FG prohibits use of phones by prisoners, officials

The Federal Government has given a matching order to the Nigerian Prison Service authorities to recover all handsets from inmates within 30 days, as it has banned the use of mobile phones in all the prison formations by inmates and prison officials..

The Minister of Interior, Abba Moro, handed down the order on Saturday in Abuja during an interactive session with senior officers of the Prison Service, decried indecent dressing by inmates.

'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, nobody goes into the 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 formations must recover all telephones from inmates,' he stated.

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 telephones. The consequence of not doing this, you should already know,' he said.