Tuesday, July 5, residents of Kuje Area Council in Abuja, startled to the shriek of the wild. Around 10pm, about a hundred gunfighters, of the Islamic State in West Africa Province (ISWAP), a splinter faction of Boko Haram, invaded the peace and quiet of the area. Their target was the Kuje Medium Security Custodial Centre.
Using explosives and guns, they breached the facility, leading to the escape of 879 of the 994 inmates on that Tuesday night. During the attack, they also freed 64 of their colleagues who were being held in detention.
For about three hours, they operated unhindered thus asserting to the world, their dreaded reach and might.
While the Tuesday attack may pass as one of many in recent times, it is instructive for both its fatality and resonance: five people were killed and 16 sustained grievous injuries.
“A total of 879 inmates escaped from the facility during the unfortunate attack. As at the time of this report, 443 have been recaptured, 551 inmates are currently in custody, 443 inmates are still at large,” disclosed spokesperson of the Nigeria Correctional Service (NCoS), Umar Abubakar.
According to him, the deceased include one security official of the Nigeria Security and Civil Defence Corps (NSCDC) and four inmates of the correctional facility.
The Islamic State in West Africa Province (ISWAP), a splinter faction of terrorist group, Boko Haram, has claimed responsibility for the attack.
The terrorists claimed the responsibility in a video released Wednesday night.
The 38 seconds video showed how some of its members shot their way into the Kuje prison.
Few months earlier, the Minister of Interior, Rauf Aregbesola, had boasted – through an aide, that, “anyone who attacks any correctional facility in Nigeria now is on a suicide mission.”
Presumably miffed by the slew of attacks on correctional centres across the country, Aregbesola, speaking through his Special Assistant on Innovation/Delivery, Ademola Adeyinka, read the riot act to prospective jail breakers.
Aregbesola’s boast, however, falls flat on the face in the wake of the Kuje Prison attack; when the minister bragged, he clearly wasn’t referring to ISWAP.
Although NCoS spokesman, Abubakar, disclosed that 443 inmates of the fleeing prisoners have been recaptured, the incident further highlights the shortcomings of Aregbesola’s leadership and management of Nigeria’s prisons service.
Despite Aregbesola’s claims otherwise, all is clearly not well with his administration of that sector of Nigeria’s interior. More than 7,000 inmates have escaped from Nigerian prisons since 2010; in the last 15 months, Nigeria has recorded about 15 jailbreaks, of which nine were successful.
The recent incident at Kuje prison is particularly worrisome, given the precision with which the ISWAP invaders operated at the facility. Tuesday’s attack on the prison revealed serious shortcomings in the security architecture of Nigeria’s correctional facilities on Aregbesola’s watch.
The lack of a functional Closed Circuit Television (CCTV) at the correctional facility makes it pretty difficult to gain retrospective views of the incident. As the Senate President, Ahmed Lawan, rightly noted while inspecting the facility after the attack, the lack of a functional CCTV means there is no record of what happened, save the narration of eyewitness – which could be highly unreliable.
“But if we had CCTV, at least the records would have been there and analysis made, and arrest will be based on the information from the CCTV,” he said.
The attack on the Kuje correctional centre could only have been possible with the collaboration of insiders within the nation’s correctional system, stressed Lawan, faulting the NCoS for not providing CCTV at the Kuje prison and others across the country.
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There is no gainsaying Tuesday’s attack on Kuje prison is an indication that the security architecture at the country’s prison, has failed. Nigeria’s penitentiary system has long been saddled with a multitude of problems.
More worrisome is the state of the facilities; the Nigerian penitentiary system is adjudged as one of the most overcrowded globally, with the country ranking 49th on a list of 206 countries in the World Prison Brief, published by the University of London’s Institute for Crime & Justice Policy Research.
The Ikoyi prison, built in 1955 for a capacity of 800 people, now accommodates approximately four times that number, according to recent findings.
