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Steppin's Posts

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Christianity Etc › Re: Five things Nigerian Pastors do by steppin: 2:23pm On Mar 02, 2015
naijaboiy:
And you just sit there obeying everything. undecided

That was how one time I went to a church with my cousin during the holidays and the pastor was preaching endlessly.

Hunger don dey fire me as I no chop before I comot house.

Service started at seven and it was already 10 with no sign of its end at all. I was feeling very dizzy and so I decided to go outside and rest in the car and maybe probably find something to eat outside before I faint there.

Immediately I stood up and was walking towards the back door I heard a loud cry.

"And that is one of the demons over there! They can appear in different forms,,this one is looking calm and presentable,,ushers bring him forward"

They brought me forward to the pastor and I was really confused on what to say.

My shouts of "i'm not a demon! I'm not a demon o" aggravated the whole issue.

If you see SLAP! shocked

I just kept dumb and let them continue with their prayers. sad

I never went to that church with my cousin again.
This your story get K leg.
Travel › Re: Gradually, Calabar Port Comes Alive Again by steppin: 2:18pm On Mar 02, 2015
GodMode:
All I see is a picture... nothing indicates that its in Calabar.
APC 'Winches'.
Travel › Re: Gradually, Calabar Port Comes Alive Again by steppin: 2:16pm On Mar 02, 2015
Fresh air dey blow for here.
GEJ till.....you know na(2019)
Foreign Affairs › Re: Saudi Prison That Showers Terrorists With Perks by steppin: 1:59pm On Mar 02, 2015
nairalandbuzz:
[size=15pt]A rare look inside a Saudi prison that showers terrorists with perks[/size]

Except for the machine guns and guard towers, the al-Hair high-security prison looks remarkably like a hotel — especially the conjugal-visit wing.

Beyond a heavy iron gate, its bars painted a cheerful lavender, a red carpet stretches the length of a long hallway, where each of the 38 private cells has a queen-size bed, a fridge, a television and a shower.


Here, just around the corner from the prison ATM, married inmates are allowed to spend three to five private hours with their wives at least once a month, with fresh linens and tea and sweets on the nightstand.

Nearly 1,100 high-security prisoners, all of them jailed on terrorism-related charges, are serving time in this prison a few miles south of Riyadh. Al-Hair is the largest of five high-security Saudi prisons established in the past decade to deal with a growing terrorism threat, first from al-Qaeda and more recently from the Islamic State.

Saudi prisons long have been largely off-limits to journalists and human rights monitors. But officials said Interior Minister Mohammed bin Nayef, the deputy crown prince, has ordered that journalists be allowed to visit, hoping to refute allegations from human rights groups that Saudi Arabia tortures prisoners.

So on a recent Sunday afternoon, Warden Mohammed al-Ahmed led me on a rare visit inside the al-Hair prison.

“We have nothing to hide,” he told me. “Point at any building, point at any cell. You can see anything you want to see.”

For the next six hours, I was able to direct my own tour, and the warden gladly took me wherever I wanted to go. We saw cell blocks, the hospital, solitary-confinement cells, classrooms and recreation areas. He never declared anything off-limits, though I wasn’t allowed to take photos.

We started with tea, in typical Saudi style, and a PowerPoint presentation that detailed the government’s strategy of showering inmates with perks rather than locking them down in harsh, Guantanamo Bay-style conditions.

The Saudi government essentially puts each inmate’s family on welfare. The government gives them money for food, rent and school fees, and it pays for airfare and hotel expenses for families to come visit — even for foreign prisoners whose families live overseas. Escorted by guards, many prisoners (except those convicted of murder) are allowed to attend funerals and weddings of close family members, and they are given as much as $2,600 in cash to present as a wedding gift.

After the presentation, we visited the Family Home, a hotel within the prison that is used to reward prisoners for good behavior. [/b]The hotel has 18 large suites, which can sleep as many as nine family members and have lots of fresh flowers, a well-stocked buffet and a playground for children.

