Minister of Interior, Comrade Abba Moro, is reported to have approved the sack of 50 prison officers, purportedly indicted in the numerous cases of jailbreak across the country, during which hardened criminals were reported to have escaped. The minister warned that henceforth, any officer on whose watch such occurs again will be severely punished.
Much as we empathise with the minister over the embarrassing jailbreaks, we wish to emphasise that making the prison officials scapegoats is an attempt to gloss over what we had earlier pointed out as being the shame of the nation. In our opinion, the jailbreaks are actually a manifestation of deep-rooted malaise the federal authorities have resisted every effort made to get them to address in a comprehensive manner.
The jailbreak incidents and the frequency with which they occurred are clear evidence of the rot in the system. The officers who are put in charge of the prisons and the prisoners and who are now being made to bear the brunt of a collective systemic failure are, in our view, mere victims of circumstance. A visit to the nation’s prisons will convince anyone that it is, indeed, the minister and the top echelon of the penitentiaries’ authorities that ought to lose their jobs. The sheer neglect, dilapidation of the structures and the pervasive state of abandonment of these ‘correctional homes’ will convince any visitor that they are rather homes established to bend the minds of the inmates towards sophisticated criminality.
Most of the nation’s prisons, if not all, were put in place by the colonial masters. Since independence, beyond the cosmetic repainting of the exteriors, there has been no concerted effort to really upgrade the facilities to make them serve the purpose for which they were established – which is to correct anyone unfortunate enough to find his or her way into any of them for whatever reason. Beyond the infrastructural decay, the morale of these same officials is so low that in some cases, it is difficult to differentiate between the wardens and the prisoners. It is no longer an allegation that prison officials convert to their personal use food, medical and other welfare items meant for the inmates. It is our conjecture that they are not doing so because they are callous, wicked or for that matter, corrupt. We imagine that it is their own way of getting back at a system that has consistently looked down on the role they play in the whole set-up.
We are not trying to justify that obvious malfeasance, but it is our view that the government must stop looking for scapegoats and indulging in other unhelpful approaches to solving what is decidedly a national disgrace, and do what is necessary to remedy the situation.
