The Nigerian police or pandemic task force made arrests, took the accused aside to a table at which a magistrate sat and filed a formal complaint. State lawyers instantly presented and prosecuted the case. The guilty were often fined, not jailed, and the expense presumably deterred them from breaching pandemic restrictions again.

Barau would judge as many as 100 cases a day. She was sometimes concerned that defendants didn’t always understand the charges brought against them and that judgments were rushed but the mobile court approach significantly reduced paperwork and cost, so she concluded it was a viable alternative to traditional court. 

Other supporters of the approach said the mobile courts were expanding legal accessibility, particularly in remote areas. So, when the pandemic restrictions were lifted, the mobile courts stayed. They now largely focus on traffic violations.

Magistrate Safinatu Abdulkareem presides over one of the road safety mobile courts in Niger state and sees them as better than taking traffic offenders to brick and mortar courts. 

“The traditional court will only waste time and hinder their journey. When they are being tried where they are being arrested and punished or fined, then they can proceed with their journey or business,” she said.

But such approving views rarely include the perspective of the people being tried. Defence lawyers are often absent from the proceedings and when they appear, there is little room for them to defend their clients.

“Everything in the mobile court is done summarily. The system doesn’t allow us, the defence lawyers, the opportunity. In the Covid‑19 pandemic, mobile courts sprung up across Nigeria to enforce public health measures. They have endured.” 

But defence lawyers say they deliver more injustice than justice.

Supporters of the approach said the mobile courts were expanding legal accessibility, particularly in remote areas to respond to the claims adequately. 

“The hands of lawyers are tied to either opt for settlement or see your client convicted,” said Sabiu Ahmad Bashir, a lawyer based in Abuja. 

To examine the charges against their client, the defence lawyers often have only a proforma template filled in by a police officer — and no further evidence.

In a recent case, Bashir appeared in a mobile court for Gudu market traders who were being prosecuted by the Abuja market management agency. He began by denying liability and advising his clients to enter “not guilty” pleas. 

But a few minutes later, he was ordered to instantly address the court with his clients’ defence as the judgment would be delivered in the same sitting. 

“We decided to plead guilty and my clients were convicted and ordered to pay fines.”

Magistrates such as Barau and Abdulkareem say even when people are found guilty in such summary trials, the fines imposed are affordable and the guilty can just pay and be on their way.

That is often not the case.

In September 2022, the Lagos State Traffic Management Authority auctioned more than 130 vehicles that had been impounded from offenders convicted and sentenced to fines by mobile courts. Unable to pay in the stipulated time, the convicted lost their property. 

“We don’t expect thorough justice there,” Bashir said of the mobile courts. “They are only effective in the quick dispensation of cases.” 

This article first appeared in The Continent, the pan-African weekly newspaper produced in partnership with the Mail & Guardian. It’s designed to be read and shared on WhatsApp. Download your free copy at thecontinent.org

There were more students there than usual: the nearby secondary school had been closed due to security concerns, so all the older children were being taught on these premises. They were waiting to begin what should have been an ordinary school day.

Suddenly, armed men on motorcycles appeared, racing towards them. Teachers were powerless to prevent the attack. The kidnappers bundled some children onto the back of their bikes, while others were forced to walk at gunpoint. They shot at children who tried to flee.

By the time the chaos had subsided, and the headmaster was able to do a headcount, more than 300 children and several teachers had been abducted. It is believed that every family in the small, tight-knit community has at least one child among the abductees.

A few were able to escape as they were marched into the dense forests that surround Kuriga. One of the escapees, Mustapha Abubakar, later described how a long line of children was made to trek over great distances, and told to crawl when they got tired. The only time they were able to drink any water was when they crossed a river.

At one point, a plane hovered overhead, and the kidnappers ordered everyone to remove their clothes and lie down on the ground to avoid detection.

Abubakar seized the opportunity. “The bandits were exhausted, had no food. We saw them eating leaves and wild fruits but they gave us nothing to eat,” Abubakar told BBC Hausa. “While we were moving, I noticed a shrub that was brown in colour, like my trousers. I hid inside and crawled like a snake. I was there until it was completely silent before I came out and headed to the bush.”

It took Abubakar many hours of walking alone through the forest before he reached a village where he received help. He was one of the lucky few to escape. No one knows where the rest of the children are, or even who took them.

The government has promised to do everything it can to bring the children back unharmed.