Officials said the government spent $35 million last year on those perks.

“Just because someone is a criminal, we do not punish his family, too,” Ahmed said. “Our strategy is to take care of these people to make the community better. This is what Islam tells us to do.”

[b]The majority of the 3,500 inmates in the five high-security prisons have been convicted of terrorism-related offenses, including al-Qaeda attacks inside the Saudi kingdom, that happened before the rise of the Islamic State last year.


Gen. Mansour al-Turki, spokesman for the powerful Ministry of Interior, whose Mabahith secret police run the five high-security prisons, said taking care of inmates’ families is part of the Saudi strategy of trying to rehabilitate radicals.

The Saudis have a long-standing program of placing those convicted of terrorism-related offenses in an intensive program of education and religious study designed to try to alter their thinking and behavior.

Inmates in the five high-security prisons start with months-long in-depth courses inside the prisons. When they finish their sentence, they are transferred to one of two large rehabilitation centers, in Riyadh and in Jiddah, for further studies.

“If you lose these inmates when they are in prison, they will come out of prison more radical,” Turki said, adding that supporting their families also helps make sure they, too, don’t “fall into the hands of the terrorists.”

Turki said that about 20 percent of those who have gone through the rehabilitation program have returned to terrorism-related activities. Many rights activists think the failure rate is higher than Saudi officials admit.

Critics often argue that Saudi Arabia, or at least many rich Saudis, supports violent Islamist radicals, and that the government’s emphasis on rehabilitation reflects a certain sympathy with terrorists.

But Saudi officials argue that no country, except for Syria and Iraq, is more directly threatened by the Islamic State. They say their approach to convicted terrorists is more pragmatic and effective than simply throwing thousands of them in prison for decades and hoping that their friends and family don’t become radicalized.

“I don’t think we should be reflexively opposed to these programs,” said Bruce Hoffman, director of the Center for Security Studies at Georgetown University. “The hard-core, wild-eyed fanatics we are never going to rehabilitate, but a solution that says they are all the same and we should lock them away forever isn’t effective, either.”

Hoffman said a 20 percent recidivism rate is far better than the 70 to 75 percent recidivism rate for violent criminals in the United States. He said prisons without rehabilitation programs can become “terrorist universities” that turn minor offenders into hardened militants. He also said that inmates who are coaxed away from radical thinking can also provide valuable intelligence about terror groups.

“Programs like this can be enormously effective,” he said.

To be absolutely clear, Saudi Arabia has a poor human rights record, and the fact that no prisoners were tortured in front of me is not proof that it doesn’t happen.

According to the U.S. State Department and human rights groups, the Saudis practice arbitrary detention, and torture allegations are rampant. Saudi Arabia executed 79 people by beheading in 2013, and its extreme interpretation of sharia law still calls for medieval punishments, including amputations and the stoning of adulterers.

Most recently, Saudi courts sentenced Raif Badawi, a blogger who questioned the dominant role of the Saudi religious establishment in daily life, to 10 years in prison and 1,000 public lashes, a punishment condemned as barbaric by rights groups.

Human Rights Watch and others also have alleged that the Saudi government has used its tough anti-terrorism laws to lock up hundreds of people virtually indefinitely, often for simply criticizing the government, and has convicted others in secret and unfair trials.

They also have condemned Saudi prisons for being overcrowded and often dangerous places, but those allegations usually concern the prison system for those convicted of crimes not related to terrorism. The Saudi government operates about 20 regional prisons, roughly the equivalent of a U.S. state prison, and about 90 local lockups, similar to U.S. city or town jails. Those facilities house about 50,000 prisoners, nearly half of them foreigners.

Rights groups have cited reports of violence among prisoners and cases of guards subjecting prisoners to strobe lights, loud music, cold temperatures and long periods of solitary confinement.

Turki denied those allegations. He said that more than 11,500 people have done time in the five high-security prisons since 2003 and that about 8,000 of them have been released.

