Vice President Yemi Osinbajo is seeking the decongestion of the prisons in which over 70 percent of inmates are awaiting trial.
Everyone knows that Nigeria’s prisons are dreadful. Less obvious is the fact that over 70 per cent of people holed up in those woeful cells are awaiting trial. Then consider that the prisons have been overstretched for decades.
Vice President Yemi Osinbajo, a professor of law, is worried by this and seeks an overhaul of the criminal trial system so that the innocent are not locked up indefinitely.
Several administrations have tried to solve the problem but failed.
Prof Osinbajo has asked the Department for Public Prosecution (DPP) to look at how criminal cases are tried. He is also worried by the investigation of cases.
“If investigation is poor then the prosecution will be difficult, if not impossible. I am happy that the FCT chief judge is here, because we have a lot to do in criminal trial. Cases are unnecessarily adjourned. The prison system is just a warehouse for inmates…”
He said this in Abuja at the presentation of the Nigerian Prisons Survey Reports by the Nigeria Prison Service (NPS), in conjunction with the Prisoners Rehabilitation and Welfare Action (PRAWA).
Osinbajo expressed sadness that Nigeria does not have valid statistics hence the difficulty to carry out research that will answer questions within the criminal justice system.
He revealed that the Port-Harcourt Prison, originally designed by the British colonial masters to conveniently take 800 prisoners, currently has almost 5000 inmates.
Osinbajo also revealed that most of the colonial prisons built over 100 years ago across the country are now turning their inmates into animals due to their deplorable and gory conditions over the years.
Most of the prisons especially those built between 1830 and 1918 were said to be lacking rooms and operating as mere warehouses to accommodate inmates.
He said that for a long time the Nigerian Prisons were neglected by successive governments, thereby making their reformatory mandates to be defeated.
On the Port-Harcourt prisons with over 5000 inmates, the Vice President noted with regret that 3700 inmates are awaiting trial and have been locked up in the prison for over five years.
The Vice President who was represented at the occasion by the Minister of Interior, Lt. Gen. Abdulrahman Danbazzau said: “We do not have valid statistics and that is why it is difficult to carry out research that will answer some of the questions we have within the criminal justice system. And this is a very important reason why we have not been able to advance and make progress within the system.
“I was in Port-Harcourt and I used my stay there to visit Port-Harcourt Prison built in 1918 by our colonial master. What I saw was gory because the prison has no rooms but just serving as warehouse for the over 5000 inmates accommodated in it instead of 800 inmates designed as capacity for the prison.
“From my finding, they say no room for prisoners and any human being that goes there would come back as an animal. My finding also reveals that prisons have been neglected over the years by the successive administration at the expense of the inmates.
“It is however a thing of joy that President Muhammadu Buhari has shown keen interest in prison reform and has carried out tremendous progress on prison rehabilitation even though funds are not there.”
The Comptroller General of NPS, Ahmed Jaafaru also noted that lack of data on inmates over the years was responsible for the congestion of Prison, but he however thanked the Presidency for unprecedented intervention and the National Assembly for improvement in budgetary allocations to the Nigerian Prison Service.
The Chairman of the Board of PRAWA Chief Gabriel Tobi, described the Survey Report presentation as a momentous occasion because the issue of over-crowding of the prison would be urgently looked into when the reports are being implemented.
He called for multi-sectoral cooperation among security agencies and those in the administration of criminal justice to rise to the challenges and give each other supports that would impact on the Prison reforms in the country.
The Chief Judge of the Federal Capital Territory Judiciary, Justice Ishaq Bello noted that Nigerian Prison failed in the reformatory mandates issued out during their establishment but however called on appropriate authorities to help give legal needs to inmates in the Prisons.
He commended PRAWA for its leading initiatives in conducting the survey and compiling the report with the assistance of experts and appealed to other relevant bodies to follow the gesture of the organisation.
