadside.

Through hundreds of such lynchings, we know that these incidents are often protracted, lasting hours sometimes, involving huge crowds. Yet, somehow, the police have still not found ways to prepare a response protocol for this lawlessness.

While it is easy to dismiss these acts as wanton savagery—and don’t be mistaken, they are quite clearly so—it is important to address the context. The barbaric acts are a direct product of the systemic failure of Nigeria’s justice system.

When mobs angrily demand that suspects in police custody be released to them to dispense justice by themselves, it is because they do not trust the police to conduct diligent investigations and prosecution of the suspects.

Often, the police have been known to take bribes to release suspects in their custody. Often, they have been known to lack the commitment to see cases through to their logical conclusion. Where there are trials, some do not start until years after and are often not concluded—if they ever are—until decades later.

This wilderness of social justice, by the very nature of human society, cannot exist. Justice, too, abhors a vacuum. This vacuum has been filled by lawlessness, frequent breakdown of law and order, jungle justice and savagery masquerading as social order. All things that do not belong to this century.

While the trial of those accused of complicity in the Aluu killings lasted five years, at least a semblance of justice was delivered in the end. The trial of those accused of lynching David Imoh has concluded and judgement will be delivered this June. However, suspects arrested in the Deborah lynching were discharged and acquitted after the state prosecution lawyers repeatedly failed to show up in court. Justice delayed is justice denied and only reinforces the vicious circle of blood and fire.

The writer, Ahmad Mubarak Tanimu, captured this in his short story, “A Trail of Blood and Fire,” in the recently published Flame Tree Anthology, Someone Should Hold Farida. In the story, a young man aggrieved by the lack of justice for his murdered uncle, decides to participate in the lynching of a suspected kidnapper and must live with the truth he later learned about his own victim.

Until Nigeria’s social justice system wakes up to its responsibilities, people will always find alternative means to an idea of justice—it will never be civil or right. And until law enforcement takes its responsibilities seriously, carries communities along during investigations through regular, sincere updates, those suspicions of their complicity will always remain. And until they install protocols to respond to reports of lynch mobs, the death of Malama Ummulkhair and all the victims of lynch mobs would be in vain, and every Nigerian is one scream away from becoming a victim.