Too precious to expel?, By Uddin Ifeanyi

Arguably the easiest conclusion from the decision of the Nnamdi Azikiwe University, Awka to expel Goddy-Mbakwe Chimamaka Precious, over her gratuitous assault on a lecturer from the university’s Department of Theatre and Film Studies is that we are agreed on the need for punishment. Beyond this, though, since the case broke, public commentary has stumbled on the purpose, justification and ethical implications of punishment. By far the greater number of commentators, that I have read and listened to, have plumped for a punishment commensurate with the offence. Consensus seems to be that a university undergraduate, expected to be “worthy in character and learning” upon graduation, cannot have the instincts and morals of a pit bull terrier – and where s/he does civilised community ought not to provide support for this. Within this worldview, expelling precious was as much about sanitising the university space as it was about punishment. The university owed a duty of care to the remaining staff and faculty to deter Precious, herself from further malfeasances, and to discourage would-be Preciouses.

How do you recompense the lecturer for the savagery of being bitten by one he stood in loco parentis to? Have him bite her back? After all, Mosaic law (“lex Talionis “) would have wrongdoers suffer in proportion to the injury they occasion. Besides, simply for being on the wrong side of the rules by which the institution that she was until recently a member of, Precious deserved to be punished. And if, indeed, the arc of the moral universe bends to justice, as Martin Luther King Jnr. would have us believe, is punishment not an essential duty of justice? This latter argument is the more poignant when we all seem to agree that impunity and “anyhowness” in high and low places are banes of our development as a law-governed society. We cannot make the progress that we desire if we continue to be soft on all manner of crimes and the causes thereof. And if the “broken window theory” helps at all, then the larger misdemeanours that our society suffers from is the result of inadequate attention having been paid to the Preciouses of our world. Immanuel Kant thought this duty of justice independent of any social consequence.

But there are social consequences to punishment (as with everything human). This realisation is probably one reason why we changed the name of our prisons services to a correctional service. Punishment? Yes, by all means. But it ought not to be at the expense of the offending person’s forfeiture of the chance of redemption. In this case, the most persuasive argument is that Nigeria is a much better place if Precious has an education than if she does not have one; indeed there is no doubt that she would be a much better person educated than semi-literate. Aside from that, our challenge, as parents and policy thinkers, is to optimise the constraints that we face – as a people, as communities, and as a country. Thus phrased, for the female in this country, there are no bigger constraints to a positive outcome than lack of access to sound education.

Still, of the many domestic commentators who plumped for retributive punishment in this case, none, so far as I know, would have us take Precious to the guillotine. Whatever spectrum it inhabits, therefore, retributive justice has boundaries beyond which it may not reach. Is there, then, an ethical context to punishment? Rehabilitation, for instance? In a way that post-punishment, the offender is a no less useful member of our society than before the offence. Whatever the answer to this question, we may not deny the fact that even, when we take justice as a critical tool in the strengthening of our moral and legal norms, there is still space for restoration – to fix all injuries, instead of just deterrence and retribution.

Thus, would it not have been better for UniZik to have rusticated Goddy-Mbakwe Precious than to have expelled her? In other words, to give her time to have her parents take her to a psychiatrist over her anger management issues, and following that course of treatment and proven evidence of unpaid community work, she may then be appraised for re-admission at the end of the period of rustication. After all, evidence abounds that not only do systems of retributive punishment reinforce cycles of harm, they nearly never curtail recidivism.

Uddin Ifeanyi, journalist manqué and retired civil servant, can be reached @IfeanyiUddin.