The Minister of Interior, Dr Olubunmi Tunji-Ojo, has said that between 30 and 50 per cent of offences committed by inmates in correctional centres across Africa do not warrant incarceration.
He urged correctional authorities to critically assess the true state of congestion in their facilities.
Tunji-Ojo spoke on Wednesday in Abuja at the Regional Conference on the Classification of Prisoners and the Use of Technology in Prisons in Africa, jointly organised by the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime and the African Correctional Services Association.
He challenged correctional authorities to ask themselves a fundamental question about the true nature of overcrowding in their facilities.
“The question is this. Is your correctional centre rightfully overcrowded? That is the question. You have to look at those particular offences. You will realise that more than 30, 40, 50 per cent are offences that do not warrant incarceration,” he said.
The minister disclosed that 93 per cent of inmates in Nigeria’s correctional centres are state offenders, while only seven per cent are federal offenders, noting that a significant number of the state offenders were held for minor infractions.
“93% of our inmates in Nigeria are state offenders. Only 7% are federal offenders.
And of this 93%, I want to tell you before this President came on board, a lot of them were for minor offences that had no need for incarceration,” he said.
Tunji-Ojo said he had personally directed officials to review the records of inmates held over minor fines shortly after his appointment as minister.
“When I became minister, I called my permanent secretary, I called the Controller General of the Correctional Service, and I said, listen, give me the data, the record of people who are in correctional centres for fines and compensation of less than 500,000 or something. And guess what? Over 4,000 people,” he said.
He questioned the economic logic of keeping such offenders behind bars, citing the cost implications for the government.
“I said, what is the sense in this? Because I feed them in a year with more than 10 times the fine. So how is the government benefiting? And we were able to clear that, and in one day, we decongested our correctional centre by five per cent,” he said.
The minister also revealed a sharp decline in recidivism in Nigeria’s correctional centres, from about 13,000 cases annually in 2023 to 1,000 last year, a drop he linked to expanded access to education and vocational training for inmates.
He said the correctional service currently has 62 inmates pursuing postgraduate studies, 261 in undergraduate programmes, 1,125 in formal education, and 9,582 enrolled in vocational and non-formal rehabilitation programmes, supported by 18 National Open University centres domiciled within correctional facilities.
Also speaking at the conference, the Controller General of the Nigerian Correctional Service, Sylvester Ndidi Nwakuche, said Nigeria has continued to modernise its correctional system through reforms anchored on the Nigerian Correctional Service Act, 2019.
He said effective prisoner classification has become a strategic tool for identifying inmates’ risks, protecting vulnerable prisoners, deploying resources efficiently and delivering targeted rehabilitation programmes.
Nwakuche stressed that no single correctional service possesses all the solutions to contemporary security and rehabilitation challenges, describing the conference as an opportunity for collective learning.
“We have a unique opportunity to exchange ideas, share practical experiences and collectively develop solutions that will strengthen correctional systems across Africa,” he said.
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