The failure of Nigeria Government and its institutions to deal with security challenges and promote social justice suggest a culture of impunity. The term “culture of impunity” refers to a situation in which individuals or groups in a society have come to believe that they can do whatsoever they want with impunity or without accountability. Impunity is often use in human rights’ law to denote the tenacious or incessant failure on the part of Government or institutions to bring perpetrators of human rights violations to justice.
Nigeria News Net’s article dated October 11, 2012, citing the work of German-American political scientist Hannah Arendt posited that the greatest evils recorded in history are executed by ordinary people who believed the premises of their actions and therefore participated in them on the grounds that their heinous actions were normal. This is referred to as concept of ‘normalising the unthinkable’ or the ‘routinisation of evil’. The article places the gruesome murder of the UNIPORT 4 discussed in my earlier article within the context of prevailing culture of impunity or ‘culture of normalising the unthinkable’. In other words, culture of impunity is responsible for hundreds of innocent victims of extra judicial killings in Nigeria in recent years.Extra judicial killing occurs when a person’s life is unlawfully taken. Vengeful or reprisal killings in response to extra judicial killings paradoxically promote the same culture of impunity.
The wrong inflicted on victims of culture of impunity is two fold: violation of their inalienable rights and the failure to give them justice by punishing those that violated their fundamental human rights. Thus, given the nature of culture of impunity which routines abuse of human rights, it will not be difficult to comprehend why ‘culture of impunity sublimed with government of weakened institution’ cannot truly promote justice.
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