“Do you hear them going out in public and saying, ‘I was tortured’?” he said. “There are thousands and thousands of them. If we were torturing people, they would say so.”

As the tour continued, Ahmed, the warden, drove me through a vast open yard to the main prison building, where we passed through huge metal doors, metal detectors and a couple of sets of iron gates.

“What would you like to see?” he asked.

I picked a hallway at random, and he ordered the guards to open the gate. The hallway was at least 50 yards long, with paintings of desert scenes hanging on the walls between cell doors.

Halfway down, I chose a random cell and asked to interview the prisoners inside. Six surprised-looking young men, all in their early to mid-20s, wearing long, prison-issued gray robes, greeted me.

The cell, identical to several I saw later, was a large cube about 20 feet by 20 feet, with 20-foot-high ceilings. High on one wall were four windows that filled the cell with natural light.

The six men slept on single mattresses on the carpeted floor and watched a TV mounted high on one wall. The room was spartan but clean, with a large bathroom and shower area. Plastic bags filled with cookies, candy bars, apples and bananas hung on pegs on the wall.

One young inmate, Fahad, told me that he was awaiting trial on terrorism charges. He said he traveled to Syria last year to join the Islamic State because he wanted to fight against Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.

“But when I got there, it was not like they told us,” he said.

Fahad, 25, said the Islamic State was fighting not against Assad, but against other rebel groups. He said Islamic State militants took his passport, but after two months, he escaped and found his way to the Saudi embassy in Ankara, Turkey, where he turned himself in. He was returned to Riyadh and sent to al-Hair.

“We’re not happy to be in prison,” Fahad said. “But we have good conditions here.”

With the warden sitting right there, what else could he say? I was still skeptical.

I called Sevag Kechichian, an Amnesty International researcher, who said allegations of mistreatment and torture of prisoners in Saudi prisons are widespread. He said the poor treatment probably happens more frequently in overcrowded local jails, but he said that torture can still happen even in nice-looking prisons — when no one is looking.

I also called Gary Hill, whose work for the International Corrections and Prisons Association, a nonprofit affiliated with the United Nations, has taken him to prisons in 80 countries.

Hill, a Nebraskan, has been going to Saudi Arabia for 20 years to help Saudi officials design training programs for prison staff. He said what I found in al-Hair “doesn’t surprise me at all.”

“Prisoners there are to be treated nicely — that’s their religion,” Hill said. “From all the interactions I’ve had over many years, they believe that, and they do it.”


Kechichian and Hill have never been inside a Saudi prison. So I also arranged a telephone call with Mohammed al-Qahtani, a Saudi economist who was sentenced to 10 years in prison in 2013 for criticizing the government. He is serving his sentence in a general prison close to al-Hair.

Qahtani said that many prisoners’ families receive money from the prison, though his family, now living in the United States, has turned it down on principle.


Qahtani said he has access to newspapers, books, television — and daily phone calls with his family. He said that many of his fellow inmates have been convicted of violent crimes or drug trafficking and that there is regular violence among prisoners. He said that one inmate committed suicide after being left in solitary confinement for more than a month.

Qahtani is angry about being imprisoned for simply speaking his mind, but he said he had no serious complaints about his living conditions.

“It’s not bad,” he said.

SOURCE: http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/middle_east/a-rare-look-inside-a-saudi-prison-that-showers-terrorists-with-perks/2015/03/01/2da9dfb4-a64e-11e4-a162-121d06ca77f1_story.html?tid=sm_fb
Fridge, television for inside prison?
Please, how do I book for jail time?
This prison dey hungry me!
Family › Re: How Marriage Has Become A Luxury In Nigeria by steppin: 1:55pm On Mar 02, 2015
HoneySwag:
story for d gods.... U empty vessel, poor mentality,u dey craze,e no go beta for u,dem tell u say i dey find man,useless fool
Honeyswag, carpenter fit use this your legs do plank. grin
Education › Re: 15 Best Uncommon Courses To Study In Nigeria In 2015 by steppin: 1:51pm On Mar 02, 2015
Who wan study sales representative for school?
Wetin Alaba boys dey do?
Investment › Re: Nigerian Banks Lose 24.5% Of Market Value by steppin: 1:42pm On Mar 02, 2015
searching4love:
Fixed cool
APC MUMU! Keep re-arranging my posts!
Senseless bagger!
Investment › Re: Nigerian Banks Lose 24.5% Of Market Value by steppin: 1:35pm On Mar 02, 2015
searching4love:
undecided


