A report released Monday by an investigating panel commissioned by Nigeria’s Lagos State, titled the Lekki Toll Road Prisons report, has the world’s largest port city, trying to tackle allegations of corruption and mismanagement. A press release from the Lagos State government said the committee, led by Umar Abdul-Razak, “verified 5,596 prisons in prisons that were not captured in the database.”
Razak proposed providing funds for “detailed statistical research” to create a database which would be a repository of statistics pertaining to the prison system in Lagos. As the report went on to state, a maximum of about 23,532 out of the estimated 50,000 prisons in Lagos might be accurately enumerated. This includes people incarcerated in Nigerian prisons abroad, however only prisons located outside Lagos had been listed. But there is still a stigma attached to these people that exists even in Nigeria itself. This may end up making the jobs of prisoners’ rights advocates difficult. And this report still deals with a problem of serious proportions.
Since the beginning of the year, 29 prisoners were killed in protests, mostly in Lagos, a city with a population that is larger than that of France. Last month, a bus stop in Lagos was attacked and looted by armed prison rioters.
Lagos seems to be going through an unprecedented spell of economic prosperity, with many saying that the city’s situation is a world apart from the rest of Nigeria. But the prison problems undermine all that: legitimate public money is being squandered in a system that is designed to protect criminals at the expense of its own citizens.