Therefore, by all means let us punish those beasts that had the heart to take any human being, beat them senseless with brick and wood, and then set them on fire – which they did with four young men who may or may not have been guilty of petty theft or even of cultism.  
You’ve probably heard this kind of story many times before – a friend or an uncle or a colleague got robbed somewhere on the Third Mainland Bridge, perhaps a few metres away from a police checkpoint. She was confronted with a gun, robbed and left helpless.
Or maybe it happened at the airport, or perhaps down the road from where you live. Eyewitnesses tell you however, it is a common occurrence. The robbers come here everyday, and yet no one has caught them. The people leave their homes every morning knowing they might be robbed, knowing they live in a country that should protect from that insecurity, but also knowing that nothing will be done about it.
That is the country we live in. It’s a country where those who live in urban communities find themselves subject to primitive interruptions. But even they are lucky. For those who live in the rural parts, life is nasty, brutish and short.

They are raped, they are killed, they are stolen from – and no one is punished. They live in a country whose leaders rob them blind and no one is punished, and they haven’t come out to protest that. All they ask for is a right to live quiet, simple lives secure. But even that they do not get. They report to the police and are responded to with silence. No one listens to them. No one cares about them.
Aluu stands as only the latest symbol of the forgotten Nigeria. It is impossible to forgive its people who came out and murdered fellow Nigerians in the name of jungle justice, but perhaps somewhere we can understand them. You see, Aluu is not isolated; it is not some unbelievable out of this world backwater – what happened there happens all across Nigeria. It has happened more than once in the markets of Yaba and elsewhere, and a few more times in campuses across Nigeria.
People who are tired of their lives being destroyed, and who make the costly – dastardly – error of thinking it is okay to help themselves, and to take the law into their own hands. They buy candles because PHCN won’t provide power; they buy machetes because the courts won’t provide justice.
They are the ones who resorted to the level of animals and killed four human beings. They are ones who panicked, thinking that these ones too might get away scot free, and decided to help themselves by doing the unforgivable. Driven by hopeless desperation; emboldened by relentless helplessness.
They might not have parents who wear Chris Aire jewellery and move from directorship of oil companies to administration of oil resources, and they might not belong to the family of those who own estates on Bourdillion and rule infinitely over South-West politics, but they too are human beings.
They deserve a country that works – so that they are not defined by a few animals amongst them, who bloodthirsty and looking for an excuse. They need to believe in something; to have faith that the primary duty of government, which is to secure life and property, can actually mean something.
But, time and again, Nigeria fails them.
Therefore, by all means let us punish those beasts that had the heart to take any human being, beat them senseless with brick and wood, and then set them on fire – which they did with four young men who may or may not have been guilty of petty theft or even of cultism.
It doesn’t matter what their offence was – their murderers crossed the boundaries of all humanity and offended everything that makes us people and a civilization, and they must be punished to the full extent of the law so this kind of heartless barbarism doesn’t at all find a place amongst Nigerians.
But after we are done, let us remind ourselves that they are not the problem. The problem isn’t angry, poor people in some remote abandoned village, left to fend for themselves and to give in to the worst of themselves. The problem is with those animals in government whose desperate incompetence and thievery had led to the existence of those remote abandoned villagers. Those are the ones that deserved to be punished – and we need to punish them soon.
Sadly, some of them don’t even give a damn.