According to Daily Sun, several months after the Federal Government increased the feeding allowance of prison inmates from N200 to N300, tension is mounting among contractors who supply the food over non-payment of about N3billion outstanding bills.
A non-governmental organisation, Alliance for Good Governance and Democracy (AGGD), expressed concern over the development, urging the Federal Government to expedite action in the payment of monies owed the food contractors.
In a statement signed by its national coordinator and national secretary, Shadrack Nwokolo and Jimi Sanwo respectively, the group revealed that after a thorough investigation of the state and conditions of prisons across the nation, it discovered that contractors responsible for food supplies were being owed huge sums of money for the services they rendered to Nigerian Prisons Service (NPS) in the last one year. According to the group, in January 2015, the Federal Government increased feeding allowance for prison inmates from N200 to N300 daily, excluding N150 allowance for gas per inmate a day. The group explained that the total provision for feeding each inmate is N450 per day.
It stated: “There are about 56,000 inmates scattered in Nigerian prisons. A lot of prisoners would have been dying on a daily occurrence if not for the kind gesture of the contractors who have not relented in supplying foods to the inmates despite the huge indebtedness by NPS in the last one year.”
Source: Daily Sun
Incarceration is a punitive measure to offending by the penal process. However, it is expected to be reformative – where the offender learns not to reoffend. It does not entail ‘torture’ which lack of life’s basic requirement such as food, drink, healthy environment form part of basic human right.
It is inevitable that poor administrative governance and corrupt practices by those charged with ensuring the purpose of deprivation of liberty as a means of enforcing reform get it all wrong by playing with people’s lives and particularly, mental well-being.
If the Prisons department is owing this much for food, how much more would they have owed in various other significant structural facilities such as internal and external provisions expected to improve prison/prisoner conditions during the period of they serve their sentence. Ultimately, they are further criminalised and demonised. In situations like this, the survival of the strongest applies as exploitation, victimisation and bullying will result. Prisoners are meant to complete their sentence having learnt that crime does not pay. On the general health view is that lack of food translates as lack of nutrition, loss of quality of life (which has nothing to do with being an offender) with consequences such as heightened criminality post-imprisonment or expedited death and or chronic illness.
Yes, the government, as the budget disbursement source, must step a reform process and investigate the aspect of blatant corruption which this report has made very apparent.