Nigeria’s correctional system has long been a space where the state’s obligations to those in its custody receive little public scrutiny. That reality is now being forced into view. President Bola Tinubu has approved the deployment of 50 medical doctors and 100 nurses to hospitals inside the country’s correctional centres, a direct response to what the Minister of Interior, Dr Olubunmi Tunji-Ojo, described as a dangerous shortage of healthcare personnel within the custodial estate.
Tunji-Ojo made the disclosure on Tuesday when the Minister of Information and National Orientation, Alhaji Mohammed Idris, paid him a courtesy visit in Abuja. The conversation between the two ministers ranged from healthcare inside correctional facilities to prison vocational reforms, mine security, and the need for a coordinated federal communications strategy. But it was the announcement of 150 new medical personnel that drew the sharpest attention.
The minister did not mince words about the depth of the problem. He stated that the hospital inside the correctional centre in Rivers State currently has no medical doctor, leaving inmates entirely without qualified clinical care. He further noted that while some facilities have equipment capable of supporting major surgical procedures, including the Kuje Correctional Centre in Abuja, those facilities are undermined by a lack of trained medical personnel to operate them.
Kuje Correctional Centre, located in the Federal Capital Territory, has a documented history of challenges. In July 2022, it was the target of a coordinated attack by Boko Haram militants, which led to a mass jailbreak involving over 440 inmates, including high-profile terror suspects. The facility was subsequently reinforced with security upgrades. The minister’s disclosure that Kuje holds surgical-grade medical equipment while facilities elsewhere lack basic staffing underlines a systemic imbalance in how correctional health resources are distributed across the country.
“The President understands that he is the President of all Nigerians, including those inmates. And as father to all, he has always shown that he cares,” the minister said.
Nigeria’s correctional system, formally restructured under the Nigerian Correctional Service Act of 2019, operates a network of custodial centres across the country’s 36 states and the Federal Capital Territory. The Act replaced the old Prisons Act of 1972 and represented an attempt to shift the philosophy of the custodial system from punitive incarceration toward rehabilitation and reintegration. Healthcare was one of the pillars cited in that legislative overhaul.
In practice, however, the health infrastructure inside Nigerian correctional centres has consistently lagged behind the law’s aspirations. As of the most recent data compiled by the Nigerian Correctional Service and various civil society organisations, Nigeria’s correctional population stands at well over 77,000 inmates, a figure that includes a substantial proportion of awaiting-trial persons, many of whom have not been convicted of any offence. Overcrowding is pervasive. The Nigerian Bar Association and human rights organisations including Prisoners Rehabilitation and Welfare Action, known as PRAWA, have repeatedly documented the consequences: disease outbreaks, malnutrition, and deaths in custody that go largely unreported.
A 2022 report by the International Committee of the Red Cross noted that tuberculosis, skin diseases, and mental health disorders were among the most prevalent conditions observed inside Nigerian custodial centres. The same report flagged inadequate medical staffing as a critical structural gap. Against that backdrop, the announcement of 150 medical personnel represents a significant acknowledgement of the problem, though independent observers and health policy specialists have previously argued that sustainable reform requires not just staffing but institutional investment, supply chains for pharmaceuticals, and a functional referral system for cases that cannot be managed within custodial settings.
Beyond healthcare, the minister outlined a vocational rehabilitation programme that the Federal Government has been running across correctional centres. The initiative, described as a train-the-trainer model, began with what Tunji-Ojo called an inmate skills audit, a systematic effort to identify pre-existing skills among the custodial population. Inmates who possess tradeable vocational competencies are then empowered to train others inside the facilities, creating an internal knowledge-sharing structure.
“We have been able to build capacity through what we call ‘train the trainer’. We did what we call inmate skills audits. We went to our correctional centres and tried to know the skills these inmates had. We now empower you to be able to train other people. Those people who graduate, we empower them,” the minister said.
This approach, while not new in correctional policy globally, represents a notable shift from the historically passive posture of Nigerian custodial management, which for decades provided little beyond warehousing for inmates awaiting trial or serving sentence. The skills audit model, if well executed, aligns with the NCS Act 2019’s emphasis on reformation, rehabilitation, and reintegration, the three principles around which the legislation sought to reframe the purpose of incarceration in Nigeria.
