By Kachi Okezie, Esq.
If a high-profile man on remand cannot keep his wedding ring safe in Kuje prison, then no citizen’s rights are safe anywhere.
There is a special kind of dread that grips a society when the very institutions created to secure life and liberty become the ones that violate them most brazenly. The recent report out of Kuje Medium Security Custodial Centre, alleging that former Skye Bank Chairman Tunde Ayeni was robbed of a ₦120 million watch and wedding ring, would be alarming enough if it were the work of external bandits scaling fences under cover of darkness.
It becomes something far more corrosive when, as alleged, the raiders were not hoodlums but security personnel whose identities remain unknown. That single detail shifts the conversation from one about failed fences and poor surveillance to something more fundamental: abuse of authority. When the hand that holds the key is the same hand that reaches into your pocket, we are no longer talking about insecurity. We are talking about the state turning on its own citizens.
Ayeni is on remand. That legal status matters more than most people realise. Under Section 36(5) of the Constitution of the Federal Republic of Nigeria 1999 as amended, every person charged with a criminal offence shall be presumed innocent until proved guilty. The Supreme Court reaffirmed this in Al-Mustapha v. State (2013) LPELR-20372(SC), holding that the presumption is absolute and applies at all stages including pre-trial detention.
A remand inmate is not a convict. He stands before the law as Ayeni does, entitled to every constitutional right that has not been expressly taken away by due process. Section 35(1)(c) of the Constitution permits detention only upon reasonable suspicion and for the purpose of bringing him before a court, while Section 34(1)(a) guarantees that the dignity of his person is inviolable. The Supreme Court in Uzoukwu v. Ezeonu II (1991) 6 NWLR Pt. 200 p.708 made clear that fundamental rights do not stop at the prison gate.
Property cannot be seized except by a court order following a lawful process, as Section 36(12) of the Constitution demands, and Section 12(8) of the Nigerian Correctional Service Act 2019 expressly provides that an inmate shall retain all rights not lawfully taken away by the sentence of a court or by the fact of detention.
Yet inside a facility that should be the most controlled environment in the country, a man awaiting trial is said to have been relieved of personal effects of immense value, with no judge, no order, no record, only the implied threat of men in uniform. If this is true, then it is not just a robbery. It is a desecration of the very idea of justice itself, a direct assault on the presumption of innocence that the Court of Appeal in Duru v. FRN (2017) LPELR-43289(CA) warned must not be violated by treating an accused as guilty before judgment.
For years Nigerians have watched the slow erosion of our public institutions with a mixture of anger and resignation. Courts hearings are delayed, hospitals under-equipped, roads abandoned, and now even prisons, the last line of the state’s claim to order, have become spaces where rights are negotiable.
Kuje itself was attacked by terrorists in 2022 and hundreds escaped. The state promised reforms, better intelligence, stronger perimeters. To now hear, as alleged, that danger may come not from outside the walls but from within the uniform is to confront a deeper rot. It suggests that the problem is not only what we lack in terms of money or manpower, but what we have lost in terms of discipline, oversight, and fear of consequences. When men who wear the insignia of the state can enter a custodial centre and allegedly strip an inmate of his possessions without fear that anyone will hold them to account, it means impunity has moved from the streets into the very heart of the correctional system.
Section 13 of the Nigerian Correctional Service Act 2019 requires that awaiting-trial persons be kept separate from convicted persons and treated as innocent. The Court in Nemi v. State (1994) 7 NWLR Pt. 355 p.201 held that remand inmates must not be subjected to punitive treatment reserved for convicts. When that statutory duty is ignored and the remand cell becomes a hunting ground, the law is not merely broken; it is ridiculed.
The social contract is simple in theory and demanding in practice. Citizens surrender certain freedoms to the state with the expectation that the state will protect their lives, their property, and their dignity. Nowhere is that bargain starker than in prison. An inmate cannot lock his door, cannot hire private guards, cannot run to the police if the police are the threat. The moment the state takes liberty away, it assumes total responsibility for safety. The Supreme Court in Fawehinmi v. IGP (2000) LPELR-1279(SC) held that detention, including remand, must be lawful and the detainee retains all constitutional rights except those necessarily restricted by detention itself. To fail at that point is to breach the contract at its most basic clause. If a remand prisoner cannot trust that his wedding ring will be safe inside Kuje, then what citizen can trust that his home will be safe in Abuja, his shop safe in Kano, his farm safe in Benue? The corrosion begins in the cell but it does not end there. It spreads outward, convincing people that the state is not a protector but another predator to be managed.
