Why jailbreaks, prison riots will never stop in Nigeria

Barrister Gabriel Giwa-Amu is known as a foremost crusader for prisons’ reforms in Nigeria.  In this interview with JULIANA FRANCIS, Giwa-Amu speaks on the last prison riot in Lagos, stressing why jailbreaks and riots will never stop.

He also speaks against the judiciary, insisting some judges and magistrates are not qualified for their positions. Excerpt

What is the cause of jailbreaks and riots in Nigerian prisons?

Congestion is an issue. It’s not the fault of the Nigerian prison service or the officers in charge of the various yards. Among their statutory duties, is to receive persons who ought to be kept in their custody on the orders of the courts or tribunals.

They don’t have the discretion to receive or not to receive such persons, except in cases where they don’t have the facilities to look after the person. Their other duty is to bring the person to court as at well due based on the warrant, sent to them by the court. The prisons are not entitled to keep lunatics. They’re not entitled to keep someone whose state of health can endanger other patients, for example, an Ebola patient.

There’s also the issue of the maltreatment of the inmates. When there’s a crowd of people, it becomes difficult to individualise contact with everybody. For example, the Medium Prison was built for 1, 300 inmates, it now has about 2, 800. It’s difficult for the Chief Warder or warder to enter into a personal relationship with the inmates. This is what the awaiting trial expect; after all, the court has not found them guilty. They regard it as maltreatment.

The feeding is an issue too. The contractor of the various prisons, who supplies foods, lives in Abuja. How do they determine the number of inmates they have to feed in the various yards? At the end of the day, the contractors’ supply two or three bags of rice or two bags of garri and feel they’ve done their bit. It’s this that necessitated the inmates wanting to feed themselves.

This is why the inmates now scramble for an opportunity to have stoves. They feel if you can’t feed us while we’re awaiting trial, we might as well feed ourselves.

Some officers in charge have been gracious enough to allow them, although it’s a breach of the standing order to allow stoves, pots and generating sets to inmates.

When you say maltreatment of inmates, do issues of sodomy, lesbianism and homosexuality come into the picture?

Such happens in every prison in the world, not just Nigeria! The prison is a different world entirely. Why do you expect a man who has been in custody for seven years not to spike his libido? You can get the truth from me, even if the prison authourity tells you they don’t have issues like. I have clients who speak to me about such things. I relate with them one-on-one. The officers in these prisons will not tell you what I’m telling you now. There’s high grand lesbianism and rampant homosexuality in the prisons. In South Africa, its worst!

What about female inmates who end up having babies in prison? Do you think it’s the prison warders who are responsible?

You want me to say that, but I would not say that! I’ll be very frank with you. Any seminar or convention I attend, they ask me this same question. I regret to inform, that’s not the case. In the female prison, you have wardresses. They are female warders. The way it is built, you hardly find a female making contact with a male. But sometimes in the past, there had been just one incident; about nine years ago, where a warder was alleged to have impregnated an inmate. That ended well because immediately after she was released, they got married. In the past four years or so, there was a case I know where an inmate’s impregnated a female wardress. Again, it ended well. They’re happily married today. There’s no law that says a wardress cannot marry an inmate.

There are some allegations that some warders’ sell smuggle Indian hemp into prisons and sell to inmates.

It’s true! A bag of Indian hemp in the Nigeria Prisons sells for N250.000, that same bag sells for N50.000 in the conventional market. The more difficult is it to take in, the higher the price. This year, a prison warder was convicted by justice Idris, given 21 years imprisonment for trafficking Indian hemp in maximum prison. It’s a known fact! And the former Deputy Comptroller of Prison (DCP) in charge of the Maximum Prison, Shinoye, did a wonderful job of checking trafficking. So did the former DCP of the Medium Prison, that’s Tunde Ladipo. Several times they bring out the raw seed and burn them outside. Aside from Indian hemp, they have cases of cell phones.

The most dangerous part is that SIM cards are put into watermelon, brought in by relation. You wouldn’t think any person would put in a SIM card inside watermelon. Incidentally, a client of mine was in court with us and at the time she was taken back to the yard, she had two Nokia phones inserted into her vaginal. They were tied neatly into nylon and inserted into her vaginal and she was in her period.

