“AS we walk through the prison yard, a voice keeps coming from a corner I later was told is meant for prisoners on death row,” says Toun (not real name), who recently visited a relative, an inmate of the maximum prison, Maiduguri, Borno State.

When she visited, there was somebody in the death row section who was shouting, “Please help me. They want to kill me. They have not given me my drugs for two months. Please help me,” she recalls.

A prison official told her that that was Charles Okah, the younger brother of Henry Okah. The warden said he is always shouting like that when he sees people around.

Okah was convicted of masterminding the 2010 Independence Day anniversary in Abuja.

He reportedly claims he is dying slowly in prison due to lack of access to medical treatment.

He says he has been living with a single kidney in the last 37 years, and his condition is deteriorating in prison.

Okah wants the Comptroller-General of Nigerian Correctional Service, Ja’afaru Ahmed, to either transfer him to Abuja or Lagos for better care.

Inmates’ lives in danger

Except the Federal Government takes a drastic decision to decongest correctional centres and police cells across the country, lives of tens of thousands of inmates are at risk as the Covid-19 pandemic tightens its grip on the country, The ICIR can report.

Toun expresses fear that a single case of Covid-19 in any correctional facility across the country puts the life of the inmate in danger.

“The situation in the prison is very bad and I can just imagine if just one single person contracts the Coronavirus disease, it would be devastating,” she says.

There are currently more than 74, 123 inmates in correctional centres, in the country, over 70 percent of them are awaiting trial, according to World Prison Brief.

READ MORE: https://www.icirnigeria.org/report-nigerian-inmates-live-in-danger-amid-coronavirus-pandemic/