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The birth and death of a local initiative: Challenges of and lessons from the ‘Bakassi’ Vigilante Group in Southeastern Nigeria

2006; Routledge; Volume: 11; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/13549830500396271

1469-6711

Lawrence Nchekwube Nwankwo,

American Constitutional Law and Politics

Violent crime has plagued Nigerian society. It is in this context that some traders in the southeastern part of the country put together the Bakassi Boys—a security apparatus to parallel the Nigeria Police. The Bakassi attracted both praise and criticism. In this paper, I review the Bakassi phenomenon as a local initiative that tried to integrate elements of the traditional cosmology and ways of policing in response to the escalation of crime. The Bakassi being a child of crisis, there were flaws in their operation. By exploring the lessons that one can learn from the Bakassi experiment and outlining the challenges that it poses, one might hope to harness the lessons of a local initiative that failed in order to respond better to the socio-political issues that engineered its emergence.