ANOTHER ACHIEVEMENT OF THE GEJ ADMINISTRATION. grin


HE IS REALLY TRANSFORMING THE COUNTRY BUT UPSIDE DOWN undecided


I BLAME THE DUMB PROFESSOR WHO APPROVED GEJ'S DOCTORATE THESIS.

GEJ'S DECISION MAKING MAKES DOCTORATE DEGREE LOOK LIKE A JOKE undecided
what has his thesis got to do with the topic?
Some Nlanders are crazy mofos.
Politics › Re: Politics Of Buhari’s London Visit-Daily Trust by steppin:
Buhari dey take 'drip' for London!
Abeg, come home and do debate jor!
Politics › Re: Ex-Senate President Joseph Wayas Dumps PDP For APC by steppin: 1:22pm On Mar 02, 2015
Irrelevant mofo! Who cares? He has no history, just another attention seeker, like that idiat SSA that was given 7 blows, 11 akpus.
Celebrities › Re: Nadia Buari Gives Birth To Twins by steppin: 1:14pm On Mar 02, 2015
Ghana female artistes...closing and opening their two legs for Naija artistes since 1856AD.
Politics › Re: Military Gets Two Boeing 747 Jets Loaded With Weapons by steppin: 1:08pm On Mar 02, 2015
searching4love:
undecided


WHO IS GEJ AND THE PDP FOOLINGhuh

ALL OF A SUDDEN THE ARMY BEGINS TO WIN A 6YEARS OLD WAR IN JUST 6 WEEK undecided

THEY BEGIN TO RECEIVE LOADS OF WEAPONS AND AMMUNITIONS JUST TO PROVE TO GULLIBLE PEOPLE ESPECIALLY THE IGBO'S THAT GEJ IS WORKING undecided

WE SANE NIGERIANS KNOW THIS BOKO HARAM PLOT IS A CALCULATED BLACKMAIL AGAINST BUHARI AND NO LIES OR PROPAGANDA WILL CHANGE OUR MINDS..

#WE HAVE DECIDED TO RESCUE NIGERIA

sai Buhari
Must you mention Igbos in your statement?
We can support whoever we choose.
Cowards! Always scared of the Igbos!
Politics › Re: President Jonathan Arriving Lagos Today For A Two-day Visit (Photos) by steppin: 12:31pm On Mar 02, 2015
jeje123:
U pure bastard!
Na u na. As u no sabi ur father, na u be the pure bastard!
Politics › Re: APC Calls For International Sanctions If Elections Are Postponed Again by steppin:
APC leaders are nuts! Travel bans and tough economic sanctions? Who's gonna bear the burden when it happens? How can you request for international sanctions on your own country?
Whatever affects the government, affects it's people.
This people are definitely out of their damn minds!
Celebrities › Re: Sean Tizzle Bowing Before President Jonathan by steppin:
itsdumebi:
t the youth event organized by the Jonathan presidential campaign team yesterday, President Jonathan met with over 5000 lagos youths were he danced and talked with them. Various artists like Timi Dakolo, sean tizzle were among the artistes that perfomed.

