BRITISH GOVERNMENT TO BUILD 112-BED WING UNITED NATIONS STANDARD PRISON IN NIGERIA

Penpushing further learnt that in a written statement to parliament, British Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson said tenders had been placed and a supplier identified to conduct the building work at Kirikiri in Lagos, but the supplier remained unnamed.

Similarly, details showed that the project will be funded from Britain’s Conflict, Stability and Security Fund, which has an annual budget of more than 1 billion pounds and aims to commission projects that can help prevent conflicts and stabilise countries or regions.

Penpushing report further that, Kirikiri is not one of the oldest prisons in Nigeria, while it is a known fact that Nigerian prisons, many built more than a hundred years ago, are usually overcrowded, resulting in the spread of diseases.

It would also be recalled that, in February, the Nigerian government disclosed that the prison in Port Harcourt currently has nearly 5,000, with about 3,700 of them had been awaiting trial for more than five years. The prison was originally designed to hold 800 prisoners.

Also Controller General of Nigerian Prisons Service, Jafaru Ahmed, in July 2017 said there was urgent need for adequate funding of prisons across the country in order to properly achieve major objectives of prisons service as well as ensure greater efficiency.

He said “We can improve the prisons service by improved funding that is one of our major constraints. We have gone to developed countries to see how prisons are efficiently run. The facilities that we have in Nigeria, most of them are obsolete and overstretched because of the high population. If there is improved funding, all the facilities that supposed to be in place will be in place,”