#HOMILYFROMTHEPEW

It is no longer news that Professor Jason Arday is gone.

It is no longer news that he endured what we now name social media lynching.

It is no longer news that in the last nine days of his life, one hundred and eighty-eight articles were published on Jason Arday, and that before the comments that swarmed beneath them and the countless random posts beyond.

It is no longer news that our society has already moved on, as though humanity were not diminished by his passing.

It is no longer news that the timeline is already hunting its next victim.

It is no longer news that in this mob, this jungle justice online, no one takes responsibility.

It is no longer news that our laws have not matured enough to trace the source of such inhumanity to man.

It is no longer news that those left behind, his family, his friends, now carry a weight so many are calling avoidable.

Everything that matters in this case sits in plain sight. Nothing is hidden. So if all of this is no longer news, what makes this homily worth your morning?

He was the youngest Black professor Cambridge had ever seen. For weeks the press dissected his doctorate and the claims of his life. He resigned on the fifth of August; nine days later he was found dead in a London flat, forty-one years old. The police call his death unexpected, though not suspicious. His family calls it the breaking of a gentle man, worn down by a campaign of harassment and misinformation that became too much to bear.

Accused, he was guilty before any trial. Innocent until proven guilty had already tendered its resignation. Every chapter of his life, even the boy who did not speak until he was eleven, was ransacked for a lie. And every man has a breaking point. The onslaught was simply too much.

I met jungle justice early. Growing up in Ado-Ekiti and later in Ondo, I saw men accused in public squares, chased by a mob, crowned with a used tyre, and set ablaze, gone before anyone asked a single honest question. In 1983, I was thirteen when Ondo State was set on fire over an alleged stolen mandate, the disputed contest between Chief Adekunle Ajasin and Chief Akin Omoboriowo. I saw houses burn. I saw men killed for their politics.

But the old jungle justice carried a weakness: it could be seen. The mob had a face, a street, a boundary. And so the law could still reach it.

It reached the killers of the Aluu Four, Ugonna, Lloyd, Chiadika and Tekena, four University of Port Harcourt students falsely branded thieves, beaten and burned on 5 October 2012 while phones filmed it all. Nearly five years later, a Rivers State High Court sentenced three of their killers, a police sergeant among them, to death.

It reached the men in Kano who, in 2023, hacked a sixty-seven-year-old woman to death because one of them had dreamt she was a witch. In 2025 the court sentenced five of them to hang.

Here, then, is the true news. Man’s appetite to take the law into his own hands has not died; it has grown sophisticated, accelerated by social media into a new pandemic, bigger than COVID.

Jungle justice was once called the mark of the primitive place, a symptom of the developing world. No longer. Today it cuts across every culture, every level of education, every religion. The lettered and the unlettered, the devout and the godless, almost all of us, consciously or not, are now implicated. It has metastasised like a stage-four cancer, reaching organs we believed were safe.

Consider the paradox. Revolution after revolution drew us upward toward civilisation, the steam engine, the machine, the computer. Yet the Fifth Industrial Revolution, for all its staggering gifts of social, economic and human advancement, has done what none before it did: it has enlarged not our reach but our appetite to be inhuman to one another, almost cancelling out its own benefits. Our world has become a keypad jungle, travelling at speed back toward the state of nature, a global retrogression in which we engage our fingers before we engage our souls and our humanity. A man now strikes at the speed of thought, no editor, no law, no restraining hand between the impulse and the blow. The old mob needed a street; the new one needs only a keypad in the corner of a quiet room, no boundary, no pressure, no fear that justice will ever knock. Jungle justice has gone global: a phenomenon of millions, even billions, all sharpening the same knife of words.

My forefathers saw this danger long before the keypad was ever imagined.

Tá a bá ń jà, bí ká kú kọ́, to fall out with a person is not to wish them dead. That we disagree does not licence us to send one another to the grave.

And this is where the pew must speak.

“He that is without sin among you, let him first cast a stone.” (John 8:7)

We are quick to see the speck in another’s eye and slow to feel the log in our own. (Matthew 7:3–5)

“Brethren, if a man be overtaken in a fault… restore such an one in the spirit of meekness; considering thyself, lest thou also be tempted.” (Galatians 6:1)

We forget that we too are weak, that we too stumble, that our struggles are simply not yet on public display.

Let me be clear about what I am not saying. Our peace as a people must never be hostage to the applause or the silence of the crowd; a man’s worth is not for the mob to decide. But that is precisely why the mob must be resisted, because when a person’s struggles, real or alleged, are dragged into the light, that becomes our moment to sow. And whatever a man sows, he reaps. (Galatians 6:7) Sow empathy, and you will reap it. Sow a kind word. Sow mercy, “for the merciful shall obtain mercy.” (Matthew 5:7)

I write this also as a father. Twice in two months, my four-year-old son has had a rough encounter with man’s inhumanity to man. Because his world is still within what I can see and shape, I have resolved to prepare him, not to answer meanness with meanness, but to become the beauty he wants to see. As Gandhi is so often quoted, an eye for an eye only leaves the whole world blind. That is my #50PlusDad reflection tomorrow.

But the deeper lesson is for all of us. Our homes, our schools, our communities have too often become breeding grounds for those who find pleasure in bullying others. And so I say again what I have said for thirty years: the solution to bullying is not suspension from school, nor chastisement at home, nor sanction in our places of worship or communities. All of these are reaction, and reaction is not culture. We do not punish children into culture. We do not discipline them into culture. Culture is built the only way it ever has been: by the example we ourselves show. Enlightenment is Superior to Enforcement®. The solution is to teach empathy, to help our children know that the world is a beautiful place, and that its beauty begins with who they choose to be within it.

I am not surprised that in Denmark, since 1993, every child between six and sixteen sits for one hour each week in Klassens tid, “class time,” learning to listen, to feel with one another, to carry each other’s burdens. Empathy, it turns out, can be taught. Cruelty, clearly, can be learned. We are simply choosing the wrong teacher.

May we choose mercy, while it is still called today.

MinistryofClarity

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Follower of Christ. Husband. Father. Egalitarian. Goodwill Investor. Attorney. Author. Thriver. Culture-Edge Family Strengthening and Child Safeguarding Pioneer, Innovator and Practitioner. Value-Based Parenting Ideologue. Change Agent. Rebel with a Cause. Three Decades in the Saddle.