The spectacle of Nigerian justice has once again captured the attention of the civilized world. Four men, convicted of a murderous attack on a church in Owo, have been sentenced to death. The verdict, delivered in a courtroom that might have been lifted from a Dickens novel, was greeted with approval by the British High Commission in Abuja. 'The UK justice model has been upheld,' they declared, as if congratulating a student for correctly reciting a Latin declension.
Let us pause to consider the irony. Here is a nation whose legal system is a patchwork of colonial inheritances, customary laws, and military decrees, yet we speak of it as a vessel for 'our' model. It is as if we are praising a man for wearing a bespoke Savile Row suit, ignoring the fact that the fabric was stolen, the tailoring botched, and the buttons are falling off.
The death penalty, that relic of a less enlightened age, remains on the books in Nigeria. Britain abolished it decades ago, yet we celebrate when other nations employ it. This is the sort of cognitive dissonance that would make a Victorian missionary blush. We export our legal forms but not the spirit that animates them.
But let us not be too harsh on the Nigerians. They are merely playing a part in a drama we wrote for them. The script demands that they execute 'terrorists' to prove their commitment to 'our values.' It is a convenient fiction, one that allows us to feel virtuous without having to confront the moral squalor of our own penal system. After all, our prisons are bursting with men serving life sentences for crimes that would have earned them a flogging in the 19th century. But we have the decency to call it 'justice' rather than 'revenge.'
The real lesson of this affair is not that Nigeria has upheld the UK justice model. It is that the model is a chimera, a legal phantasm that exists nowhere but in the speeches of diplomats. Every nation adapts justice to its own cultural and political needs. The Nigerians are simply being honest about what those needs are.
We might ask ourselves why we insist on this elaborate charade. Perhaps it is because we need to believe that our values are universal, that they can be planted like exotic seeds in foreign soil and made to flourish. But history tells us otherwise. The Roman Empire tried to impose its law on the barbarians. The result was not civilization but a parody of it, a world of Roman titles and Germanic realities.
So let us stop pretending. The death sentences in Nigeria are not a tribute to our legal genius. They are a reminder that justice is always local, always contingent, always a product of particular histories and particular people. The sooner we abandon our fantasies of a global legal order, the sooner we can begin to understand what justice actually means in the places where it is dispensed.
And if that means accepting that others may choose to kill criminals while we do not, so be it. It is not our place to judge. Or rather, if we must judge, let us do so honestly, without the pretense of universal standards. The Nigerians have their gallows. We have our life sentences. Neither is a model for the other. Both are just the way things are.
