The Federal Government has said its recently signed Transfer of Sentenced Persons Agreement with Ethiopia is firmly rooted in the citizen diplomacy component of President Bola Tinubu’s Renewed Hope Agenda and is aimed at bringing incarcerated Nigerians home to complete their prison terms.
Minister of Foreign Affairs, Ambassador Bianca Odumegwu-Ojukwu, made the clarification in a statement issued on Friday by Dr Magnus Eze, Special Assistant on Communication and New Media in the Office of the Minister of Foreign Affairs.
She described the pact as a significant diplomatic breakthrough that underscores Nigeria’s commitment to the welfare of its citizens abroad, particularly those caught in difficult circumstances across foreign lands.
The minister also debunked reports circulating on various media platforms regarding the number and identities of Nigerians held in Ethiopian prisons, describing the widely shared list as false. According to her, Nigeria does not have 136 inmates in Ethiopian correctional facilities.
She further dismissed claims surrounding the nature of offences allegedly committed by the prisoners, stressing that the government’s focus remains on ensuring that affected Nigerians return home to serve their sentences under humane conditions and with dignity.
Odumegwu-Ojukwu explained that efforts to secure the transfer of the inmates had stretched over several years, complicated by challenges in obtaining accurate data on the actual number of Nigerians imprisoned in Ethiopia.
She noted that the inmates are housed in Kaliti and Aba Samuel prisons, both maximum-security facilities, making the agreement on the transfer of sentenced persons a necessary step toward resolving their plight.
“Essentially, if prisoners have been sentenced in one country and they are serving a jail term in that country, they can return to their state or country of origin to serve out the sentence.
“This is important because the inmates in those prisons have been agitating for so many years, to return back to Nigeria to complete their jail terms.
“This is in view of their precarious living conditions, health challenges, inadequate medical facilities, poor feeding, denial of visitation rights, they didn’t have adequate legal services and language barrier among other things.”
She lamented that while negotiations dragged on, four Nigerian inmates died before the agreement could finally cross the finish line.
“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,” the minister queried.
Addressing fears that the returning inmates would automatically regain their freedom upon arrival in Nigeria, Odumegwu-Ojukwu said such concerns were misplaced. She also rejected claims that those affected were predominantly from a particular part of the country, insisting that criminal conduct knows no ethnic or regional boundary.
She pointed out that one of the key provisions of the Memorandum of Understanding signed by both countries expressly prohibits the granting of pardon or amnesty to transferred inmates without the approval of the sentencing country.
“The list trending online is a made-up list. We don’t have 136 inmates in Aba Samuel and Kaliti prisons. Those that are subject of this agreement, transfer of sentenced persons, are 98 inmates of that prison.
“A lot of them are from the Southeast. There are also those from the Southwest, from the South-South: crime has no ethnicity. All these people are Nigerian citizens in a foreign jail,” she said.
