Wednesday at the State House

“As I sat down beside the president, he begn to joke and said that I should tell him about my experience in prison. When I told hm that 67 people were at once locked up in a little hall meant for 12, he looked at the vee-pee and said to no one in particular: we need more prison space … but there is no space in Lagos.”

“Giwa, eh, you de,” President Shehu Shagari remarked with a twinkle as he shook my hand on the receiving line at the beginning of his meeting with the nation’s media executives at the Marina State House on Wenesday. Everybody laughed along with the president whose remark was an echo of Vice-President Alex Ekwueme’s welcome the reporter eearlier in the day at the Ribadu Road State House. I ad arrived late to the monthly briefing hosted by the vice-president for the media executives. As I entered, he looked up, and  stopped in mid-sentence to welcome me. “oh, Dele is here.” Later when he was asked by Abba Dabo of the Sunday New Nigerian what he thought about police harassment of the press, Dr. Ekwueme said he would like to keep his thoughts on the matter to himself, but that he would like to say that he had no prior information of the arrest of any of the journalists recently detained by the police.

At the end of the briefing, on the way to the luncheon with President Shagari, Garba Wushishi, the minister of information, called me and fellow reporter aside to express his disappointment over police detention of journalists. “Quote me,” he said solemnly, “I am opposed to it, and I think it is against the idea of press freedom.” That, I thought, would be the end of the discussion between officials of the Shagari administration and me that afternoon of the sad harassment of the press by the police. Of course, I expected the editors to share notes all day long on their various experiences in police detention. The president’s entourage soon joined the editors at the ornate reception hall of the Marina State House. After his jovial remark on shaking my hand, the president went to a small room set to the side of the reception hall where he customarily sits with the vice-president, top officials of the Guild of Editors and a few editors. I am no more in the Guild, either as an official or a member, and I didn’t join the select group in the alcove. I sat with other editors in a different part of the room. Five or so minutes later, I heard my name, and I saw Segun Osoba, the veritable conscience of press freedom in Nigeria, move towards me. “Dele,” Segun called out,” the president wants you.” Of course, everybody laughed as I went to the president. As I sat down, he began to joke and said that I should tell him about the prison. He said he had read about my experience there, but I told him that the prison bit had not been written yet. The president was perhaps referring to Michael Awoyinfa’s feature on the first part of my detention at Alagbon which appeared in the Sunday Concord of February 20. He said that he read the column my impression of Sunday Adewusi, the inspector-general of police.

I told him that prison was a better detention than the police cell. “Why do you say that?” President Shagari asked.

“Warders are more humane, less brusque than the police.”

The warders, I explained, try to temper mercy with officialdom. They realize that people are detained for various, and they try as hard as they can to treat each detainee with an eye towards the nature of his offence. I said further the warders are professional custodians of prisoners and detainees sent to the prison by the courts, and that they don’t have reasons to be hostile to their wards against whom they bear no grudge. As for the police, I told the president, they regard a man detained in their cells as an adversary, if not an enemy. They get a special joy from humiliating their captives, and the higher the station of the detainee, the more irreverent the attitude of the police. “Which is not to say, sir, that being locked up in either the police cells or the prison is anything to applaud, “I told the president. The comparison is not a question of one being better than the other. It is a question of one being less evil. The prison is less evil. It is more airy. You can see the grass there, and you do get to take a walk to the open bathing area, or to the gates to see your visitors. Unlike in the police cells in which you can’t see God’s shy, or walk beyond the enclosed walls of the dungeon that is for ever putrid with human defecation, you do get to watch a football match between prisoners at the prison. For a journalist and a writer, I told the president, the prison provides an inestimable well of information and materials for thought. When I noticed that the president was hooked, I told him the following story: “What’s your name?” I asked the little boy who just came into the prison and had just been initiated into the Frontiers State, that being the territorial name of Cell E1 at the Ikoyi Prison where I spent two nights with Ray Ekpu and an assortment of criminals.

“Wandering.”

“How old are you?” I asked the boy, my voice raised, thinking that the scraggly youth clad in only dirty briefs was hard of hearing.

“Wandering.”

I turned to Ray Ekpu who was lying on his 6’by 8” blanket laid on the bare, hard and uneven floor of the Frontiers State to ask him what was the problem with the hearing of the boy staring at me.

“I don’t think that he understands you.”

At that point, another inmate who thought that the boy moght have come from the north repeated to him in Hausa the questions that I already asked. The boy answered in Hausa, and the interpreter told me in English that the boy said he was 12 years old, nd that he was arrested by the police for wandering, and a magistrate ordered him detained in the prison custody. When I finished the story, the president said aloud what I had said in the evening of my conversation with the poor boy who said that he came from Maidiguri: “But youths are supposed to have a place where they should be held.”

When I told him that 67 people were at once locked up in the Frontiers State, a little hall meant for 12 persons, he looked at the vice-president, and said to no one in particular: “We need more prison space … but there is no space in Lagos.” Segun Osoba took the opportunity to inform the president that Mr. Adewusi is running wild with the law, and that the press was getting even at the least the Sketch, by refusing to mention the I-G’s name or use his photographs in papers belonging to the group. Felix Adenaile of the Tribune group also told the president that the group had the same policy.

“Why don’t you use uncomplimentary photographs of the men (Adewusi and Chief Richard Akinjide)?” President Shagari joked. “We do that,” Mr. Osoba said.

©Sunday Concord, March 6, 1993
(Pp.197-199)