Investigative journalist ‘FISAYO SOYOMBO spent two weeks in detention — five days in a Police cell and eight as an inmate in Ikoyi Prison — to track corruption in Nigeria’s criminal justice system, beginning from the moment of arrest by the Police to the point of release by the prison. To experience the workings of the system in its raw state, Soyombo — adopting the pseudonym Ojo Olajumoke — feigned an offence for which he was arrested and detained in police custody, arraigned in court and eventually remanded in Prison. In the second of this three-part series, he exposes how the courts short-change the law, and the prisons are themselves a cesspool of the exact reasons for which they hold inmates.

Too many unforeseen obstacles had sprung up against me by the time I arrived at the gates of Ikoyi Prison, Ikoyi, Lagos, on July 12: I’d had my most tortuous night in the police cell; I had been messed up by the typically ruthless Friday evening Lagos traffic; I had arrived under the cover of darkness, which wasn’t the plan. Even the few things that went well would later come back to haunt me.

Proceedings were well underway at Court III when we stepped into the Chief Magistrate Court, Yaba, Lagos, after my extrajudicial detention for five consecutive days at Pedro Police Station, Shomolu. It was a little after noon — or thereabouts. A funny but very contentious matter was ongoing. The protagonist, a woman, was being tried for, allegedly, illegally selling a piece of land belonging to a former associate of hers. This woman — ostensibly in her late 50s or early 60s — claimed, vehemently so, that the complainant indeed owed her millions of naira in accumulation of unpaid earnings for executed projects. She sold the land because she had been instructed to, to defray the cost of her service, she said. But the prosecutor insisted otherwise, arguing that the sale was fraudulent. The woman, irritated and incandescent, embraced and perhaps enjoyed every window to have a go at the prosecutor. Once, the prosecutor got under her skin by scoffing at how two of her high-profile witnesses were deceased. “Excuse you!” the woman fired back in protest. “Are you suggesting I killed them? Is it my fault that you’ve been dragging me from one police station to another and from court to court for more than 10 years?”

The magistrate — a dark, soft-spoken, middle-aged man whose eyes often evaded the lens of his pair of glasses when talking — adjourned the matter, as expected. And after two or three other cases, mine was mentioned. His orders: remanded in prison custody, two sureties in like sum of N500,000 each, N150,000 to be paid into the Registrar’s account by each surety, sureties to be from father’s side of the family. Not long after, the court rose, to be followed by my preparations for a long and difficult journey to the prison.

PRISON WARDERS ASK FOR BRIBES RIGHT IN COURT

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Before the authorities take my freedom away from me, the first thing they do is give me a final semblance of it by unfettering my hands from the handcuff, as is the custom. That was just before entering the dock. Minutes later, the same man who released the handcuff returns to hand me over to a policeman who, accompanied by Zainab Sodiq, the lady posing as my sister, leads me downstairs. First stop on the ground floor is the office of the prisons service. Manning it, comfortably sitting opposite the entrance, is a gun-wielding prison warder, legs waggling, whose shirt hangs loosely on the wall inside, leaving his trunk scantily covered by a singlet. Inside that office are three more warders. The next room is a holding cell — for momentarily detaining inmates until the arrival of the prisons bus that conveys them to Ikoyi. I expect to be led to the holding cell, but I am taken into the prisons office and encouraged to “take a seat”. What manner of magnanimity is this? I was wrong!

The three officers summon my sister. “You can have a look at that holding cell and see if it’s the kind of place a human being should stay,” one of them tells her with feigned sympathy. “Your brother can stay in our office but it will cost you N10,000.” My sister takes a moment to peep into the holding cell, then returns to bargain. The negotiating parties reach an agreement of N5,000, collected by the singlet-donning warder.


Money in the bag, the warders’ initial measured disposition turns happy-go-lucky; I notice the ease with which they regale one another with tales of similarly shady financial dealings. “The day Naira Marley was billed to be taken to prison, I was on this chair making cool money,” says one of them. “I made some good money, I won’t lie. Transfers were just going up and down.” Naira Marley, the hip hop artiste whose original name is Azeez Fashola, had been arraigned at a Federal High Court in Lagos on May 20 by the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC), on 11 counts of alleged Internet and credit card fraud.

