In a bid to curtail the recent jailbreaks in some Nigeria prisons, the Federal Government has banned the use of mobile phones by the inmates and prison officials in all the prisons in the country.
This was disclosed by the minister of interior, Abba Moro, on Saturday, November 22, 2014 in Abuja during an interactive meeting with the senior officers of the Prison Service.
The minister also directed the Nigerian Prison Service authorities to recover all handsets from inmates within 30 days.
He also frowned at indecent dressing by some of the prison inmates stating that the mode of dressing of the inmates should be put under close scrutiny, “no matter highly placed they may be.”
He said, “I have visited some prisons in other countries as the Minister of the Federal Republic of Nigeria; Nobody, no matter highly placed you are, you don’t come to prison with your phones, not even the minister of Interior as the supervising minister over the prisons. So, why are you an exception?
“Henceforth, no matter who you are including myself, that nobody goes into prison with telephones. And so, as you are going from here, create a meeting platform where all the officers that work in the prisons as they walk into prisons, they submit their phones and collect them when they close.
“Secondly, it means that you have one month to recover all the phones in the custody of inmates across the prison formations. Within one month, all prison formation must recover all telephones from inmates.”
“Don’t forget that I will know if you fail to do this, because we have various agencies in Nigeria that are tracking telephone usages and MTN and other service providers could make available such facilities. The consequence of not doing this,you should already know,” he told the senior prison officials,” he added.
Also, in reaction to the most recent attack on Koton-Karfe prison in Kogi state, the minister expressed his disappointment towards the prisons intelligence unit and the armed squad to stop the attackers.
He further issued a directive to the Acting Comptroller-General of Prisons, Aminu Suley, to investigate and report back to him, within two weeks, allegations that a prison officer provided the assailants the arms with which they carried out the attack.
