Two suspects, lucky Igbinova and Effiong Edu, who have been standing trial for the killing of Pa Alfred Rewane, an elder statesman in Nigeria, were recently sent free after 15years in Custody in the Nigerian prison awaiting trial. The Court ruled that the prosecution was unable to establish a case against them, that the police did a very shoddy job in their investigation, with the prosecution only relying on the forced confession of the suspects.

The police initially arrested about 8 of the late politician's domestic staff, and kept them in prison despite the obvious facts that they were unlikely to be the real culprits. Now about 5 of them have already died in prison, just remaining 3 of them, regaining freedom 15years after.

I am not going to go into who killed the late pa Alfred Rewane, nor the inability of our security agents to catch the real killers, what i will focus on, is a matter of national urgency, where our security agents, due to laziness, or wickedness would frame up innocent citizens who have no powerful relative to help him or her, to take the blame. Time and over again we hear of stories where police will come after a crime as been committed, would not carry out any investigations, just quickly pick on innocent citizens who are unfortunate to be mistakenly close to the crime, and force them into a confession through toture, and parade guns in their front and display them to the whole world.

Whenever i see such display of so called armed robbers on t.v, i dont usually believe the police, first of all, a person is not termed guilty, until it has been proven in the court of law and a judgement has been passed, so it is legally wrong to even display them on t.v as criminals, most of our security agents lack the mental capacity to properly investigate a crime and pick on the less obvious. Our prison's is awash with innocent citizens awaiting trial. According to the statistics given by the Nigerian Prisons Service, it shows that as at July 2010, the population of the prisoners stood at 47,268, out of which only 13,300 or 23% are convicted persons and 77% are awaiting trial.

Lets not kid our selves we have no justice system, a system that jails a kid who stole a tyre (worth 1500naira) to prison for 15years, and in the same vien jails a man who stole 50billion for 2years, and its because of the fearless nature of the Judge, meanwhile others just only negotiate to return some of the money and they drop the charges. In a well developed society, when a crime is committed, a well seasoned detective is attached to the case, depending on the level of the crime, then he investigates, maybe taking months, wait to be 100% sure, before charging the criminal to court, then he hands over the case to a trained and experienced criminal lawyer provided by the prosecuting state, who makes sure that no law was broken in the building of the case against the suspect, then he/she works hard to secure a conviction in the court.

But in our case, its all upside down, what determines the level of your case is the amount of money you are willing to part with, we don't have trained detectives who are really passionate about catching criminals , we also don't have trained criminal lawyers prosecuting the case, what we have is the person investigating the case, who will prepare your file, then charge you to court, and meanwhile you have already been arrested and thrown into jail, with no bail option, because the innocent citizen cant afford a lawyer to advice him or her, the suspect accedes to all their request and continues to implicate himself or herself without the suspect knowing. The long and short story is that, before your case gets decided you have already spent 20years in prison, and by the time they find you not guilty, you are already a harden criminal, because our prison system doesn't reform you into a better person, but into a more bitter person towards the society.

I can continue on and on with examples of the high injustice going on in our country, i feel aggrieved and annoyed as am writing this report, but the truth is that a nation can never know peace until true justice prevails. The 7 point agenda of the government is useless if there is no proper rule of law, where true justice prevails irrespective of your background, political status, financial status or level of your education. My prayer to you is that you never experience our injustice justice system, because thats when you will take this write up seriously.

curled from www.voiceoutng.com

smh, welcome to Nigeria

i dont think we should all lay the blame solely in the hands of our lazy police force. its a fact that there is no justice in nigeria.seriously justice will keep evading us all until WE ALL RISE UP and demand change in the system
look @tunisia.egypt.