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A second warder describes how he facilitated the payment of N300,000 to a senior colleague of his in Abuja, by a man who wanted to ‘smuggle’ all his three children into the employ of the Nigerian Prisons Service (recently renamed the Nigerian Correctional Service) during a recruitment “some years ago”. Though unqualified, all three were eventually employed by the service. It suddenly dawns on the warder that an ongoing promotion exercise in the prisons service offers him fresh opportunity for corrupt enrichment. “Let me quickly call the man; he may be interested in a deal to facilitate his children’s promotion,” he adds, running his hand through his breast pocket for his phone.

‘IF YOU HAVE YOUR MONEY, YOU CAN NEVER SUFFER IN PRISON’

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Seeing the lack of restraint with which they discuss acts of bribery and corruption, I approach them for guidance on the allocation of accommodation in prison. Apparently, it’s a high-wire fraud involving prison officials in court and those in the yard proper.

“You can get a cell for N30,000,” one of the warders tells me. “You can also get for N100,000 or N150,000. You can even get a N1.5million cell.”

“A million and five hundred thousand?” I protest.

“Of course!” he insists. “When Ayodele Fayose was remanded in Ikoyi Prison, what kind of cell did you think he stayed in?” Fayose, the immediate past former Governor of Ekiti State, was remanded at Ikoyi Prison in October 2018 at the start of his N2.2billion fraud trial initiated by the EFCC.

Another warder cuts in. “Don’t worry, you can never suffer in the prison yard,” he says. “As long as you have your money.”

Patience, a third urges me. “The warders at the prison have warned us off striking deals with inmates while still in court,” he explains. “They’ve told us to leave them to push their own deals when the inmates get to the prison. So, when we get there, we will hand you over to the warders you will negotiate with.”

EMERGENCY BAIL FOR SALE BY ‘THE MAGISTRATE’S MAN’ AND PRISON OFFICIALS


Male warder collects bribe to allow visitor see an inmate

Minutes later, one of the warders — dark, mild-mannered and diminutive — walks up to me to ask if I’m making progress with my bail conditions. The question confounds me. Who makes progress on bail application within two hours of a court hearing?

“My lawyer is working on it,” I reply, “but it’s too early to know since it’s just a few hours ago we left court.”

“No, no; it doesn’t mean,” he says. “I have a lawyer in this court who will help you perfect your bail ‘today today’. In fact, you will not get to Ikoyi Prison at all; you will go home straight from here. He works in concert with the court authorities. I can call him right now and he’d be here any minute, if you want.”

Stunned and curious in one breath, I nod in the affirmative. In a matter of minutes, the lawyer, ostensibly in his late 40s or early 50s, shows up. He speaks in carefully considered and restrained patches, sporadically wiping the lens of his glasses with a silky piece of cloth.

“What exactly is your offence?” he begins, then proceeds to hearing my bail conditions. He assures me that the problematic components of my bail requirements would be waived, but the process would cost me money.

“Did the Magistrate order you to pay any money to the Registrar’s account?”

“Yes. N150,000,” I say in error. It should have been N300,000 — at the rate of N150,000 per surety.

“Okay, that’s no problem,” ‘Mr. John’, as he introduces himself, says. “Can you make everything N200,000?”

I tell him I can’t. That’s a lot of money. Fifty thousand naira on top of the N150,000 is a lot of cash. But he disagrees. “You see, I am very close to the Magistrate,” he says. “I am very close to the man; therefore, we will waive many of these bail conditions for you.”

We haggle for a while: N180,000, N170,000, N180,000. We eventually settle for N170,000.

John takes a quick look at his watch; it’s a little past 3pm. “Hurry and get the money. It’s almost too late already — why did you wait till this long?” he laments. “Today may or may not be possible. If you had mentioned it immediately the court rose, say around 2pm, I would have been able to totally guarantee you that you would go home today without ever reaching the prison.”