Soldiers are combing the forests, but so far the search has been fruitless.

The kidnappers have demanded a ransom of one billion naira ($622,000), to be delivered by 27 March – or else all the students will be killed.

Nigeria has a mass kidnapping problem, and this has been an especially horrific month.

On 6 March, 200 civilians – mostly women and children – were taken from a camp for internally displaced people in Borno State.

On 7 March, 287 children were taken from Kuriga.

On 8 March, 16 civilians were taken from a village in Benue.

On 9 March, another school was targeted – this time 15 schoolchildren were taken from their rooms late at night, along with one woman in Sokoto State.

And on Tuesday last week, at least 61 people were taken from their homes in a village in Kaduna State’s Kajuru district.

The perpetrators of the kidnappings – not thought to be connected to each other – are usually described as “bandits”, a catch-all term in Nigeria that encompasses everything from armed criminal groups to terrorist organisations. Usually a ransom is demanded. That’s why schoolchildren are a popular target: parents and schools can’t afford large sums, but the headlines generated may force the government to pay up.

The template for this is, of course, the most notorious mass kidnapping of them all: the kidnapping of 276 young girls from Government Girls Secondary School in Chibok, Borno State, in April 2014 by the Islamist militant group Boko Haram.

Some girls escaped in the immediate aftermath, but at least 219 were held in the Sambisa Forest, and some were forced into sex with Boko Haram fighters.

It was only in 2017 that the Nigerian government agreed to pay a ransom. The amount has never been confirmed, but media reports suggest it was in the region of $3-million in exchange for the release of 82 girls.

It is believed that more than a hundred are still being held captive.

The fate of the Chibok girls, and the government’s inability to protect them, sparked a worldwide solidarity movement known as #BringBackOurGirls, and heaped enormous pressure on then-president Goodluck Jonathan’s administration, which played a significant role in his electoral defeat in 2015.

For current President Bola Tinubu, the stakes may be just as high.

He promised to tackle insecurity, and the country will be watching closely to see how he deals with this crisis. So far, he has emphasised the role of the security forces in locating kidnappers and releasing victims.

One thing he won’t be doing – not officially, anyway – is paying any ransoms. In 2022, in an effort to deter further kidnappings, the government criminalised the payment of ransoms, with a minimum jail term of 15 years for anyone found guilty of doing so.

“The government is not paying anybody any dime and the government is optimistic that these children and other people … will be brought back to their families in safety,” he said on Thursday.

Those families, who have called on the government to do more, do not appear to share the president’s optimism.

This article first appeared in The Continent, the pan-African weekly newspaper produced in partnership with the Mail & Guardian. It is designed to be read and  shared on WhatsApp. Download your free copy at thecontinent.org

Mohammed Ibrahim, an official of the state’s liquor licensing board, announced the ban in December. Days later, after a backlash from liquor sellers, the state governor called it a “false pronouncement” and instructed security agents to arrest Ibrahim.

But the local government chairperson of Suleja, which is home to more than 260 000 people, has insisted on the ban and is enforcing it.

The kerfuffle highlights the complexities of alcohol regulation in Nigeria where drinkers spent 600  billion naira ($399  million) on beer in the first half of 2022 alone, according to the Vanguard newspaper.

That figure — equivalent to 4% of the Nigerian federal government’s 2022 budget — was based on the sales reported by the country’s four biggest brewers and didn’t include informal and small brewers.

In 2018, the World Health Organisation reported that more than half of Nigerians over the age of 14 drink alcohol, with 60% being heavy drinkers who consumed in one sitting more than the equivalent of five beers at least once a month.

One driver of such habits is the ubiquity of alcohol. Last year, a study in parts of Abeokuta city in Ogun State found that some areas had as many as 200 alcohol outlets per square kilometre.

“We found only two schools and three religious institutions located further than 600m from an alcohol outlet. The shortest distance from an outlet to a school was 18.77m and 44 schools were located within less than 100m of an alcohol outlet,” said researcher Ogochukwu Odeigah, a psychology lecturer at Chrisland University in Ogun.

“Each alcohol outlet people pass serves as a visual reminder of alcohol consumption, possibly shaping collective norms by suggesting that a higher percentage of people drink alcohol,” Odeigah said.

But that ubiquity also represents jobs, as well as tax and licensing income for states and the federal government. 