Below is a pic of sean tizzle prostrating before GEJ during his perfomance…….
http://itsdumebi.com/photo-of-sean-tizzle-prostrating-before-president-gej/
When you're in the presence of Ori Ona(Oga Nla) you bow!
GEJ we dey your back! Ride on till....you know na(2019)
Travel › Re: Picture Of Train Passing Through A Rural Community In Nigeria by steppin: 10:43am On Mar 02, 2015
FG at work!
GEJ - the man wey sabi.
Politics › Re: President Jonathan Dancing Orezi's Shoki Last Night At Eko Hotel, Lagos by steppin:
bennygreat1:
Dancing Shoki.... And Nigerians re complaining of fuel hike...


#Godsavethiscountry!!!
You wish! He's dancing away APC's winch and bad belle for im bodi.
Politics › Re: Checkout Photo Of Youths Rocking "AskProfOsinbajo" Polo by steppin: 8:47am On Mar 02, 2015
samento:
You nko. You fine?
Tiger face, I no say I fine pass you.
Politics › Re: Checkout Photo Of Youths Rocking "AskProfOsinbajo" Polo by steppin: 11:18pm On Mar 01, 2015
Aprime:
Three ídiots.

Relax. I'm only watching a movie and that's the title.
Hahahhahahahhahaha! True talk!
The girl on the left side be like say na Tinubu's daughter!
Her ugliness no get part 2.
Politics › Re: President Jonathan Arriving Lagos Today For A Two-day Visit (Photos) by steppin: 10:15pm On Mar 01, 2015
jeje123:
OLODO!!!
Your mama!
Politics › Re: President Jonathan Arriving Lagos Today For A Two-day Visit (Photos) by steppin: 10:14pm On Mar 01, 2015
MrALIVE:
anybody that is still asking for Buhari's certificate up till now needs to be examined mentally
Congo! Na u and ur retarded' father go need proper examination!
Politics › Re: President Jonathan Arriving Lagos Today For A Two-day Visit (Photos) by steppin: 10:12pm On Mar 01, 2015
edgeproduk:
Robbot.This is old yarn naa,change ur programming
Mumu, how dat one take concern u? Na ur programming I dey use? Silly brat!
Politics › Re: President Jonathan Arriving Lagos Today For A Two-day Visit (Photos) by steppin: 10:10pm On Mar 01, 2015
Gabrielsylar:
[size=18pt]ode[/size]
Your father ode! Go chop shiit!
Health › Re: NAFDAC Arraigns Chinese National Over Import Of Fake Diapers by steppin: 9:06pm On Feb 28, 2015
And yet, they say it's only Igbos that flood Nigerian Market with fake goods.
Politics › Re: Prof Osinbajo At The Akarigbo's Palace In Sagamu This Morning by steppin: 9:04pm On Feb 28, 2015
Jarus:
Don't be hypocritical, man.

He will be number 2 in APC government if they win, and you don't want him to also go round to campaign and bring value to the ticket.

Statements like these piss me off.
Who cares if you're pissed off? Everyone is entitled to their own opinion.
Jokes Etc › Re: Which Bank Do You Think Does This To Customers (pics) by steppin: 9:02pm On Feb 28, 2015
First Bank or UBA.
Jokes Etc › Re: Nigerians Refuse To Share A Coke With Buhari (see Photo) by steppin: 8:58pm On Feb 28, 2015
Hahahhahahaha! Photoshop na die!
Politics › Re: Femi Fani Kayode: Buhari Has Cancer, Chronic Asthma And Dementia. by steppin: 8:54pm On Feb 28, 2015
nerodenero:
Nobody knows tomorrow. What if these people wishing this man's death dies before him? Why do mortals behave as though they own their own lives? If only we live everyday as though it is our last, we would behave better.

I am not a fan of both presidential aspirants.
I smell lies! Janjaweeed agent!
Politics › Re: Why Don’t You Want Jega Sacked, PDP Asks APC by steppin: 8:44pm On Feb 28, 2015
Jega has been compromised.
#Teamsackjega
Politics › Re: President Jonathan Arriving Lagos Today For A Two-day Visit (Photos) by steppin: 8:36pm On Feb 28, 2015
Correct Presido! GEJ till Buhari gets his certificate!

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