But for the diligence of the prison officers that day, she would have gone into the yard with those phones.

There are also allegations that charity materials brought for inmates are taken over by warders.

In every profession, we have the good, the bad and the ugly. In my profession, I can’t say all lawyers are as clean as the Pope. We have some rogue warders. They deviant from the norm. It’s not unusual to hear such things. Sometimes they pilfer, not just things brought to the inmates by the NGO, but even things supplied to them. So long as these matters are checked, it won’t become a permanent problem. That it happens, it’s not in doubt.

Why do people sent to prison to reform, come out worse? Sometimes they form robbery gangs inside the prison. Has the system failed in reformation?

In actual fact, in most prisons, we have gangs even in Brazilian and Mexican jails. The problem is that when you have congestion, you must have ways to dissipate the anger of these inmates. When you fail to maintain the prison, gangs now emanates. It’s all over the world.

We also heard that inmates stay inside prisons to organise robbery operations.

Yes! It’s possible.

Is it because the inmates were given the liberty of using phones?

It’s not a liberty, it’s trafficking! When you talk of liberty, it means it’s lawful. But this time, it was trafficking. An inmate once called me. He said he hoped I didn’t live in Oshodi, I said no. He said he was asking because there was a robbery there last night, from 12 to 3am. I didn’t know there was a robbery. I asked him if anybody was killed, he said he didn’t know, but that by tomorrow morning, he would give me a report of the casualties. I told him that I’ve recorded our discussion and that by tomorrow I would play it to the warder in charge of him. I reminded him that we were representing him pro-bono, that he should get another lawyer because I wouldn’t be out there, battling to release him, believing he was innocent, only for him to come and start looking for the number of people he had killed outside.

Do you know that incidentally, without any effort on our part, the CJ went there in the course of one of her visits, released that man. He had been there for eight years without trial. The good news about the matter was that he was killed in Ijebu-Ode in a robbery operation.

That’s just what I’ve been saying, the prison system has failed! These people are not being reformed.

No! No! Let me tell you, I’ve watched with interest the Minister for Interior, Mr. Abba Moro, saying that the prisons were built for reformation, rehabilitation and restoration. And I said to him, restore to what? Rehabilitate what? How do you restore a man who has spent six years in prison custody, only for him to be found, not guilty? How do you restore a person, who has lost all, including his family, property and everything!

If disbursement of funds is actually sent to the prison yards, there’s a lot that the officers at the prison yards can actually do in terms of rehabilitation. Unlike what is happening now. The aftercare section in the prison yard is dead. The rehabilitation section is also dead. What we have now, is just a dumpsite!

We heard that most of the prison structures had been there since colonial era.

The wall at Ikoyi prison fell. My brother there was told to go and source for money, to rebuild it. He was the officer in charge of that yard. He didn’t have money to rebuild it. He now used zinc to cover it until they came from wherever and rebuilt it. In Kirikiri, the soil there is marshy. It’s quick to sink. If you build a wall now, don’t be too sure you’ll see that wall by next year. These are issues they hadn’t looked at. There hadn’t been a violent jailbreak there, is not because of the height of the wall, but because of the characters of the officers and men there.

If 2000 inmates decide to push that wall down, it will fall! 171 warders as against 2,800 inmates, it would be a massacre!

What motivated you into fighting for inmates, taking their cases pro-bono and demanding for renovation of prison yards?

It gets to a stage in a man’s life, when it can’t be about you all the time. My brother initiated me into this prison ministry. My first experience when I visited prison was to discover that most of the inmates, awaiting trial, are innocent people. I was shocked. You can imagine a case, where a policeman has a dispute over a fan with his neighbour and simply because he works with Federal SARS, he organizes the arrest of his neighbour, charged him to court for armed robbery and the man stayed in prison for two years. Within those years, the man loses his job and his wife not wanting to wait further, married another man and the landlord throws out property of the man who was still in prison. This sort of story brings water to the eyes.