“The average Nigerian who waits tables at hotels and establishments in order to feed and sustain himself and his family … would be forced out of a job,” said Okosisi Atama, who chairs the association of hoteliers in Suleja, where the ban is still in effect.

Atama also argued that banning alcohol can be divisive along ethnic and religious lines. Non-Muslim people could interpret it as an attempt to nationalise the teetotal tenets of Islam, which is more established in the north than elsewhere in Nigeria. These sensitivities have led to a significant regulatory gap.

It’s not that there is no regulation. This month, the National Agency for Food and Drug Administration and Control started enforcing a 2022 ban on alcohol packaged in sachets and tiny bottles.

But piecemeal regulation is not enough in a country with an “exponentially increasing young population”, said Odeigah.

She recommended a national law on alcohol that sets when and where alcohol can be sold; mandatory health warnings on alcohol products; restrictions on how much pure alcohol one drink can contain; and widespread campaigns guiding people on low-risk drinking.

Any federal law would need to flexibly allow states to pass their own local legislations and have local licensing committees, to work around the cultural and religious differences that make implementing federal laws and policies difficult.

For comprehensive national regulation, authorities would have to look beyond the taxes and liquor licence fees they earn from the alcohol industry and, Odeigah said, to “the larger social and public health cost of alcohol use”.

But, she added: “The alcohol industry has been lobbying the government aggressively against the formulation and implementation of alcohol policies that would affect alcohol consumption or harm the industry.”

The deep-pocketed lobbyists typically win.

This article first appeared in The Continent , the pan-African weekly  newspaper produced in partnership with the Mail & Guardian . It’s designed to be read and  shared on WhatsApp. Download your free copy at thecontinent.org

It’s an area of constant innovation, from rallies in mega stadiums to billboard adverts and pamphlets handed out in minibus taxis. The new frontier is technology.

In South Africa in 2016, British public relations firm Bell Pottinger used an army of Twitter bots to stir up racial tensions. Their “white monopoly capital” campaign amplified the sentiment that white people in South Africa were hoarding wealth, while depriving black people of jobs.

Fake accounts would tweet hate. This would then make its way into society at large. And this distracted people from the clients of that campaign, brothers Ajay, Tony and Atul Gupta, who were working with then- president Jacob Zuma to systematically loot the country’s state entities, such as its already struggling energy utility, Eskom. The slick operation was eventually revealed and the fallout contributed to the collapse of Bell Pottinger.

Using this playbook, honed in the election of Donald Trump and the campaign to pull Britain out of the European Union, companies have been selling their manipulation skills across the continent. Their success is despite more than half of people in 38 African countries having no internet access.

Platforms like Facebook have been slow, or loath, to respond.

Ahead of the 2017 Kenyan election, automated bots on Twitter accounted for more than a quarter of the most influential accounts discussing the election, according to research by consulting company Portland Communications. Countries like Lesotho, Equatorial Guinea and Senegal saw a similar influx. The research found that these accounts had more of an impact than the accounts of politicians and their campaigns.

These “served primarily to agitate, pushing negative narratives about major issues, candidates, and perceived electoral abnormalities.” After the elections, many had their election content deleted, said the report.

Facebook employees and researchers at the Stanford Internet Observatory revealed in 2019 that a firm tied to the Russian mercenary Wagner Group was running a network of at least 73 Facebook pages targeting Africans.

The pages blasted over 8,900 posts, praising controversial figures like Libyan warlord Khalifa Haftar or flattering incumbents in Cameroon, the Central African Republic, Côte d’Ivoire, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Madagascar, Mozambique, and Sudan. Facebook removed the pages but not before they had garnered over 1.7-million likes.

Ahead of Uganda’s 2020 election, Meta deleted 32 pages, 220 user accounts, 59 groups, and 139 Instagram profiles promoting President Yoweri Museveni. These focused on smearing support for his opponent Kyagulanyi Ssentamu (aka Bobi Wine) as “hooliganism”.

Facebook found that a few individuals at a government office and PR firms had used fake or duplicate accounts to manage these disinformation assets, a practice that the platform labels as “inauthentic coordinated behaviour”. Facebook was banned in Uganda for deleting the network and remains inaccessible without the use of a virtual private network (VPN).

In the DRC, people connected to political figure Honoré Mvula created fictitious personas to run 63 accounts on Facebook, as well as 25 Instagram accounts. The US-based Digital Forensic Lab reported that the Mvula network started as “pour le buzz” accounts – pages and groups impersonating celebrities or their fans. Once they had followers, they were renamed and their starter content was deleted.

