Uju Agomoh, the executive Director of one of Nigeria’s best known credible civil society organizations, Prisoners Rehabilitation and Welfare Action (PRAWA), has done a lot of advocacy activities around the issues of the illegality of prolonged detention of mentally challenged persons in the heavily dilapidated, derelict and decrepit archaic infrastructure we today call Nigerian Prisons.

In several speaking events around Nigeria, Uju Agomoh, who is vastly travelled globally, has canvassed an end to the unconstitutional practice of detaining persons who are mentally challenged in the antiquated prison facilities in Nigeria that are lacking in medical and/or psychiatric facilities. Sadly, the political administrators heading the highly incompetent Ministry of Interior don’t give a damn about what to do to change this evil status quo.

Many years after Mrs. Agomoh kick-started her campaign to end the impunity of detention without medicare of persons afflicted with mental retardation, this tireless human rights advocate may have finally gotten the institutional support of the Federal Government because a recently released 2012 prison audit report by the National Human Rights Commission of Nigeria which was publicly validated by the National Assembly of Nigeria and other leading human rights stakeholders, disclosed that there are many persons that are mentally challenged who are detained in prisons across the country who ought not to be there in the first instance.

With the 2012 Prison Audit Report publicly presented in the nation’s capital, it is believed in critical cycles that the President Good luck Jonathan-led administration would activate effective mechanism to release these persons with mental illness in Nigerian prisons to be treated in psychiatric hospitals spread across Nigeria.

Conversely, it is also expected that since most of these lunatics in Nigerian prisons were sent to those prison facilities by the justice ministries and prosecutorial institutions working for the various state governments whereby this ugly phenomenon is noticed, these state governments must take immediate action to release and medically rehabilitate these category of hapless inmates.

The National Assembly and the state Houses of Assembly must also introduce effective legal framework to make it almost impossible for lunatics to ever be sent to prisons rather than sent to psychiatric medical facilities for attention. As it is, the current bunch of politicians at the state levels are not in the right frame of mind to effectively carry out this revolutionary project of ensuring that lunatics are taken to the appropriate psychiatric facilities for proper treatment and rehabilitation and not locked up in the prisons to die.

In the year 2012 Prison Audit Report introduced to the public by the National Human Rights Commission of Nigeria, some of the prisons audited across the country had mentally ill inmates in detention, despite the fact that these facilities have no qualified psychiatrics or the facility to take care of their special need.

For instance, in the North East Zone 4 out of 37 prisons had 20 mentally ill inmates in prison. In the North West they were 50, while in the South South they were 79. Also, in the South West, they were 121, while 289 were found in the South East zone, with Enugu having 136.

Lunatics in Nigerian prisons are as follows: South South 79; North East 20; North Central 44; South West 121; North West 45; and South East 363; making a total of 672.

There are other sad tales from the prison audit report which importantly stated that sanitation of those prison facilities has become so bad and deteriorated thereby exposing many of these prison inmates to unfathomable health predicaments.

On state of sanitation of Nigerian prisons, the report has it that “though there is every effort by the inmates to keep the cells clean and tidy, the age of the infrastructure (some of these prisons were built in 1925) and overcrowding in some cells frustrated the effort. In most of the prisons, the water cistern toilets were broken and there was no water to flush after use in some instances.

“In some, they used the bucket system and that created a lot of stench in the cells. Some of the prisons where the bucket system of toilet is still in use are Gassol and Serti prisons in Taraba State, and Misua prison in Bauchi State; Oturkpo in Benue State, Pankshin in Plateau State and Ilorin in Kwara State. In some other instance there exist sewage system, the sewage systems were either broken or filled up. The prisons also lacked basic toiletries like soap or disinfectants.”

The report which rightly criticised this bad state of sanitation of these prisons, reminded the Nigerian authority thus: “The UN Standard Minimum Rules on the Treatment of Prisoners and other International, Regional or National laws have set a benchmark for the treatment of prisoners. In each of these human rights instruments, it is stated that prisoners are to be accorded with dignity and human being shall not be treated in a dehumanising manner, even when his/her freedom to liberty has be taken away by the instrument of law.”

