Guest writer Femke van Zeijl chronicles her experiences at a Magistrate’s Court in Lagos.]
He looks up to the clear blue sky and then across the street, to the big green prison gate he just emerged from. He still feels like he is dreaming. The same way he felt his first night in detention, exactly two years, three months and two weeks ago: as if someone had played a cruel joke on him. But he is not dreaming. His name was on the list that the Lagos State Chief Judge called out this morning. After all this time in Kirikiri prison without ever seeing his case in court, he is free to go.
When you enter Kirikiri Medium Security prison, a board on the wall gives the total number of inmates: 2555. Underneath this number it states how many of them are convicted: 98. And on the third line it affirms that 2457 of those are awaiting trial, about 96 percent of the prison population.
When she was inaugurated some years ago, the Chief Judge decided to do something about this. She installed the Prison Decongestion Committee to look at cases of pre-trial inmates eligible for release, either because the time they’ve already spent in prison is longer than the sentence they’d get if they were eventually convicted, or because there is no evidence to build a case on. Since then the Chief Judge has released an unprecedented number of 750 inmates, some of whom had been awaiting trial for nine years. At the time of this report, as part of the beginning of the new legal year, she visited several Lagos prisons and freed about 250 inmates.
The freshly released prisoner who couldn’t believe his luck was one of them.
‘How far. Na me wey dey play ball. I don commot. Them release me for amnesty.’ Inside Kirikiri they all know him as one of the best football players in the prison. So that’s how he introduces himself when he borrows a cell phone to call a friend he met in there, to see if he can stay with him in Lagos on his first night outside. The footballer has nowhere else to go and not a kobo on him.
According to him, his arrest came out of nowhere. It was an early Saturday morning in June 2011. He was in front of the National Stadium in Surulere, trying to catch a cab to Ikeja to meet buyers for the clothes he had purchased in Cotonou. When he saw a commotion at the police checkpoint in front of him, he decided to wait at a distance. He had not expected the Special Anti-Robbery Squad (SARS) to storm up to him and throw him to the ground.
‘They did not allow me to say anything. I was stripped naked, beaten up, thrown into the van and taken away before I could ask what was going on.’
The SARS version of what happened was different. According to the police officers, the footballer was one of the three men seated in the car they had stopped at the checkpoint, in which they discovered weapons. He had thrown open the door and made a run for it, they said, but they’d managed to catch him. That is why the footballer ended up in Kirikiri, charged with armed robbery.
He is not the only one that happens to. There are several reasons people spend more time inside than the law allows for. Sometimes a suspect is granted bail, but nobody shows up as a surety and he is taken back to jail and forgotten. At times local police stations neglect to send the results of their investigation to the Directory of Public Prosecution, who then cannot advise the court whether or not the suspect has a case to answer.
And once in a while prisoners just get lost. The registration of inmates leaves a lot to be desired, claims the Chief Magistrate who is Secretary of the Decongestion Committee. ‘No pictures are taken and no digital registration is being kept. Often, we don’t know who they are. So when the name of a suspect is called out because he is due in court, but nobody answers, there is not much the prison authorities can do.’
For this batch of 250 releases the prison board provided a list of 4000 imprisoned who might be eligible. Each case was screened and advised upon by the public prosecution, after which 250 people remained. Their selection process works, says the Chief Magistrate: last week the Deputy Comptroller of Prisons declared that of the former inmates the Chief Judge had freed in the past year, not a single one has ended up back in jail.
The footballer does not intend to ever return to Kirikiri either. He won’t miss the cell that only contained eight bunk beds but held eighty people, or the cold beans with stones he got for breakfast every morning. Neither will he miss being woken up at three in the morning to brush his teeth. But the inmates playing football in the courtyard will miss one of their high scorers though.
What he will do next? The 30-year-old shrugs, still trying to get used to the idea of his freedom. ‘I think I will go to my sister in Port Harcourt, and then I'll see. Inside I stopped thinking of the future. Too much hope is deadly there.’
Femke van Zeijl is a Dutch freelance correspondent and writer living and working in Lagos.