THE PRISON WAS MY HOME - USHUHUDA KUTOKA KWA WALIO-OKOLEWA NA T. B. JOSHUA
At Home In Harsh Conditions
“Prison conditions in Nigeria are bad, very bad. The environment is foul and the water is dirty. The food we receive is beans and rice but the beans are half-cooked with a lot of insects and there is a lot of sand in the rice. I wouldn’t call it a meal – I call it disease. But yet, I still loved the prison because each time I would go there, it was the only home I had. Sometimes I could get clean water because I was friendly with the wardens. If you were being remanded in prison custody, you remained in your hall locked up all day; you didn’t do anything. If you were awaiting trial, you didn’t have any rights. Some people there had waited for eight or 10 years without being tried, especially robbers and murderers. Some spend their whole life without being tried. They do nothing – wasting precious time. A small hall contains a lot of people – 180 inmates in a small room in serious heat, stuck together like sardines. You don’t have any space. People will be choking. We slept on the bare floor with no mattress.
“Prison conditions in Nigeria are bad, very bad. The environment is foul and the water is dirty. The food we receive is beans and rice but the beans are half-cooked with a lot of insects and there is a lot of sand in the rice. I wouldn’t call it a meal – I call it disease. But yet, I still loved the prison because each time I would go there, it was the only home I had. Sometimes I could get clean water because I was friendly with the wardens. If you were being remanded in prison custody, you remained in your hall locked up all day; you didn’t do anything. If you were awaiting trial, you didn’t have any rights. Some people there had waited for eight or 10 years without being tried, especially robbers and murderers. Some spend their whole life without being tried. They do nothing – wasting precious time. A small hall contains a lot of people – 180 inmates in a small room in serious heat, stuck together like sardines. You don’t have any space. People will be choking. We slept on the bare floor with no mattress.
“Whenever I came into prison, within a week I was always made the
head of my hall because of my good behavior and kindness. I was able to
go to the prison wardens and ask for blankets to put on the floor
because people were dying of infection. Sometimes when rain fell, it
came straight to the hall and you would have to sleep in the water. Some
sleep stood and had swollen legs because of standing all day and night.
Some because of sleeping on the wet ground got pneumonia and died. With
that, I had to create awareness to the wardens; that was one thing I
did in the prison that everyone remembered me for. I was the one that
brought about them bringing blankets into the prison to put on the
floor. Because in a day, you could see six to seven people die before
your eyes. If the person died in the night, you had to sleep with the
dead body until morning. No matter how loudly you banged the door,
nobody would come to open because they felt that maybe it was a set-up
for you to escape. In the morning, they would come and drag the bodies
out and take them to the mortuary. I’ve carried many bodies out of my
cell. Sometimes you would be lying down and by the time you woke up,
your neighbour would be dead. And many people had skin disease and
infections because of the conditions. But in all my years in prison,
this never happened to me. I didn’t have a single skin infection because
then, it was my home.
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