When the Suspect Becomes the Crime: Personhood, Community and the Ontology of Jungle Justice in Nigeria

Abstract

Amnesty International has documented at least 555 victims of mob violence in Nigeria between 2012 and 2023 alone, and the toll has continued to rise till date. This article argues that jungle justice is best understood not merely as a failure of law enforcement or a system of socio-economic frustration, but as an ontological error. That is, a metaphysical collapse in which a person, a being with inherent moral status, is reduced to a single alleged predicate. In jungle justice, the accusation is treated as though it exhausted the totality of that person's being. The article makes two original theoretical contributions. First, it develops the concept of ontological non-disposability of the person, arguing that even a genuinely guilty person retains an ontological status that punishment must work through rather than annihilate. Second, it develops justice as relational preservation, arguing that justice is not merely the correct distribution of punishment but the restoration of the normative relations constituting community, so that jungle justice fails doubly. It may harm the innocent, and even where guilt is real, it forecloses the only processes capable of restoring those relations. Engaging four distinct scholarly conversations on jungle justice in Nigeria, and drawing on Western and African philosophy alike, the article argues that jungle justice is self-defeating as justice, since the community's attempt to restore normative order through the destruction of a person simultaneously destroys the relational, epistemic and institutional conditions that make justice possible.