There are consequences that flow from this drift if we do not arrest it quickly. The first is the death of public trust in the judiciary and the correctional system. Why should any Nigerian believe in the rule of law if the place where the law is supposed to be enforced becomes a marketplace for extortion? The second is the hardening of criminality. Prisons are meant to correct, to rehabilitate, to return people to society better than they entered. A facility where inmates must defend their watches and wedding rings from those meant to guard them will not produce reformed citizens. It will produce embittered citizens who have learned that survival means distrusting every institution.
The third consequence is international. Nigeria has domesticated the African Charter on Human and Peoples’ Rights through the Ratification and Enforcement Act, and Article 7(b) of that Charter guarantees the presumption of innocence. In Abacha v. Fawehinmi (2000) 6 NWLR Pt. 660 p.228 the Supreme Court held that the Charter is part of Nigerian law and enforceable. Repeated violations inside our custodial centres invite scrutiny, lawsuits, and diplomatic embarrassment at a time when we are trying to attract investment and partnership. Investors do not pour money into countries where the state cannot even guarantee the safety of those in its custody.
What makes this episode particularly painful is that Ayeni is not a faceless statistic. He is a high-profile figure whose case has been in the public eye. If someone with resources, access to lawyers, and public attention can allegedly be robbed inside Kuje by security personnel, then the ordinary awaiting-trial trader, student, or driver who has no voice and no connections is completely vulnerable. That is the true measure of institutional failure. When the system cannot protect the visible, it has certainly abandoned the invisible. Remand under Section 296 of the Administration of Criminal Justice Act 2015 is administrative, not punitive, as the Court in Odogu v. A.G. Federation (1996) 6 NWLR Pt. 453 p.180 emphasised. Yet the experience alleged turns administration into punishment and custody into extortion.
So where is the state’s responsibility? It lies squarely at the door of those who control the Nigerian Correctional Service, the Ministry of Interior, and ultimately the presidency which swore to uphold the Constitution. Responsibility means more than issuing press statements. It means an immediate, independent, and transparent investigation into the allegations, with the identities of all personnel who accessed Ayeni’s cell in the relevant period made public. It means sanctioning and prosecuting any officer found culpable, not redeploying them quietly to another command, because the Evidence Act 2011 places the burden of proof on the state and the state must now prove that it can police its own. It means publishing a clear policy on inmate property, with receipts, inventories, and accountability, so that no court order is needed to remind officials that a man’s watch is not state property. It means decongesting prisons by speeding up trials for the majority of inmates who are awaiting trial, because overcrowding breeds chaos and chaos invites abuse. And it means funding and training staff properly, paying them on time, rotating them frequently, and subjecting them to real oversight, because a poorly paid, unsupervised officer with absolute power over a captive population will almost always become the problem he was hired to solve.
Nigerians are tired of excuses. We have heard about bad eggs and isolated incidents for too long while the pattern repeats. The Kuje allegation, if proven, is not an isolated incident. It is a symptom of a nasty culture. It tells us that the line between custodian and criminal is thinning, and that the authority we grant the state is being weaponised against the very people it should shield. That is an affront to civil rights and to justice in the deepest sense of those words. Justice is not only about courts handing down sentences. It is about the daily, unglamorous work of ensuring that every person, even the accused, even the unpopular, is treated as a human being under the protection of law, as Section 36(5) and the long line of authorities from Woolmington to Al-Mustapha demand. We must demand better, not just for Tunde Ayeni, but for the principle he represents in this moment. A nation that cannot keep its correctional facilities safe cannot claim to be secure. A government that cannot control its own security personnel cannot claim to have a monopoly on force. And a society that shrugs at the robbery of a remand inmate has already begun to accept that no one’s rights are safe. The time to arrest this drift is now, before the next story is not about a stolen watch, but about a stolen life, and before Nigerians conclude, with bitter accuracy, that the greatest threat to their liberty comes not from outside the gates, but from the officers standing inside them.
The views expressed by contributors are strictly personal and not of Law & Society Magazine.