Tunji-Ojo also disclosed that President Tinubu approved a 50 per cent increase in the feeding allowance for inmates. For context, the feeding allowance for Nigerian inmates had for years been stuck at figures widely criticised as grossly inadequate, with various reports and civil society filings indicating that the approved allocation per inmate per day had not kept pace with inflation or food prices. The 50 per cent increase, while welcomed, still leaves the per-inmate daily allocation well below what nutritionists and welfare advocates say is necessary to maintain basic health standards inside custodial facilities.
The meeting also offered the minister an opportunity to highlight the Nigeria Security and Civil Defence Corps, the NSCDC, which sits under the Ministry of Interior. Tunji-Ojo announced that the corps had created what he called mine marshals, a specialised unit developed in collaboration with the Ministry of Solid Minerals to secure Nigeria’s mining fields.
“In NSCDC, we’ve created what we call the mine marshals in collaboration with the Ministry of Solid Minerals. Now securing our minefields. And you can see that the effect is there. There is a reduction in criminality and violence within this sector. And also, protection of critical national assets,” the minister said.
The creation of mine marshals speaks to a broader challenge that has been gaining urgency in Nigeria’s policy conversation. Illegal mining has become a significant source of insecurity, environmental degradation, and revenue loss. The Nigerian Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative and the Ministry of Solid Minerals have repeatedly flagged the problem of artisanal and small-scale mining operating outside regulatory frameworks, often controlled by criminal syndicates or armed groups. Deploying NSCDC personnel with a specific mandate to police those spaces is an escalation of state presence in an area previously described as a governance vacuum.
The courtesy visit from the Information Minister carried its own sub-text. Tunji-Ojo was candid about his desire for greater communication support from the Idris-led ministry, stressing that many of the Interior Ministry’s reform activities had not been adequately communicated to the Nigerian public. He called for a coordinated communication strategy, particularly around national security objectives.
“We want you to come and see some of the things we have been able to achieve. And, in terms of our national security strategy, we want to collaborate more with you so that there can be a coordinated communication strategy,” he said.
Idris, in his response, signalled alignment with that objective and committed his ministry to a more proactive role in publicising the administration’s reform work. “Our job is to ensure that whatever we do, whatever the administration does, the Nigerian public hears it and aligns with it. This is primarily our responsibility,” the minister said.
The exchange between the two ministers underlines a pattern within the Tinubu administration: individual ministries moving on reforms that lack public visibility, and a communications architecture that has struggled to package and project those reforms coherently to a sceptical public.
The history of custodial health neglect in Nigeria runs deep. Under colonial administration, British-era prisons were designed primarily as instruments of control, not rehabilitation. After independence in 1960, successive Nigerian governments made only superficial adjustments to what was inherited, with the Prisons Act of 1972 remaining the primary legal framework for custodial management for nearly five decades. By the time the NCS Act was enacted in 2019 under President Muhammadu Buhari, human rights groups had catalogued decades of abuse, neglect, and preventable death inside Nigerian prisons.
The Legal Defence and Assistance Project, known as LEDAP, along with the Civil Liberties Organisation, documented cases of inmates dying from treatable conditions such as malaria, typhoid, and respiratory infections, illnesses that become life-threatening in the absence of basic medical care. The United Nations Standard Minimum Rules for the Treatment of Prisoners, the Nelson Mandela Rules, require that every prisoner have access to qualified healthcare equivalent to what is available in the community. Nigeria has ratified relevant international instruments but compliance with those standards inside custodial centres has remained inconsistent.
Against this background, the approval of 150 medical personnel can be read as an acknowledgement of a gap that has existed since before the current administration. Whether the approved deployment will translate into functioning clinics, adequate drug supply, and consistent medical attention across all custodial centres remains to be seen. The ministry has not issued a detailed implementation framework or timeline for when the doctors and nurses will be posted. That detail matters, because Nigeria’s bureaucratic history is littered with presidential approvals that were slow to materialise or were quietly shelved.
