About 3,688 condemned inmates are presently caged in custodial centers across the country awaiting the hangmen, according to the Acting Comptroller General of the Nigerian Correctional Service, Sylvester Nwakuche.
Speaking during his screening before the Senate Committee on Interior, he disclosed that the population of condemned inmates increased from 3,590 in September 2024 to 3,688 in March 2025, reflecting a gory picture of the challenges facing the country’s prison system.
While 77 of the condemned inmates are housed in the Okekura Custodial Center in Ilorin, the Kwara State capital, the rest are being detained in various custodial centers across the country.
Impeccable sources at the state headquarters of the Correctional Service in Ilorin revealed that past and present state governors have refused to sign the death warrants of the condemned inmates.
In Ilorin, Kwara State, the last person, identified as Usman Shuaib, was sentenced to death by the court this week, bringing the total number of condemned inmates to 77, an official of the Correctional Service who preferred to remain anonymous informed DAILY POST in Ilorin.
“They have remained a great burden and threat to the service and government as they are fed and taken care of every day,” the official added.
“Most of them have spent more than 10 years waiting for their final breath on planet Earth,” according to the official, adding that “the refusal of the state governors to sign their death warrants has compounded the situation in the custodial centers holding the condemned inmates.”
Reacting to the development, Jimoh Mumini Adebimpe, SAN, and former Director of Public Prosecution in the Kwara State Ministry of Justice, said it is simply political.
“I believe it is simply political, and the refusal by the state governors to sign death warrants for convicted criminals is one of the very ways of assisting the country grow in deadly crime rates across the country,” he declared.
In his reaction, Professor Joseph Fayaye said neither the president nor the governors may be ordered or forced to append signatures by the court or popular opinion, hence the consequent arithmetic or geometric surge in convicted criminals in prison custody.
According to the Professor of Sociology, “the prerogative of mercy conferred on the president and governors by the constitution comes often after courts of competent jurisdiction had sentenced convicts to death.
“A state pardon, at the instance of the president or governors, may commute a death sentence to life imprisonment, absolute pardon, or confirm the death sentence, but when they withhold their signatures, the offenders remain in prison custody in anticipation,” he stated.
Professor Fayaye explained that “this scenario may play out, leading to the swelling of the numbers of prisoners on death sentence without execution, commutation, or outright pardon.
“This also comes up when the president or governors wait for competent security briefs, or the case files are suspended on state interest, consideration of interest and political pressure groups, or discretion to withhold signature in the exercise of final prerogative,” he added.
Another Ilorin-based legal practitioner, Lukman Raji, declared that the governors have failed to perform their constitutional power of signing death warrants of condemned criminals for political reasons.
“Some of them are either doing that so they would not have a record of signing death warrants or trying to satisfy and protect some political criminals.”
Lukman argued that the failure of the governors to perform that very important constitutional function is also exposing the government to unnecessary spending.
“This is because the prisoners who are due to die are still being budgeted for every day, as government still feeds them and provides healthcare from the same public treasury,” he explained.
Efforts to reach the State Commissioner for Justice in Ilorin were unsuccessful, as phone calls and a text message sent to him by DAILY POST were not responded to on Thursday.