Writing specifically with reference to what they observed, the report is of the opinion: “The standard of facilities in the Nigerian prisons are appalling, to say the least. Most of the prisons audited lacked facilities that would aid the wellbeing of the inmates as well as the reintegration of inmates back in the society after their release from prison.”

The report also observed that most prison facilities in Nigeria are deficient in vocational; Recreational; health; educational and transport facilities.

Substantially, the findings of the investigators who visited the 173 prison facilities all across Nigeria, show that Nigeria has failed to respect international humanitarian and human rights laws in the administration of these facilities.

According to the report, “The dignity of the human person is an inherent right. In Furtherance of that, the need to adhere to minimum standard in protecting the welfare of inmates cannot be overemphasized. Despite the fact that the inmates are legally deprived of their freedom of movement, their right to the dignity of the human person cannot and need not be compromised. Section 34 of the 1999 Constitution (as amended), provides that “every individual is entitled to respect for the dignity of his person.” Similarly, the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights provide as follows: “All persons deprived of their liberty shall be treated with humanity and with respect for the inherent dignity of the human persons.”

The report passed a vote of no confidence on Nigerian prisons thus: “It was observed during exercise that the wellbeing of the inmates was far from the minimum standard provided under the laws.”

Nigerians are also aware that of late, a lot of prison wardens have lost their lives to the violence viciously launched by armed terrorists who have successfully organised jailbreaks to free their detained members and the Federal Government has made no concrete effort to build better protected prisons. This criminal neglect on the part of government is a grave crime against humanity. The plan by the National Assembly constitution review committee to transfer prison from the exclusive legislative list to the concurrent is not the best way out as most state governments are too poor to run good prisons.

With the above background in mind, it is therefore inexplicable that the Federal Government rushed into lobbying the National Assembly to amend the Prison Act without introducing bold, positive and revolutionary ideas that will change the face of the prisons and improve the security and welfare of the inmates and officials. This government has succeeded in signing an agreement with Britain that will allow for the prisoners’ exchange partnership with the government of United Kingdom to make it easier for Britain to transfer Nigerian-born but United Kingdom-based persons convicted for sundry crime in the United Kingdom back to Nigeria to serve out their prison terms.

The question to be asked is why rush to accept heavy indirect financial bribe from the government of Britain just so that Nigeria can accede to the prisoners exchange programme aimed at decongesting the British prisons that are built with modern and functional infrastructural facilities when Nigerian prisons are in very bad shape and overstretched?

Even going by the recent prison audit report, Nigerian prisons are over-populated even as majority of the inmates are awaiting trial persons.

“Across the prisons the number of Awaiting Trial inmates was far above that of convicts. In the 173 prisons audited, out of 50,645 lockups, the number of convicts was 13,901 compared to awaiting trial inmates of 35,889. Besides the awaiting trial inmates, Ikom prison in Cross River State had 5 lodgers, Ahoada Prison in Rivers State and Benin prison in Edo State, had 2 and 1 lodgers respectively; (lodgers are persons kept in prison without an order of court detaining them. There are no records of such inmates in the prison records).”

I therefore ask, are these derelict prison facilities in Nigeria the places whereby these repatriated British based prisoners be transferred into?

It would be recalled that when this sinister move by government to sign the controversial prisoners exchange treaty with the United Kingdom was exposed, most critical stakeholders opposed it and raised suspicion that the then federal government headed by late Umaru Musa Yar’Adua only wanted to rush the agreement so as to find a way to bring back the incarcerated former Delta State governor James Ibori (Yar’Adua’s political friend) who was jailed in Britain for sundry offences bordering on theft of Delta State fund.

With these sad tales emanating from the Nigerian prisons, it is therefore inconceivable that any British based Nigerian prisoner could voluntarily accept to be repatriated to serve term in prisons facilities in Nigeria that are absolutely sub-human and filthy.

•RIGHTSVIEW appears twice a week on Tuesdays and Saturdays. The Columnist, popular activist Emmanuel Onwubiko, is a former Federal Commissioner of Nigeria’s National Human Rights Commission and presently National Coordinator of Human Rights Writers’ Association of Nigeria (HURIWA).

Update news