By the official records of the Nigerian Correctional Service (NCoS), the current population of inmates across correctional facilities in the country is 70,237. This figure is way higher than the 57,278 inmates carrying capacity of correctional facilities in the country, as revealed by the Interior Minister, Aregbesola earlier in 2021.
The absence of a public security surveillance system has also placed the burden of ensuring security on manual monitoring by security personnel, who are underpaid and underequipped.
According to the NCS, there are currently 70,653 prisoners across 240 centres nationwide. Only a third of them have been convicted while the rest are filed under “awaiting trial”. The latter category is local legal parlance for suspects who have been jailed for years for petty crimes such as shoplifting and traffic offences without conviction. In some facilities, those “awaiting trial” represent up to 90 percent of the total prison population, whose true number is believed to be much higher than the official one.
“There are individuals in these facilities who don’t know when they are going to go out, some [are in] for offences that they would’ve been discharged even if they were convicted,” said Uju Agomoh, director at the Prisoners’ Rehabilitation and Welfare Action (PRAWA) group.
“So you see a situation where within, there is tension because of this disproportionate number of persons who have not been convicted and it begins to be overbearing on the infrastructure, cell spaces, water, health – everything.”
The consequences has manifested, overtime, in a series of riots by inmates over their subhuman living conditions, and incessant attempts at jail break at correctional centres across the country. This includes invasion by armed groups like ISWAP, Boko Haram and so-called unknown gunmen of southeast Nigeria.
Prior to the Kuje prison attack, the most recent jailbreak occurred on Sunday, November, 28, 2021, at the medium custodial centre in Jos, Plateau State.
A group of unidentified gunmen pretending to be on a visit to the facility engaged the officials in a shootout at the gate, to gain access into the facility, and subsequently released 262 inmates. At least 11 people died during the encounter including one security guard and 10 inmates.
This occurred in a facility bordered by security outfits such as the state Police Command, State CID, headquarters of Department of State Services, DSS, Police A Division as well as the Police and prison barracks. The gunmen engaged security agents in a shootout that lasted over an hour as residents and passersby scampered for safety.
It will be recalled that some inmates had earlier this year escaped from the facility that is situated in the heart of Jos City and were yet to be recaptured.
On October 19, 2020, the deputy comptroller of correction in charge of Oko Prison, West Amayo, said at 9 a.m., an attempt to break into the jail was repelled. The attack was unsuccessful. But two days after the Oko Prison attack, the Benin Prison located along the Benin-Sapele Road was attacked by hoodlums and a total of 1,993 inmates escaped from the two facilities.
In October 2019, a jailbreak was triggered by a flooding incident at the Koton-Karfe prison in Kogi, south of the capital, Abuja. More than 200 inmates escaped as floodwaters overwhelmed the prison fences, prompting Lazarus Ogbee, the federal politician heading a committee on reformatory exclamations, to say: “This nature of jailbreak is first of its kind in the whole world and to say the least, embarrassing.”
Correctional centres in Kogi have also been attacked by inmates and by Boko Haram, twice.
The attacks often result in many casualties. In the latest incident in Kuje prison, at least five people were killed and 16 were critically wounded.
It would be recalled that the Interior Minister Aregbesola, admitted recently that the facilities have “shot above the capacity by 18 percent.”
The former governor of Osun State, who called for an introduction of a parole system, also said some of the jails outside the big cities of Kano, Port Harcourt and Lagos are under-populated.
Till date, none of the measures flaunted by Aregbesola, including the NCoS name change, has been able to remedy the manifest shortcomings of the Nigerian penitentiary system.
According to him, “Sometimes you may not be able to forestall a jail attack 100 per cent. What we are concerned about is that if anybody escapes, they can only run from the law, they cannot hide from the law. That is what we are trying to achieve,’’ the minister said.
‘’For instance, the federal government has declared all custodial centres as critical national assets. And being critical national assets, we are mobilising extra armed guards to protect these national assets. We are not likely to experience any other jail attack in this country,” said Aregbesola few months ago, precisely December 2021.
Barely seven months after, ISWAP belies his claims, courtesy its attack on the Kuje correctional centre.