By Rotimi Fasan
I WOULDN’T know exactly what I was doing when I came upon the news. Perhaps, it was at one of those moments when one perfunctorily casts around to know the latest news out there. But the fact of the matter is that sometime last week I came upon this news item of a seven year old boy set alight somewhere in Badagry, Lagos State, for stealing garri.

Typical of a rumour, the exact place that gory incident supposedly happened would change severally as investigators and other interested persons subjected the story to scrutiny. On first encountering it, though, I experienced a visceral rejection of whatever sense of justice could have led a crowd to such an action. I could not for the life of me understand how anybody would sentence a child to death through such inhuman method simply for taking garri that he probably needed to stave off hunger. I doubted the story for the very reason given for that apparent lynching of a child. How could even a lawless crowd know that and still go ahead to perpetrate such act?

But even as I was riveted by this report, found it impossible to scroll past it, I was immediately suspicious of it. Something about it just didn’t seem to add up and I conducted a quick investigation. I zoomed in to view the image of the supposed child to be sure it was indeed a child. Sitting on his bare butt with face all bloodied in what looked like a replica of Super Eagles jersey, the person in the picture didn’t look to me like a child.

The person I saw looked like a grown man even though it was difficult to establish this as a fact given his semi-prone posture. I recall turning to my wife and telling her this could be another hoax.  The purpose? Perhaps just to stir up people’s emotion without good reasons. I was at that moment more interested in confirming if the person in that picture was a child as that would confirm for me how far we have fallen below the human ladder.

Which is not to say it makes one feel better if the report was about an adult. But we have seen people resort to such brutal measures so often as to only hope for that day when law enforcement agents would be allowed to do their job freely.

A particularly frightening instance of this kind of mob action involved four undergraduates a few years ago. They were set alight and burnt to death after somebody raised a false alarm about them being thieves. Their murder was allegedly supervised by a community leader and at least one police officer.  I was therefore more interested in knowing if that alleged latest victim of mass lynching in last week’s report was indeed a child. Once my suspicion was raised about the story I looked beyond it. I knew, given the manner it was being reported, that it would get some official response from the police if there was any truth to it.

There is so much terrible news out there on a daily basis. A lot of it has to do with violence against children and other defenceless persons. There seems to be an unseemly race to publish these accounts of inhuman violence every other second.

These are stories of fathers raping their own teenage daughters and procuring abortion for them in order to continue with the criminal act. Some of these activities go on sometimes with the knowledge and connivance of other adults including  some of the victims’ mothers. There are tales of pastors sleeping with two year olds, imams found with the remains of children or some parent or adult relation pouring hot water on children or lacerating parts of their body with razor blade and other sharp objects for whatever reason.

Since news of the lynching of the alleged child-thief broke the police have investigated and denied any such incident happened. Indeed, following initial police intervention the report started taking a different colouration. Suddenly it became difficult to establish where the incident occurred. It moved from Badagry to Orile, and from Orile to God-knows-where now. The person in the picture, we hear, is no more a child lynched for stealing garri but an adult who stole a phone and threatened his victim with violence.

Whatever are the details of that matter, it seems clear now that no child was lynched for stealing garri. The police have affirmed this and nobody has reported their child missing in the areas mentioned in the report.

This brings one some relief even as one looks to that time when we will resort less to mob action or mass hysteria on account of some false alarm or report of violecce. I have in recent times taken to scrolling past such news item of mindless violence against children. I consider them dangerous and too frequent exposure to them could inure readers to their abnormality and potential for mental disorder.

The grossly abnormal could gradually be made to appear normal and natural by too frequent exposure to it. And in this age of social media when anyone hiding somewhere with the cheapest means of communication could just post anything, reports of these type of activities have been taken beyond rational limit.

There is no doubt that the wide availability of news sharing platforms and other means of communication now makes it easy to expose these criminal acts and their perpetrators. Which may be good for society. But very few have the training to file reports of events or incidents in the right way to say nothing of doing so professionally. This is where we are today. We are beginning to see some of the pitfalls of citizen journalism. There are far too many people with access to disseminate messages, both dangerous and otherwise, via means of mass distribution that lack the training to do so.

Many times what is lacking is not so much training as is the right type of restrain. People just rush off to publish reports that have no verifiable source and have no hesitation in circulating them and inviting others to do the same thing.

What is more troubling is the manner these reports are filed with malice aforethought. And yet access is now being equated with right with the consequence that many of us are being whipped into hysteric activities by criminally-minded persons, mental cases and downright anarchists bent on causing mass confusion. We may have entered the time where as a society we should start looking at possible means of stemming the spread of toxic information on a large scale. This would begin when we behave responsibly and refuse to share reports of doubtful source.