‘Each state should have its prison’
Barr. Uwemedimo Nwoko is the 14th Attorney-General and Commissioner for Justice in Akwa Ibom State. In this interview, he speaks about the prison, punishment for kidnappers and other topical issues. Excerpts:
Since the Supreme Court has affirmed the death sentence on some convicted criminals from your state, what message do you for such people in the state?
The Supreme Court decision is a very positive statement to all persons who do not want to engage in honest living to get away from Akwa Ibom State. We are making it very clear that Akwa Ibom State is no more a place where criminals would practice their trade. Anyone who does not want to live his life within the confines of the law should find another place to relocate to. His Excellency the governor is determined to make the state safe and peaceful for not only the indigenes of Akwa Ibom State but also the investors, residents and other people who find it good to live in the state. The state is a peaceful state and currently we are rated as one of the most peaceful states in the country and we don’t intend to lose that status.
What is the appropriate punishment that you would suggest for kidnappers?
Personally I suggest the death penalty. I sympathise with people who hold a contrary opinion but before you apprehend one kidnapper, he must have killed three to four persons. In some cases their victim’s die in their hands and they just dispose of the corpses, they don’t care. They don’t even have humanity in them and to me I don’t even see why such people should get any iota of human sympathy. In my state, penalty for kidnapping is death, and we do not intend to change it.
Has that reduced the tendency to kidnap?
I am not interested in whether it reduces the tendency for others to go and commit the offence, that is a sociological appraisal, because criminals will always be criminals. I take it on individual event, each person should answer for his own crime and not what happens to the society. I am not interested in the result that has on the society but the question is that any person who has killed another person or put the life of another person in extreme danger as a kidnapper should answer for that. Not whether you reduce or increase other people from the offence. You may not.
But the question is that let every person answer for what he has done.
In Akwa Ibom State, what are you doing to decongest prisons?
We are doing a lot to decongest the prisons but unfortunately, we don’t have Akwa Ibom State prisons. In Nigeria, prisons is under the exclusive legislative list. It is very unfortunate and it is only in countries that it is run this way that you have such situations. There should not be federal prisons only. Each state should have its own prisons.
If you go to America, Canada, Australia or India, each component state has its own facility. If we were to have Akwa Ibom prisons we would have been in absolute control of how we run our criminal justice system and there would be no prison congestion. We have federal prisons in Uyo, we have built one, two are on their way been constructed by the state for the Federal Government.
The Ikot Ekpene Prisons which was built by the state for the Federal Government is one of the best facilities in West Africa, it is a reforming facility. How does that help? You build that and give a capacity and because the capacity has been expanded, every other state or the Federal Government now picks criminals from the other states and put them there. So what do you do? You cannot say don’t bring them because it is not our prison, it is federal prison.
So when people talk about prison congestion, it is not a thing that is within the powers of the state governments to manage because even if you remove all the criminals today, the Federal Government that owns the prisons has the right to bring in other prisoners from other states.
On our own we have set in motion a process that our criminal trials have the best attention and quickest approach. We work in such a way that we don’t intend to have awaiting trial inmates for long. Except due to the problem of the judicial system that we have. Don’t forget that as of today, the judges still write in long hand. The process of bringing suspects to court is still within the powers of the Federal Government, they own the vehicles used in bringing prison inmates to court.
So where you prepare all your witnesses and the prosecution to go on with trial and the prison authorities say they don’t have vehicles, that is not a matter for the states; these are the things that cause prison congestion. But in Akwa Ibom State we are doing as much as possible within our powers to ensure that there is balance in the number of prisoners that are supposed to be in a particular prison facility.
Are you satisfied with the disciplinary mechanism in the NBA?
I am. The NBA Legal Practitioners Disciplinary Committee (LPDC) is doing well but there is room for improvement. The society is dynamic; when you pick the disciplinary rules made 40 years ago, it would hardly be of use because a lot of things have changed and the LPDC has to work in conjunction with the Body of Benchers to continue to work on the procedure to deal with erring lawyers, but it should not be a situation where people cry wolf.
There is an internal mechanism both at the bar and the bench through which the legal profession purges itself.