Description

NOTHING signposts a debased and dysfunctional society with a growing population in conflict with sanity more than the spate of acts of criminality in this country. While nothing justifies crimes, a nation-state reputed for multidimensional poverty among its people would naturally be expected to have its own fair share of criminals thrown up by the imperatives of economic survival. However, if it is conceded that some undisciplined and less than resilient citizens with low moral fibre could buckle under economic pressure and resort to desperate measures and precipitate actions in order to survive, how does anyone explain a grave anti-social conduct like sexual violence? Is that, too, driven by hunger and want? It is within this context that the burgeoning descent into lawlessness in the country deserves to be thoroughly interrogated. For instance, how does anyone explain the recent reports of the apprehension of two middle-aged men by the Ondo State Police Command for raping and killing two elderly women in Ondo State?

The two suspects who were employed as farm labourers allegedly committed the offences separately in Akure, the state capital, as well as in Costain, Ore axis in Odigbo Local Government Area of the state. Farm hands who evidently have enough economic and financial issues to contend with committing rape and murder? Those are grave criminal acts fuelled by moral depravity and insanity; they have nothing to do with the need to survive by the perpetrators. Sadly, these are the kinds of scenarios that will continue to play out when leaderships of different hues in the society—government, corporate, traditional, religious, and family—have chosen to superintend over the near total collapse of the moral value system. For some time, there has been gradual loss of commitment to what should ordinarily constitute the shared values amongst citizens such as orderliness, decency, decorum and so on. The consequence is the emergence of a preponderance of aberrant characters who are undisciplined and totally bereft of the capacity to weigh the implications of their criminal and anti-social conducts before plunging head-long. And unfortunately, there has been insufficient, credible counter-action by security agencies to stem the growing slide into massive insecurity thrown up by both moral and economic challenges.