There was a case where a man visited his girlfriend and because her uncle didn’t like him, he arrested the man and charged him for armed robbery. He was in prison for five year. When you see such kind of cases, you’re bound to be touched. We now throw our backs behind indigent people, giving legal services pro-bono.

When we got in, we realized there was another problem. If you don’t want a dog handler to share of the food of your dog or starved your dog to death, you must look after the handler too.

Do you mean the warders?

Yes, the warders are the dog handlers! We found out that most of them are frustrated. They lacked what was needed to work. They needed motivation and equipment to work. As I speak with you, Nigerian Prison Service is not known to have a hospital of their own; they have clinics, dispensaries in the yards. But unlike other uniform agencies, like Navy Hospital, Military Hospital and even the police have their own.

You can imagine how frustrated a doctor that works with the Nigerian Prison will be, when all his patients are being taken to Navy hospital.

We said let’s do something. From the little resources we had, we did some minor repairs in the prisons. Those that didn’t have furniture, we supplied them.

In Ikoyi prison for instance, I was surprised to see an officer, writing on his laps. I asked him how much he had in his account. He said in his salary and personal accounts, nothing. I told him that I wanted him to buy table and chair for himself, so that I can refund him, but since he said nothing, we supplied him table and chair.

The things we supplied are worth about N12 million, but in the whole of Lagos State offices, about N18 million furniture. This doesn’t include vehicles and other items. I charged the Minister for Interior, that there was nothing he could tell me about prisons. I told him that we should visit some of the prisons. At Shagamu prison, the place was leaking and there were inmates who had not been taken to courts in the last two and three years. Yes! This is because they don’t have functional vehicles. As I speak with you, the ACG, which is equivalent to AIG Zone 2, doesn’t have a functional vehicle to take him to work.

The comptroller of Prison, Ogun State, doesn’t have a functional vehicle to take him to work. There are inmates in Abeokuta who saw court room a year ago. At Ukwale prisons, the officials take inmates to courts in motorcycles. In that same prison, we have men who are as old as 85 years, awaiting trial, for cases like house breaking. We released one in June this year.

Except the government takes a bold step, of actually setting up a serious minded committee, empowered to renovate the prisons and emphasized the role of the prison, we’ll still have these problems.

If you’re a prison warder, whose salary is just N35.000, and you have three kids and someone brought some bags of rice, what would you do with one bag of rice? Pastors say those who stay by the altar should feed by it and so also the warder, who stays by the gate of the prisons, should feed therein.

Recently you wrote a letter to President Goodluck Jonathan on the state of the prison. Has he replied you? We also heard that prisons have budgets

In papers, there’s a budget. Budget stops at Abuja, prison headquarters. I know for a fact that N40, 000 was what was paid to the Lagos State Command every month as allocation. What they’ve done now, is to make sure the contractors get paid in Abuja, so everybody focuses on Abuja.

I challenge any prison officer to an oath, to come and tell me if they’ve collected up to N500, 000 this year as allocations. And when there’s a jailbreak, there’s complain that these officers don’t know what they’re doing. They know what they’re doing.

As to whether the president replied my letter, I’ve always asked people how one tells a deaf and dumb man that his mother is dead. When we sent that letter, we were not expecting a reply. We just wanted awareness. Senate committee visited the prisons and gave a damming report. The prisons are not congested. It’s the awaiting trial sections that are congested. If you remove the awaiting trials, you’ll have enough rooms.

Why are we having so many awaiting trials? Why are so many innocent people on death row even though they had been through lawyers, magistrates and judges?

That the judicial system is bad is not in doubt! That we also have bad judges and magistrates is not in doubt. That we also have good ones is not in doubt. That administration of justice can be improved is equally not in doubt. We pray that the day will come, when the selection of judges, will not be based on personal relationship.

What about the qualification and character of the judges? There’re some judges, their favourite part time is to adjourn cases. We went to Ogudu Court and she adjourned to February next year. I know of a judge in Lagos State, who did not have a magistracy exam. But she’s a high court judge now. When you have such kind of people in the judiciary, what do you expect? It’ll be adjournment, upon adjournment. The Lagos State Government has done a bit of its own. It has passed laws; it remains to checkmate arbitrary adjournments.