By Oyinkan MedubiListen, without a healthy fear of the law, people will continue to embezzle, destroy and kill. Until we develop more fear, we shall continue to roll the country involuntarily towards extinction. Only then can we reduce our fear.Fear, says the dictionary, is an unpleasant feeling of anxiety or apprehension. I am very familiar with this. I get this very fearful feeling whenever I have been in a car driven by a young un who is controlled by nothing but racing hormones. Then I grit my teeth, hold on to the dashboard and recite the Nunc Dimitis. I also get it when I measure my waist and realise that I would probably soon require two measuring tapes to capture the inelegant direction in which my development is going.Most dreaded of all my fears is when I check my pot and realise it is on Ground Zero. Then I hit the panic button as I recall all its implications: money, err, money, and oh yes, money. I have found that my familiarity with fear is now fast approaching the level of contempt, for me, that is, not the fear. All around me, however, I find the reverse going on: people are not only throwing stones at fear, they have even made it to sit on the dung heap of all emotions. Very few people have any respect for it anymore.Today, I am looking at fear from yet another angle. Whenever I have examined the newspapers, I have been accosted with fearsome stories of cases of misappropriations, gross mismanagement, willful destruction of properties, and of course, direct (and often permanent) borrowing of peoples lives (Im talking of murder, rape, terrorism, etc.) running into, what now, hundreds of thousands' And I ask, what happened to fear in this land: gone like a whoosh'I dont know about you, but I believe that any society that does not write fear into its constitution is gone like a whoosh. Someone once got a scorpion bite and made so much noise about it that his screams could have woken the dead were he to have been in a cemetery. His problem, he spat out between screams, was the pain, oh, the pain! It got so much someone around him attempted to stuff some rags in between his teeth so he would shut up, stand still and get some medication. Noooooo!, screamed the writhing man as he eyed the needle approaching him, you have to give me something for the pain of that medication.Then the sympathies and conversations started in the form of questions. What caused all that screaming' Was he so fearful of everything' Was he so afraid to die' What could happen that he was so afraid of: paralysis' Why, they all chorused to a man, was he screaming' Pain, he managed to explain; the pain was worse than what he imagined labour pain to be. Oh for a body that would not feel pain, he ended in a self-pitying moan. Now that would be very dangerous, replied the doctor. Pain, he said, is there for a reason; it helps the body know the limit of hurt it can tolerably manage so it does not go into involuntary self-destruction. The same goes for fear; the presence of fear should keep a state from going into involuntary self-extinction.Every society thus attempts to write its own fear into its constitution (or commandments if you like) by writing out laws. So, a society that asks people not to commit murder (a commandment) or voluntary or involuntary manslaughter (a law) is actually attempting to protect other people from being killed for reasons ranging from stealing to being drunk or even just looking ugly. I killed him because I didnt like the way he looked is therefore not tenable before the law. There are many other things that should also not be tenable before the law: holding public office to no effect; using public funds and office to fund private social causes; taking billions of Nigerias money and hiding same in foreign accounts; insufficient housekeeping money for housewives; and of course, my insufficient take-home pay. I tell you, the law should say no to these things.Im sure I have told this story before but Ill repeat it here for the sake of those just joining the class. Once, I went to a self-service diner in a western country where I served myself some snacks. Since I needed some salad and not knowing I was expected to get another plate for it, I simply added some to my dry food plate. The cashier at the end of the queue was furious but pardoned me when she realised I was a foreigner. She refrained from throwing me out but coldly turned me back to rectify the mistake. My host then took me aside and gave me a five-minute lecture on the importance of the fear that keeps that country sane and going: the fear of the law, which bends for no man or beast.Right now, however, you and I both know that the law cannot talk principally because it has been made toothless in this country. In other climes, of course, it is merely an ass as I have said before on this page. The Nigerian state itself detoothed the law systematically. Now, we have reached a point where people look at lawyers and judges and ask which law exactly they are upholding: the states or that of the guilty. Again and again, the crooked have not only ascended some hallowed thrones in this land, they have gone on to corrupt and infect them. The list is countless: examine many of the assembly, state and local government positions where parties turn the blind eyes of the law on their protgs and install them, like corrupted computer programmes, right into the peoples unwilling consciousness. Powerless and unable to uninstall those terrible highnesses, the people simply have kept their resentful distance.Many have been killed in riots, bombings and kidnappings, and for such horrendous crimes, many people have sometimes been arrested, but few have been successfully prosecuted. Seriously, many murders have gone on unnoticed in the urban areas and the guilty have merely been shipped abroad by rich parents or the law been made to throw its key away, before putting the criminal away that is. And many of the crimes that go in the rural areas are simply not noticed. The watchman-law watches and sees the whole thing but does nothing.Wait yet, worse is still to come. The law now takes the guiltless and simply rolls them off the constitution, like. Yep, thats right, dear reader, you and I dont really count where the law is concerned, because, lets face it, we are only the people. This is why it is that the plaintiff at the police station does not stand a fighting chance on his case if his opponent has more muscle than him. I still have a cartoon where a policeman tells a citizen to go home and arrest his own armed robber himself because, well, you know why. It is also the reason that many have fallen to the stray bullet of policemen, soldiers and irate husbands and wives. Its a tough world.The problem with this country is that we the citizens have developed the nasty habit of shamelessly bending the law for relatives, friends and escorts, and everyone has an endless list of those. This has led to a standing joke that Nigerians have found a shortcut to getting to heaven: its a matter of knowing one or two powerful angels. In Nigeria, we have relegated fear to the backburner. Listen, without a healthy fear of the law, people will continue to embezzle, destroy and kill. Until we develop more fear, we shall continue to roll the country involuntarily towards extinction. Only then can we reduce our fear. Get my drift'A version of this was first published 1st April, 2012.
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