Heading a “movement of young Congolese intellectuals,” Mvula campaigned for President Félix Tshiskedi in the 2018 election that brought him to power. Meta deleted the accounts in 2020.

In Kenya, with its vocal Kenyans on Twitter community, researchers at the Mozilla Foundation uncovered a network of 3,700 Twitter accounts which pushed at least 11 paid disinformation campaigns. Over two months in 2021, these blasted out over 23,000 tweets attacking journalists, civil society and public workers like judges.

In Nigeria in 2022, a BBC investigation found that political actors were secretly paying social media influencers as much as $43,000 to spread disinformation against their opponents ahead of the February general elections.

Because it is straightforward to create fake accounts and garner a following for them, campaigns like this are widespread. And this is before generative AI, which is predicted to become a big player in elections this year – 2024 will have more elections than any year in history.

As The Continent reports in an interview with Maria Ressa, the technology dramatically increases the capacity of groups that want to manipulate things like elections, and the regulation to stop this is falling behind.

This article first appeared in The Continent, the pan-African weekly newspaper produced in partnership with the Mail & Guardian, which is designed to be read and shared on WhatsApp. Download your free copy here.

Usually the residents deal in cocoa, for which the town is a major collection point, or buy and sell yams, cassava, corn, rice, palm oil and kernels, pumpkins and okra. But last week, the air was thick with grief, shock and anger.

On 5 June, Pentecost Sunday, gunmen stormed St Francis Xavier Catholic Church and opened fire on congregants, leaving 40 people dead and 87 others injured.

“I first saw a dark man. He shot twice and I ran into the church, shut the door and shouted that everyone should lie on the floor. Shortly after, they came into the church and started shooting indiscriminately. They also used explosive devices. I was on the floor till they left,” said a witness, who asked not to be named.

A 12-year-old, who went to church with her grandmother, said, “We had almost ended the service. The Reverend Father was about to say the grace when we started hearing gunshots.” 

The girl joined other congregants who fled the church. “People were going out through the window and jumping the fence. I joined them and I ran to Iloro before I remembered my grandmother was still in the church.”

After the shooters left, the girl ran back to the church and found her grandmother near the door. 

“I called on one man to help me lift her so we could rush her to the hospital but he said she can’t make it. A few minutes later, she died,” the girl recounted.

Inside the church, 48 hours after the attack, charred body parts, debris, abandoned shoes and Bibles were strewn about. The lectern and the pews were broken and the smell of blood filled the church.

Many residents have left the town to stay with friends or relatives elsewhere. Business activities are paralysed, especially around Owaluwa Street, where the church is located. Some of the shops on the street were owned by victims of the attack or their relatives. 

On Tuesday, the women of the Owo marched through the streets, raining curses on the attackers. Their procession ended at the palace of the area’s monarch, Oba Ajibade Gbadegesin Ogunoye III. 

He asked the people of the town to remain calm, saying the government and the traditional authority are doing their best to bring the terrorists to book. 

Many authorities, local and international, have released statements condemning the attack. 

The United Nations secretary general, António Guterres, urged Nigerian authorities “to spare no effort in bringing the perpetrators to justice”. 

The Pope said it was an “act of unspeakable violence” by “those blinded by hatred”. 

In a broadcast, Ondo state governor Arakunrin Oluwarotimi Akeredolu called the attack “vile and satanic”. 

And Nigeria’s president, Muhammadu Buhari, called the attack “a heinous crime” and vowed, “Nigeria will eventually win” and that “darkness will never overcome the light”.

But it’s scant relief for Ademola, a resident who ran to the scene immediately after the attack. 

“I was at home when I saw a girl running and shouting, ‘They are killing people in the church, they are killing people!’ I ran to the church. What I saw was unbelievable,” he said.

Some $360 000 has been donated to the victims and the church, the state governor said during a broadcast. 

Akeredolu also said the government would commit every available resource to hunting down the assailants.

So far, no arrests have been made and nobody has claimed responsibility for the tragedy, which Akeredolu described as “an attack on the collective psyche”. 

This article first appeared in The Continent, the pan-African weekly newspaper produced in partnership with the Mail & Guardian. It’s designed to be read and shared on WhatsApp. Download your free copy here.