We exchange numbers and I promise to call, but I never do (The plan, really, is to end up at Ikoyi Prison.). Instead, I fold my secret recording device and tuck it away carefully. Yes, I’d taped all the conversations held inside the prisons office in the court premises. The original plan was to put the device away before going to prison, then retrieve it afterwards. I had been told that there was literally nothing I wanted to smuggle into the prison that I couldn’t; I only needed to grease the palms of warders and they would fetch it for me. But with accommodation negotiations set to take place on arrival at the prison, I began to nurse the ambition of smuggling in the device outright at point of entry. This was not the original plan. But if it works out, I would have more evidence of prison-yard corruption. If it fails, I’m doomed. Big risk, I know. But I do it all the same.

PHYSICAL PAIN IN EXCHANGE FOR DIGGING THE STORY


Sunkanmi Ijadunola, the Assistant Chief

The prison warders do not quite know what to make of me when they find a hidden device on me, a supposed inmate, during the routine search at the entryway shortly after an Ikoyi Prison bus conveying the latest inmates pulled over at the prison gate. After a second, more thorough search during which nothing else is found on me, they hand me over to the ‘Section’ — a position occupied by the most senior convict in a cell — of the welcome cell. As I would later find out, this was under strict instructions: no phone calls, no out-of-cell movement, no frivolous interaction with inmates.

Very early the following morning, Sunkanmi Ijadunola, the third most senior warder in Ikoyi Prison, sends for me. They had seen the videos; they’d extracted the memory card from the device and watched footages of the five prison officials demanding bribes from me and the court official negotiating a premature bail with me. Sunkanmi, as he is widely known, asks me to confess: “Who are you and what is your mission here?”

But he was asking the question a few hours too late. I’d spent half of the night deliberating on what to expect in the morning. I had imagined that in the best scenario, some senior official would have been thoroughly mortified by the sight of their bribe-demanding colleagues captured on tape, and would be keen to convince me about helping to further unravel the bad guys in the system. I didn’t deceive myself, though: this thinking was more or less illusory. I’d also thought that in the bad scenario, I’d be handed over to the Police; and in the worst, I’d be extrajudicially executed. After several hours of carefully considering all possibilities overnight, I resolved that even if they held a gun to my head, I would not disclose my true identity. I knew once I did, that was the end of the story. After five excruciating, emotionally and psychologically destructive days in a police cell, I wasn’t prepared to ruin everything so cheaply.

Seeing I am unwilling to offer any useful information, Sunkanmi, the Assistant Chief, accuses me of plotting a jailbreak. “You’re here to understudy the prison security so that you can send the videos to your gang members outside,” he says. “You’re planning a jail break. Or you’re working for Boko Haram; you’re a Boko Haram spy!”

I do not flinch. Instead, I stick to the original story line I’d preconceived to offer in the improbable circumstance that my cover was blown. At this point, Sunkanmi sends for a cane and orders me to remove my shirt and trousers, leaving only my singlet and boxer briefs. Then he descends on me. Three rounds of beating: the first with several lashes of the cane searing straight into my skin and leaving me with blood and blisters; the second in similar pattern, with my hands cuffed behind my back; and the last with a thick stick targeting the interior and exterior joints of my ankles, knees, hips, elbows and shoulders.

Still, I refuse to disclose that I’m a journalist. By enduring the beating, I succeed in buying myself at least another 24 hours of understudying the corruption seeping through the different layers of prison operations. Bearing the pain was worth it in the end; someone needed to expose the scale of criminal corruption going on in that prison.

Corruption-Laced Registration


The first benefit of enduring the pain is that I am still accorded the treatment of a regular inmate, therefore I am sent for registration and documentation. The documentation holds inside a building opposite the Assistant Chief’s office. It’s a fairly big office with a small inner room littered with stacks of ragged files and paper, plus a narrow, hollow, open cell to the left where awaiting-documentation inmates sit without much latitude to stretch their legs. The inner room is manned by a warder easily noticeable by the ungracefulness of his chemical-bleached yellow skin. A light-skinned, heavily-built woman-warder spearheads the documentation process in the major office, assisted by three convicts. The documentation is both manual and digital, but to avoid compromising the security of the prison, I’ll skip the details. Prison warders are themselves the biggest threat to prison security, but I won’t aid them.

Full Story @ https://www.thecable.ng/undercover-investigation-ii-drug-abuse-sodomy-bribery-pimping-the-cash-and-carry-operations-of-ikoyi-prisons/amp?__twitter_impression=true