Favouring the Poor Oppressor

“Do not twist justice in legal matters by favoring the poor or being partial to the rich and powerful. Always judge people fairly.”

(Leviticus 19:15, NLT)

If you were to have a random discussion with 100 persons about injustice in our society, you are sure to get sustained lamentations about the perversion of justice by wealthy persons who are able to bribe their way out of being punished for their crimes or have “connections” to get a judge to declare that white is actually black because both have five characters. What you are unlikely to hear is any complaint about injustice that favours the poor or powerless.

Have a broad look at the world as we currently know it. There is an implicit assumption that only the “rich” or “powerful” can be oppressors. This is why almost anyone or group that historically has been oppressed would get a free pass to become oppressors, whether they were a group that suffered from ethnic cleansing, a gender that was hitherto constricted, or a group that faced discrimination. When the bullied becomes a bully, our eyes turn away because we cannot seem to rationalise how to say that we need to defend someone from another person whom we used to defend.

Jumping rapidly into Nigeria, can you guess who would be blamed if a car were to collide with a pedestrian, a motorcycle (“okada”), a tricyle (“keke”) or even a rickety bus? The default assumption is that any accident must necessarily be caused by the “bigger” person. We seem to have gotten so aggrieved by oppression by the high and mighty that we ascribe their attributes to anyone who appears to be on a higher level than us. Where we do not blame the car owner, we expect him or her to move on and fix whatever damage might have been done to his or her car, and should there be serious damage to the okada or keke, the car owner is expected to defray the cost. After all, having a car means you have money, and the nicer the car, the more money you have handy to dole out.

In a situation where an aggrieved car owner complains about the illicit driving behaviour of an okada, keke or bus driver, it is common to quickly find a mob gathering and the self-appointed adjudicators would go from begging the supposedly wealthier person to forgive and move on, and where this fails, the tactic would switch to bullying the person by casting him or her as a very wicked person who wants to destroy the life of a poorer person by standing on his legally justifiable mandate in seeking repairs to be funded by the offending party. The assumption is that the car owner either has insurance or flush funds to fix any damage. Nobody worries whether the road is filled with broke persons driving nice cars or that someone might have money but suffer significant time losses in having to spend productive hours with an automobile mechanic.

Something similar plays out when an employee, either through wilful ignorance or malice, causes damage to an employer’s property. Where a company is involved, we would readily assume that it has money, hence, wonder why anyone would want to hold an errant employee responsible for damaging an item. Even when it is two people involved, we find a way to plead for their erring party to be forgiven without any expectation that the offender be sorry and seek to avoid a repeat offence in future.

In a society that cries about pervasive injustice, we arguably do not actually care about justice. All we want is to punish people who seem different from us. If not, the same energy we use in demanding that Mr A be punished for maltreating his staff would be used in demanding that Mrs B be punished for throwing refuse in the gutters and setting up her neighbourhood for damaging floods. And where we subscribe to the practice of forgiveness, then we should be open to forgiving anyone regardless of status. Anything beyond the fair application of justice would make us guilty of favouring the poor or being partial to the rich and powerful.

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