On Thursday, a report detailed how lawyers in Lagos State were lamenting that warders at prison facilities in the state were rejecting inmates.

The problem, the lawyers claimed, was that the prisons were full, and there was no room for new suspects.

Even bigger was the problem of an October 18, 2023 circular Joy Ugbomoiko, a chief magistrate, signed. According to this circular, “No magistrate shall order any police to detain a defendant at the station.”

With both realities, if the police cannot hold suspects longer than the 24-hour constitutional period and the prisons won’t absorb them, it begs the question of where suspects would be held pending the fulfilment of bail conditions or trial.

To establish the facts of the matter, FIJ contacted an insider in the Kirikiri correctional facility in Lagos.

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This insider corroborated the claims in the report, and said the rejection of new inmates had been in place for over a week.

They said, “The prison is too congested so they are rejecting new inmates, and you know the federal government has said each state should handle the feeding of the state prisons.

“It’s from the court they are rejecting the inmates, because before any new inmate can be admitted here, the suspect must have been taken to court and the magistrate would then order for the suspect to be remanded in prison.”

We went further to interview Rotimi Oladokun, the Correctional Service Public Relations Officer, Lagos Command.

In a telephone interview, Oladokun told FIJ that the prisons were rejecting inmates because they were congested, and there was no room for more.

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“We placed a partial restriction on the number of inmates to take, and it is normal; there is nothing out of place,” Oladokun told FIJ. “There are suspects who were just arrested and have to perfect bail; we can’t take them now because there is no enough space.”

When FIJ asked where the rejected suspects would be taken, he said there were various options, and while some could be with the police, some could be sent home or the court could come up with other solutions.

After speaking with Oladokun, FIJ reached out to the office of Olubunmi Tunji-Ojo, the Minister of Interior, and Babatunde Alao, his chief press secretary, took our call on Friday night.

Alao said the ministry was partnering with the Ministry of Justice and other stakeholders to reduce the number of inmates in Lagos prisons so the facilities could absorb more inmates.

“Lagos is peculiar,” Alao told FIJ. “When we post bail for 4,000 inmates nationwide, the bulk of them who are in Lagos would free up space, and things would retun to normal.”

With Oladokun and Alao explaining the position of the correctional facilities and the Ministry of Interior, and the circular stating police cannot detain inmates for longer, one might be tempted to ask what has been happening to new suspects since October 18.

We posed this question to Benjamin Hundeyin, the Police Public Relations Officer (PPRO) of the Lagos State Police Command, but he did not take our calls or respond to the question sent via text.