By Ishaya Ibrahim/Lagos
On March 27, Daniel Gambo, who is in Kirikiri maximum prison in Lagos awaiting trial, received the usual update on his case at the Ikeja High Court.
The judge, as has been the tradition since the case started in 2011, announced a two-month adjournment to give the police another opportunity to produce their witness, after failing to do so on several previous occasions.
Internal Affairs Minister, Aba MoroGambo’s troubles began in April 2011 when the bank he was working for (Bank PHB now Keystone Bank) in Akowonjo, Lagos, was robbed on the night he was on duty.
His colleague was killed, he escaped. The Special Anti-Robbery Squad (SARS) holds him as a suspect.
Three years on, the case has not moved beyond the hearing stage due largely to the inability of the police to produce any witness.
In search of justice, Gambo’s elder brother, Noel, approached the Lagos office of the Public Defender (OPD) to intervene. He met a stone wall.
Noel left his base in Kaduna for Lagos in August 2011 to help his brother with the case and returned disappointed in December 2013.
He now hopes that Governor Babatunde Fashola will intervene to ensure that an innocent man does not suffer injustice.
There is another case in Owerri involving Stephen Anoruo, who said he was set up by his debtor and has been in detention since 2008 because the courts refused to grant him bail.
According to him, his debtor, in order to keep him out of circulation because he did not want to pay his debt, lied to the police that he was among those who attempted to kidnap the wife of Frank Nneji, the Chief Executive Officer and Managing Director of Associated Bus Company (ABC).
The prosecution witness has since died and the judge who handled the case originally has retired.
TheNiche learnt that the case has neither a complainant nor a witness. The last time it was mentioned in court before a new judge, no one showed up.
The defence lawyer, Nelson Umahi, abandoned the case because Anoruo’s family, after paying his initial legal fees, could not cope with his demand for more money.
Investigation showed that Anoruo, who hails from Aboh Mbaise, is critically ill and his mother, a bed-ridden widow, is being asked by prison officials to pay the bill at the Federal Medical Centre (FMC), Owerri.
Gambo and Anoruo are two of the 39,034 prisoners awaiting trial and who represent 80 per cent of the total prison population in Nigeria.
Prisons Controller General, Zakari Ibrahim, declared in a lecture in Ado-Ekiti earlier this year that “where a person is in prison unconvicted, that person is deemed innocent until proven guilty.
“There are 56,620 persons in custody in the Nigerian prison system. 39,034 of them are awaiting trial. This translates to almost 80 per cent. Some have been awaiting trial up to 10 years.”
It could take even 15 years to resolve some cases.
Major Hamza Al-Mustapha was kept in detention from October 1998 until he regained his freedom on July 12, 2013.
A sociologist and security consultant, Ebongabasi Ekpe-Juda, said there is a high rate of awaiting trial because of the faulty justice system.
“A person is arrested for pick pocketing and it takes the court four, five years to convict while he languishes in prison as awaiting trial. The annoying part is that prison is supposed to be a reformative place,” he added.
“But when a man stays in prison for a minor crime that should not take him three months’ sentence, he sits down there and learns even the hard things and comes out to be a hardened criminal.
“That is the sorry state of the nation, which reflects on all aspects of our society.”