By Adesakin Adefemi
The Federal Government has said the Transfer of Sentenced Persons Agreement with Ethiopia, aimed at repatriating incarcerated Nigerians, is in line with the citizen diplomacy framework of President Bola Tinubu’s Renewed Hope Agenda. The agreement prioritizes the welfare of Nigerians in the diaspora.
Minister of Foreign Affairs, Amb. Bianca Odumegwu-Ojukwu, made this known on Friday in a statement signed by her Special Assistant on Communication and New Media, Magnus Eze. She described the agreement as an important diplomatic milestone reflecting ongoing efforts to intervene in cases involving Nigerians facing difficulties abroad.
The minister dismissed a purported list circulating on various media platforms regarding the names and number of Nigerian inmates in Ethiopian prisons as fake. She insisted that Nigeria does not have 136 inmates in the country and described some of the crimes attributed to the inmates in the reports as unfounded.
She said the government is determined to bring the inmates home to serve their sentences with dignity and without being exposed to inhumane conditions. Efforts had been made for many years to secure the return of the prisoners to Nigeria, amid challenges in obtaining accurate data on the number of Nigerian inmates in Ethiopia.
According to Odumegwu-Ojukwu, the inmates are being held in Kaliti and Aba Samuel prisons, both maximum-security facilities. She stressed the need to sign the agreement on the transfer of sentenced persons, which allows prisoners sentenced in one country to return to their country of origin to complete their jail terms.
“This is important because the inmates in those prisons have been agitating for so many years to return to Nigeria to complete their jail terms,” she said. She cited precarious living conditions, health challenges, inadequate medical facilities, poor feeding, denial of visitation rights, inadequate legal services and language barriers as reasons for the transfer.
The minister said four Nigerian prisoners had died during the period it took both countries to finalize the agreement. “Some of these young people that I saw when I went into that prison could have been anybody’s brother. So, should they be faced with such a precarious situation for one mistake?” she queried.
Odumegwu-Ojukwu dismissed concerns that the inmates would be freed upon their return to Nigeria and rejected allegations that the prisoners were from a particular region of the country. She stressed that crime has no ethnic or regional affiliation and that one provision of the Memorandum of Understanding is an undertaking not to grant pardon or amnesty to any transferred prisoner without the consent of the sentencing state.
She clarified that the list trending online is a made-up list. According to her, the inmates who are the subject of this agreement on the transfer of sentenced persons are 98 in Kaliti and Aba Samuel prisons, drawn from the South-East, South-West and South-South. “All these people are Nigerian citizens in a foreign jail,” she said.
