Juju and Justice at the Movies: Vigilantes in Nigerian Popular Videos

The HRW report suggests that the only acceptable solution to Nigeria's crime problem would be a systematic reform of the police and courts by the federal government. I am quite sure that the vast majority of Nigerians would welcome such a development. They remain highly skeptical, however, that the government they have can produce even a marginally less corrupt criminal justice system in the near future. This skepticism is born of an intimate understanding of the extent of government's failure in Nigeria and the day-to-day, decade-to-decade experience of overwhelming structural impediments to the government's ability to reform itself. It is in this spirit that Obi Akwani (2002) argues that movies such as the Issakaba series can be viewed as popular rejoinders to the HRW report. Yet the videos' depiction of lethal extrajudicialjustice and the ultimate failure of vigilantes to maintain "clean hands" can also be taken as a confirmation of the report's grimmest charges. While some Nigerians still feel that their life is safer than it was before the vigilantes began their campaign against criminals, public opinion as reflected in editorials and comments reported in the press has become more pessimistic about the consequences of vigilantism (Abuja 2002; Ujumadu 2002).

Nevertheless, critics like Ekeh, Nwana, and Akwani insist that HRW fails to understand that many Nigerians feel that reform must begin at the grassroots level. The Bakassi Boys' vigilante movement was an armed uprising, not against the government, but against the absence of effective government. While the failure of the Bakassi Boys is now evident, the movies still capture a profound longing for social transformation at a community level. In the movies, heroes step forth from their ordinary lives and take political reform into their own hands. This reform operates through highly localized insurrections-a village-by-village overthrow of corruption-implying that only a nation of communities that have exorcised their own demons and established trustworthy leadership can hope for effective reform at the highest levels. For Nigerians, this understanding of Nigeria's predicament, while setting the requirements for reform quite high, has a certain practical plausibility that HRW's universal human rights prescriptions lack. It is a charter for a higher national destiny that must first be seized by people in their own communities rather than imposed from above by government or externally by international law. The vigilante movies capture a shared vision of what Nigerians wish vigilantes could be, and in the case of Issakaba they also gesture at what they unfortunately appear to have become. While the cinematic version is romanticized and fanciful, from a Nigerian perspective it may be no more so than HRW's expectation that Nigeria's government can readily reform itself. Even a national leadership with the best intentions would find itself up against an entrenched configuration of illegitimate relationships with powerful multinational corporations, particularly the oil industry, that have proven highly resistant to calls for reform and restructuring. True political reform in Nigeria would require, at the very least, the multinational petroleum corporations' taking responsibility for the role they play in distorting Nigeria's economy, maintaining kleptocratic structures of administration, and yielding profit from corrupt arrangements of commerce.8 It appears, however, that Nigeria's citizens are less than confident that such a development is likely in the near future and so they focus their attention on their own communities. This political realism is bluntly reduced to the slogan "fuck the world, save yourself emblazoned across a t-shirt worn by Ebube in the second Issakaba movie. Ultimately most Nigerians would probably agree that vigilantism is not sustainable as a system of justice. When viewed from the ground, however, cleaning up their own communities seems a more plausible goal than reforming the most powerful industry in the world and reclaiming their wayward government. A true empathy for the despair that confronts the Nigerian desire for justice helps account for the popular attraction to the cinematic mythos of the reforming hero-the promise of hope evoked by Ebube's declaration that "justice has come to town!"