Nigeria’s Minister of Interior, Dr Olubunmi Tunji-Ojo, revealed this week that the overwhelming majority of the country’s prison population, 93 percent, consists of state offenders rather than federal ones, and argued that a large share of these inmates never needed to be incarcerated at all.
Speaking Wednesday in Abuja at a regional conference on prisoner classification and correctional technology, jointly hosted by the UN Office on Drugs and Crime and the African Correctional Services Association, Tunji-Ojo said only 7 percent of Nigeria’s inmates are held for federal crimes. The rest, he said, are largely there for state-level offences, many of which he described as minor enough that incarceration made little sense in the first place.
He shared a personal example from early in his tenure to illustrate the point. Shortly after becoming minister, he asked his permanent secretary and the Controller General of the Correctional Service to pull data on inmates jailed over unpaid fines or compensation judgments under 500,000 naira. The number came back at over 4,000 people. He questioned the logic of keeping such individuals locked up, noting that the government ends up spending far more feeding an inmate for a year than the fine itself was ever worth. Clearing that backlog, he said, reduced correctional facility overcrowding by 5 percent in a single day.
That experience, he argued, points to a larger question African correctional systems need to ask themselves, whether overcrowding reflects genuine security needs or simply reflects offences that never warranted jail time in the first place. He estimated that a closer look would reveal 30 to 50 percent of inmates in many facilities fall into that category.
The minister also pointed to a sharp decline in recidivism, from roughly 13,000 cases annually in 2023 to just 1,000 last year, crediting expanded access to education and vocational training behind bars. He detailed the scope of these programs: 62 inmates currently pursuing postgraduate degrees, 261 in undergraduate study, 1,125 in formal education programs, 18 National Open University study centers operating inside correctional facilities, and 9,582 inmates participating in vocational and rehabilitation training.
On security, Tunji-Ojo noted Nigeria has gone three full years without a jailbreak or attack on a correctional facility, a record he attributed to stronger data sharing between agencies. He described one case where an escaped inmate was recaptured after attempting to apply for a Nigerian passport, explaining that biometric verification flagged him as a correctional escapee the moment immigration officials processed his fingerprint, triggering an immediate arrest.
Sylvester Ndidi Nwakuche, Controller General of the Nigerian Correctional Service, said the country’s correctional reforms remain grounded in the Nigerian Correctional Service Act of 2019. He described prisoner classification as a critical tool for assessing risk, protecting vulnerable inmates, allocating resources efficiently and designing targeted rehabilitation programs. He also emphasized that adopting technology across correctional systems would improve record-keeping, strengthen information sharing and boost institutional accountability, adding that no single country holds all the answers to the shared challenges facing African correctional systems today.
