The Lagos State House of Assembly, incensed by the rising spate of kidnappings in the state, has passed a bill that stipulates a death sentence for kidnappers whose victims die in their captivity. On the surface, such proposed law, awaiting the signature of the State Governor Akinwumi Ambode, seems like a good-intentioned move to clamp down hard on hardened criminals. But then, the surface never tells the true value, or lack of, of anything. And beyond the faux outrage of the State House of Assembly, its proposed death sentence will not deter kidnappers, prevent deaths from kidnappings or make residents of Lagos any more safe.
While the immorality and inhumanity of the death penalty may be disputed, albeit ingeniously, the ineffectiveness of such state-sanctioned murder as deterrent to crime is indisputable. The highest record of state executions for criminal offences in Nigeria were carried out during the periods of military rule in the 1980s and 1990s. Yet, crimes punishable by death remained at their peak during these times. Even the high-profile executions of notorious armed robbers such as Lawrence Anini, Monday Osunbor, Peter Presley Preboye and Shina Rambo did nothing to the continuously rising crime rates. Suffice it to say that the killings of these armed robbers were just that, killings. They were no deterrent to crime. In the same vein, the Lagos State Government’s Death Sentence for kidnappers will have no effect on kidnappings in the state, just as rampant extrajudicial killings of robbery suspects haven’t reduced current robbery rates.
If death sentences won’t curb kidnappings, then what will? To answer this pertinent question, one must return to the primary reason for the increase in kidnappings and other money-motivated crimes–economic desperation. Nigeria is knee-deep in recession, jobs have become more scarce and less secure, wages have either stagnated or fallen while commodity prices are running amok. All of these are occurring in a country with already sky high unemployment, gulf-wide inequality, pervasive poverty, endemic corruption and inept government institutions. It is not difficult to draw the parallels between these blatant failures of the Nigerian society and the rising incidences of kidnappings and other money-motivated crimes.
Investigating the relationship between crime level, unemployment rate, poverty rate, and corruption level and inflation rate in Nigeria between 1980 and 2009, researchers, writing in the Global Advanced Research Journal of Management and Business Studies, came to the conclusion that the above mentioned societal problems impact significantly on crime rate. “There is a link between crime level, unemployment, poverty, corruption and inflation; but even if people were unemployed, poor and corrupt, criminality may not be that high, but when the cost of living which is determined by inflation is high, crime level becomes high.”
In light of the above, it is clear to see that what needs the utmost attention is the optimisation of economic opportunities, not an adaptation of state-sanctioned killing. Thus, if the Lagos State Government was really keen on deterring kidnappers, it would have been more interested in creating massive job schemes, radically increasing vocational training opportunities and championing programmes that will help small businesses thrive. The government would also have been doing more about making education more qualitative, less expensive and open beyond primary, secondary, and tertiary levels, but also to include adult education.
However, the Lagos State Government, by choosing to kill kidnappers, has opted for what seems like an easy way to curb kidnappings. Only that it actually doesn’t. It is destined will only add to the State Government’s growing list of ineffectual policies, a recent one of which was the ban on highway hawking. The government had threatened desperately poor and opportunities-bereft youths, whose sole source of a daily bread was chasing down cars to sell cheap snacks and accessories, with fines and jail time. This, it did without working to combat socio-economic problems which are the root causes of highway hawking. Expectedly, the ban achieved nothing as the highways are still surfeited with hawkers. The same will be the case with kidnappings and armed robberies if a death sentence is the only sentence the government can muster.
