We spend N750 on feeding each inmate per day – Abubakar

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We spend N750 on feeding each inmate per day – Abubakar

Assistant ant Controller of Corrections ACC Umar Abubakar, is the Public Relations Officer of the Nigeria Correctional Service NCoS. In this interview, he dismissed speculations that the Service spends N14,000 to feeding inmate everyday, saying what is actually spent is N750.

He also speaks on last year’s attack on the Kuje Custodial Centre, noting that with a surveillance room now at the Service’s Headquarters, all activities at the facility and the Enugu Custodial Centre are now monitored real time while efforts are on to bring other centres during the grid.

What would you say were some of the achievements of the Service in the outgone year?

Since the assumption of office of the current CG, Haliru Nababa, he has not hidden his desire to take the NCoS to a higher pedestal, with particular reference to enhancing the welfare of both staff and inmates.

Within six months, we have seen the promotion of over 3000 personnel and he reactivated the Reward Fund Unit

which is to serve as a form of motivation to officers and men of the service. An ill motivated staff or worker is a threat to any organization and as such, he has taken the issue of motivation very seriously. Also, the issue of starter packs for inmates. As part of our mandate, we are to identify the reasons why inmates committed such crimes. We don’t look at the suspects, but we look at the reason why an inmate committed a crime. It is now our responsibility to go into that and ensure that we change his concept from act of criminality to a very good citizen that will add input to the peace in the community where he lives. While inmates are in our custody, we engage them in skills acquisition programmes and educational programmes. Right now, we have over 1000 inmates doing their degree programmes,we have six inmates who are currently undergoing their PhD programmes in our facilities.

On housing deficit in our barracks, staff quarters were inaugurated in December by the Honourable Minister of Interior.

About 25 staff including a female officer were rewarded for acts if gallantry and plaques as well as cash gifts were given to them.

How about the challenges?

Of course, just like every other organization, we have some of our challenges in the service. Number one we have shortage of personnel to mount our facilities. As such, we will need additional manpower so that we can be very effective in manning our facilities. Also, funding is an issue. The present government has done so much, however, there is need to increase funding so that a lot can be done. A case in point is on the issue of the unfortunate incident of jail attack on our facility, most recently, the one in Kuje. With adequate funding, we will be able to deploy more advanced technology in securing out facilities. Just recently, we inaugurated a monitoring room where all the activities at the Kuje Custodial Centre and 500 metre radius will be monitored in real time and movements detected easily and if necessary, such will be taken out because the federal government has already declared our facilities as red zones and anybody who has no business coming there should not leave to tell the story.

The Service is looking into the issue of arms and ammunition. I can’t give you such details. Training and retraining is constant. Most of our armed guards have been sent for further training and it is yielding positive results but as still need more funds to be able to have more participants.

The issue of non-custodial which is part of the new concept in the 2019 Act needs to be funded because it is just of recent that most of the parole board was inaugurated it the non-custodial needs more funding so that they can be able to work effectively.

On the monitoring room, apart from Kuje are there plans to enroll other facilities?

Of course, the Kuje own is a pilot scheme. We started with Kuje because of the nature of the facility there, but it will be extended to other bigger facilities within the shortest possible time.

This is to equally inform you that Enugu is already captured in this monitoring, surveillance concept of our security management in the service and other facilities will equally follow. Furthermore, logistics has always been an issue in the past, but then the CG has been able to get more vehicles that will aid court attendance of inmates. However, with adequate funding, I think we will be able to do more on issue of logistics.

You talked about the reward unit. Are there personnel who were disciplined in the outgone year?

Yea. The CG has said he will be using the carrot and stick approach. When you do well, of course, they are going to reward you. However for those who are recalcitrant, those who need to be cautioned will be cautioned. I make bold to say that within the past one year, over 100 staff have been dismissed for various offences that are against the rules and regulations of the service.

The issue of security is not something that anybody will take lightly. So anybody who is not ready to work will be shown the way out and for those who are ready to work, they will be rewarded.

