Maximum shishi: Metaphor for state failure

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Our story begins in Ibbi town of Niger State where local vigilantes did something novel but yet so natural this week: they attacked the terrorists who had routinely raided their community for years. By the time the dust settled, the vigilantes had killed no fewer than 50 of the blood merchants. For years, the killers had made mincemeat of the Ibbi people, but the recent invasion during which they had abducted 12 persons proved to be the last straw. The hunters became the hunted as enraged Ibbi vigilantes razed their camps at the bottom of a mountain within the Kainji National Park. From Ibbi, let’s move to the Obafemi Awolowo University (OAU), Ile-Ife, where a gang of murderous students mobbed a 500-level student of the institution to death on Tuesday, allegedly for stealing a phone. Like many youths sent to hell by mindless mobs in a country where voters readily elect destiny thieves, ritual killers and drug barons, hapless Okoli Ahize went to his early grave covered in a heap of accusations and given no space for self-defence. While these two stories may seem to be eerily dissimilar, they are, as I show presently, actually undergirded by the same thread.

Maximum Shishi, the social invention which claimed Mr. Ahize’s soul on Tuesday, wasn’t always associated with OAU; it was, so far as I can tell, the product of the Nigerian state’s refusal to punish the Black Axe Confraternity cultists who had invaded the OAU campus on July 10, 1999 and cut down five students in cold blood. Although some of the apprehended cultists named their collaborators, no one was brought to justice. In the face of this gross miscarriage of justice, the student body harped on a homegrown technique to stem crime on campus: Maximum Shishi or Scientific Maximum Shishi. In Yoruba, sisi (shishi is anglicized Yoruba) conveys the idea of peeling, meaning that students who chose to commit crimes on the campus would literally have their backs peeled or lacerated with whips. MSM involved the parading of culprits, male or female, either half-naked or stark-naked around the halls of residence, and then caning them in the presence of a large number of students. This was usually after the suspects had been investigated and found guilty by a tribunal, which could be the hall executive council, security committee or the judicial council of the union.

The students had to resort to this method to tackle theft, indecent assault rape, bullying, etc, in the face of the refusal of the state to punish the June 1999 killers. The students, in their wisdom or lack of it, thought that the psychological pain inflicted by the punishment would deter crime. They also wanted students who engaged in petty crimes to be punished without being handed over to the school authorities and facing the prospect of outright dismissal from the university. Constituting themselves into a court, they sought refuge in constitutional provisions on corporal punishment (article 295(4) of the Criminal Code; S.358 of the Criminal Code Act Cap 38 Laws of the Federation of Nigeria, etc). Strangely, the practice worked and the university campus became literally one of the safest places in Nigeria. There was also an undocumented law: anyone who engaged in cultism anywhere on campus would be killed instantly! Indeed, this is one big reason cultism has never surfaced on the campus since 1999. The cultists knew that they would be killed within minutes if they tried any nonsense! As a student, you could trek from lecture halls to the halls of residence throughout the night without any fear of molestation. But like anything Nigerian, MSM was prone to abuse and was indeed abused.

Now, as an undergraduate, I wrote against MSM and fixed copies of the piece around the Department of English and I recall a commentator looking at my name and writing: “Fake Dr 3 As” on it, implying that I was a false version of a one-time president of the student union government, who like me had three names beginning with A. Anyway, on one occasion, I had to tell some students in Awo Hall that I had already “sufficiently addressed” the case of a young guy, a non-student who had stolen a keg, thus allowing the offender to exit the premises through a shortcut. I had sensed some excitement in a student who asked me why I was interrogating the offender, and I did not want the kind of story that happened on Tuesday. I also recall another occasion in Angola Hall where two students who had attacked each other with blades were brought before the student’s body and given minimum shishi (about seven strokes each), with a warning to be of goof behavior or risk MSM. I never heard of blade attacks till I left the hall.

Nigeria being a nation where crime often attracts no consequences, citizens have often been forced to chart their own part in resisting oppression. That is why the action in Ibbi town took place. Between January and March this year, suspected armed Fulani militants launched a deadly attack on 31 communities in the Apa local government area of Benue State, killing at least 89 persons. They raped, maimed and killed defenseless citizens, and our intelligence agents who usually wax bold when going after the government’s critics, acting like the proverbial one-eyed man organizing a party in Yoruba lore, did exactly nothing. In June 2021, terrorists shed blood at will in Ishieke, Ebonyi State and in Igangan, Oyo State, but we saw no intelligence warnings. They massacred scores of worshippers at St. Francis Church in Owo, Ondo State, on June 5, 2022, riding on the criminal docility of our secret service agents who only wax bold when politics is concerned.

During the last elections, some criminals openly threatened voters but were never brought to book. That would not happen in a country like Saudi Arabia, where a robust social welfare system and strong law enforcement keep the crime rates very low. The Saudis have no time for nonsense, and would execute erring royals without batting an eyelid. In October 2016, Turki bin Al Kabeer, a Saudi prince, was executed for murder. In Nigeria, he would have got a chieftaincy title. And so here’s my take: the killers of Mr. Ahize shed blood and must be equally killed. But if that is where the story ends, then this society has failed. The perpetrators of the June 1999 killings on OAU campus must be brought to book and the historical injustices redressed. And if MSM is abolished, there must be something beyond mere assurances by the authorities to take its place.

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