Behind bars, without trial, without conviction

By Obiora Chukwumba

Two in every three people in Nigeria’s custodial centres have not been convicted of anything. They are not serving sentences, just waiting trial.

Onyeji is a young man hustling on the streets of Lokoja, targeting commuters in traffic hold ups to sell random wares. “Hustle” is a local lingo for bare, survival energy channeled into eking out a meal worth of income each day. His day starts with the morning’s rush hour commuting at traffic points. He shoves his ware in the face of commuters seated behind half wound-down glasses in cars or buses, yelling out appeals for patronage. He chases down moving vehicles at a sign of a barely contrived interest in his ware from often tensed up commuter until the prospect vanishes or a sell is concluded. One afternoon, he is involved in a dispute. Matters escalate and nose dived rapidly and he ends up in police cell.

Nobody to tell. No phone, no phone calls. Nobody tells him his rights. He cannot afford a lawyer, and nobody offers him one. A magistrate signs a paper he never sees. Weeks pass. Then months. Somewhere between the police station and the court, his file goes missing. And literally so does he. This may sound unbelievable but it is the reality of many across cities in Nigeria. On 9 February 2026, the Nigerian Correctional Service told the House of Representatives in Abuja that it held 80,812 inmates. Of these, 51,955, about 64 per cent, were awaiting trial. The World Prison Brief put the figure at 65.2 per cent up by 1.2 percent in June, 2026 in a facility built for roughly 65,000 people, now operating at about 125 per cent of its capacity. Put simply, for every three people behind the wall, two have not yet been put through trial.

The law is not the problem

Onyeji ought never to have been in detention beyond days. The Nigerian Constitution presumes a person innocent until proven guilty. It says an arrested person must be brought before a court within a day. Two days, if there is no court within 40 kilometres of distance. The international treaties Nigeria has signed, including the covenant on civil and political rights and the African Charter, say the same thing in plain words. Locking up people before trial should be the exception, not the habit.

The Administration of Criminal Justice Act of 2015 was meant to turn those principles into practice. It limits how long a suspect can be kept on a remand order and says the order can only be renewed for national security reasons. It makes room for bail and for community service in place of prison, and it set up a committee to watch how the law is applied and to report on its findings every quarter. Eleven years on, the law is still not a trash. But its implementation is clearly atrocious.

The gap between the paper and the counter

A recent study by the Reform Pretrial Detention Network, led by the Public and Private Development Centre, covered Adamawa, Nasarawa, Kaduna, Plateau and the Federal Capital Territory to find out why. What it found is less a story of bad law than of a law nobody is made to follow. Fewer than one in five detainees had access to a lawyer. Seventy-three per cent of those surveyed, police included, showed serious gaps in what they knew about rights at arrest. In Plateau, 31 of 79 law enforcement respondents admitted they never tell detainees their rights at all. Outside the capital, courts still run on paper and memory.

The Ministries of Justice in the surveyed states have no dedicated desk watching pretrial detainees, and no single list shows who is held, since when, and under what authority. And 85 per cent of the civil society and community voices surveyed said they were dissatisfied with how these cases are handled. Scholars call this “decoupling”, which is a grand word for something every Nigerian understands, the reform is real in the gazette and absent at the counter. A committee exists. A statute exists. A software system exists. The man at the police station still does not get a phone call.

Where you are arrested matters

There is a further wrinkle. The 2015 Act speaks directly to federal courts and the Federal Capital Territory. States are expected to pass and enforce their own versions, and most arrests and trials happen in state courts. So the protection a suspect enjoys can depend on a state boundary, a magistrate’s mood and whether a lawyer happens to be in the building. Rights that change with the address are not yet rights; they are favours. The bill is paid in many currencies. Onyeji loses his wares, his humanity and liberty, his mother loses her sleep. The state pays in increasing number of damaged personalities as citizens, the courts, beholden to their fate, stay cluttered.

There’s no quick fix

In October 2025, the Minister of Interior, Mr. Olubunmi Tunji-Ojo visiting Kuje, observed that of the people held there, more than 800 were awaiting trial against about 200 convicted and serving time. He promised a drastic reduction. The Nigerian Bar Association under Afam Osigwe mandated its Human Rights Committee to work with state Chief Judges to conduct prison visits and review records to determine those held longer than any sentence they could possibly receive and in doing so, address the grave issues of pretrial detainees bedeviling the justice system. These are welcome pronouncements. But they remain pronouncements. An occasional jail delivery is a mop, not a leaking tap-fix. Release a thousand today and, without change at the front door, the cells fill again by the following year.

What should change

To reverse the situation no one needs to reinvent the wheel, it does not require a new law. It needs five normal, human steps taken rightly and intentionally.

Getting every police, court and correctional record to feed a single register that shows that Onyeji is being held at a specific facility, why he is being held, and for how long he has been in the facility. Each Ministry of Justice at the federal and state levels to create a desk with the mandate to chase every case that has stalled. Activate a help scheme that makes legal aid available and at the door steps of the police station within hours, not the court after months.

Ensure that magistrates are specifically trained, and required to write down, in a few lines, why a particular person must be held. Where release is safe, release should be the rule.

Normalize the rule of upholding probation and supervised release of detainees ensuring that the process is funded and staffed so that judges can use them with confidence. Each state’s monitoring committee needs to be galvanized by every means possible to meet, report quarterly and publish the numbers. Furthermore, the bar, the human rights commission and civil society may be required to oversight the implementation process.

Conclusion

The real question is not whether people like Onyeji deserve mercy. It is whether the rest of us are willing to live in a country where any one of us, on a bad evening, could become the next missing file. “Innocent until proven guilty” is a promise written into our Constitution. Promises are kept or broken in places like the cell where Onyeji waits. It is time to start counting the days, and to make someone answerable for every one of them.

• Dr. Nzomiwu, MNIPR, a journalist, political commentator and public affairs analyst, writes via [email protected]