The Federal Government has banned the use of mobile phones
in all the prison formations by inmates and prison officials. It also directed
the Nigerian Prison Service authorities to recover all handsets from inmates
within 30 days.
Minister of Interior, Abba Moro, who handed down the order
on Saturday in Abuja, during an interactive meeting with the senior officers of
the Prison Service, decried indecent dressing by the inmates.
He stated that no inmate should be allowed to wear their
choice of clothes or shoes, as is the practice presently, “no matter highly
placed they may be.”
Moro said, “I have visited some prisons in other countries
as the Minister of the Federal Republic of Nigeria; Nobody, no matter highly
placed you are, you don’t come to prison with your phones, not even the
minister of Interior as the supervising minister over the prisons. So, why are
you an exception?
“Henceforth, no matter who you are including myself, that
nobody goes into prison with telephones. And so, as you are going from here,
create a meeting platform where all the officers that work in the prisons as
they walk into prisons, they submit their phones and collect them when they
close.
“Secondly, it means that you have one month to recover all
the phones in the custody of inmates across the prison formations. Within one
month, all prison formation must recover all telephones from inmates.”
The minister threatened to deal with the NPS management if
it failed to carry out the directive, adding that he would know if the phones
were not recovered from the inmates as ordered.
“Don’t forget that I will know if you fail to do this,
because we have various agencies in Nigeria that are tracking telephone usages
and MTN and other service providers could make available such facilities. The
consequence of not doing this, you should already know,” he told the senior
prison officials.
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