Nigeria, Dec. 29 -- What happened to Dr. Don Pedro Obaseki in Benin City yesterday being the last Sunday of the year should unsettle anyone who still believes Nigeria is governed by law rather than by mob instincts wrapped in culture. A man was publicly beaten, paraded, and humiliated on the claim that he violated the "tradition of the land." No court. No due process. No restraint. Just punishment by spectacle. That alone should force an uncomfortable national conversation we have postponed for too long: where does tradition end, and where must the law begin? The foregoing question is what not a few Nigerians keep dodging, and every time they dodge the question, barbarity finds fresh oxygen.

Across the country, especially in cosmopolitan...