Your personnel are going to be participating in the coming elections. How ready is the service?

We have our quarterly, mid year and annual plans on how our activities should go and we review them periodically. Part of the design is that the service will take part in the elections this year and staff would be trained as to what to do during the elections. One, they are not politicians and so they will be non partisan. Theirs is to ensure that they work with other agencies to secure the polls and they will be briefed accordingly. The police is the lead agency in this regard and so we are going to partner with them while they take the lead.

How about the issue of raising kids behind bars? A pregnant woman is sentenced, she gives birth in your facility and the kid serves the sentence with the mother. Do you have facilities to take care of such inmates?

We have what we call admission board. For any inmate who is brought to our facilities that is pregnant, or we need to confirm if such inmate is pregnant, in the admission board, we have medical personnel that will participate in the processes of admission.

First, she has to go through a test to know if she was brought in with pregnancy. Secondly, if it is a woman that possibly would spend one year or six months, after confirming if she is pregnant, there is no way you will divorce or you separate her from the pregnancy. They one is for sure.

Secondly, we have adequate facilities in our Custodial Centres to take care of any pregnant inmate. If for any reason she gives birth within the facility there is a period allowed for such child to stay with the mother, which is the period of 18 months, after which the child will be given to the family to take care of while she continues her jail sentence.

The attacks on your facilities are now external as we no longer have jail breaks. After the incident in Kuje, the CG met with paramilitary services within the ministry. What is the state of that collaboration?

The external attacks on our facilities was alien to us because we are trained to curtail attacks within our facilities. But what is happening now is as a result of security challenges that has bedeviled the world. So we are only taking a share of our security challenges. Of course, for any challenge, there is always a solution to it. And part of the solution the service has adopted is collaborating with other security agencies which includes the Nigerian army, the Nigeria police, the DSS and then the paramilitary services under interior, which is the immigration, the Civil Defence. Now there is what I will call internal rapid response squad that is formed to ensure that our facilities never experience such unfortunate incidents. And as a result of this robust collaboration, I want to say that it is really working. So it is a very wonderful collaboration that is really giving us positive results. For anybody to say he wants to defy our facilities, I am sure that person will think twice because the method adopted correctly to ensure that there are no unwarranted attacks on our facility.

This issue of stigmatization of ex-convicts, I recall that there is a policy to issue them certificates when they leave. How is it now?

The issue of stigmatization to ex offenders is one of the challenges of Nigeria Correctional Service. We have a responsibility to find out why he did what brought him to the facility and having found out, we work on him psychologically. Part of our mandate is rehabilitation because we have various rehabilitation programmes. We have skills acquisition. We have counseling and guidance. We have educational programmes. Keeping them without engaging them is dangerous. We rehabilitate them, train them and give them tools. If an inmate, for instance, has learned tailoring in our facilities, we give him the first sewing machine and other tools to begin his trade when he leaves our facility.

Where the challenge comes in, is the issue of reintegration back to the society. So the societies should see them that these are reformed people, even though they might have committed crimes in the past, but they are now reformed because most of the inmates who come out from the prison, must have gained one way or the other, either through carpentry, salon, our educational programmes. The society should accept them as those who contribute to the socioeconomic development of the nation. If you stigmatize them, you are only telling them to go back to a life of crime.

Last year, one of our inmates who came to our facility without any experience of tailoring, as I speak now, he has trained over 150 members of his community and is now preaching to people to lead a crime free life. He is one of our ambassadors and even his community chief has been very grateful to him.

Despite several clarifications in the past, there are some people including one of the presidential aspirants who still believe that the service spends N14,000 to feed an inmate every day. Just for the sake of clarification, how much do you spend on that?

In one of our trainings, they said you can never tell people not to think their ways. You are free to think your way. But the issue is that are there facts in what somebody is saying? It is not true.

What we use to feed inmates is N750 (Seven Hundred and Fifty Naira) per day.