‘Torture homes’ everywhere!

They are embedded just about everywhere across this country and in diverse cloaking of religious affiliation. Within a space of some two months, Nigerian security operatives have dug up a rash of purported rehabilitation centres for drug addicts and other social deviants, but which in truth were hostage camps where hapless inmates were being held against their will and subjected to gross human rights abuses. And it seems certain many more centres remain out there and are only waiting to be unearthed within the polity.

Since the first discovery in September of a facility in Rigasa area of Kaduna State, where the police found some 500 inmates including children held in appalling conditions, the lid has been blown off more centres in Daura, Katsina, Lagos and Ibadan, among other locations. The latest instance was the uncovering of an alleged torture centre inside the Oloore Central Mosque at the Ojoo end of the Lagos-Ibadan highway, in the Oyo State capital. At that facility, which was barnstormed early last week by the police, more than 250 inmates were rescued by the security agents. Media visuals of the affected inmates showed them chained, visibly dazed, battered and severely underfed.

We get some sense of the perversity of the problem from police accounts of circumstances leading to the security siege on the Ojoo facility. State Police Commissioner Shina Olukola was reported explaining that the command acted on a tip-off about yet another centre at Owode area of Apata, Ibadan, by a 17-year-old escapee from the centre: “This morning, I received a call about a young man who informed one of my divisional police officers that there is an illegal detention facility somewhere at Owode, Apata in Ibadan being run by someone who claimed to have the powers to be able to change anti-social behaviours of youngsters and others. The young man said they were being maltreated, not being well fed, being treated like slaves and they were engaged in forced labour, and sometimes the death of an inmate was not reported to anyone,” he said.

The police chief added: “On the basis of that information, the police decided to check things out. We got to Owode, Apata. By the time we got there, they had evacuated that facility. But from the surroundings, we knew that there were people in that place earlier than the time we arrived. However, the young man informed the police that there is another detention facility, and that is where we are now at Oloore, Ojoo area of Ibadan. When the police got here, we discovered that young men and young women are being kept in a dungeon-like condition.”

The reported experiences of inmates at the Ibadan facilities have been a pattern common to all other victims of torture houses posturing as rehabilitation centres across the land. Only a few weeks earlier, the police had raided another torture facility packaged a religious instruction reformatory in Daura, Katsina State, where they freed more than 60 men and boys. Reports said the security agents noted there were up to 300 names on the centre’s register, but that many of them had escaped following a riot the previous weekend against hardships to which the inmates were being subjected. Another centre in the guise of a religious reformatory was unmasked last month in Kaduna, and it had females alongside males as inmates. Kaduna State Commissioner of Humanitarian Services and Social Development Hafsat Baba was reported saying that was quite unusual, as such institutions seldom admit both sexes.

On the heels of the first discovery of such torture camp in Kaduna State, President Muhammadu Buhari had condemned the phenomenon and ordered security agents to unearth all other similar facilities embedded within the polity. Analysts as well pontificated it was a trend deriving from the al majiri caste system peculiar to the northern region of this country. But before you rush to conclude it was therefore a trend limited to one particular religion, you had the case of 15 persons who late in October were rescued from a church at Ijegun area of Lagos – a private facility used as a holding bay for mentally ill persons and social miscreants, among others. Reports said when security agents barraged in following a tip-off by a civil society actor, they found victims chained down and ill-treated inside a building within the church premises.

‘Harsh socio-economic circumstances may be one reason so many people seek ‘escape’ in drugs, and concerted steps need be taken by government to reconnect them with ‘ungilded’ reality’

Accounts by survivors of the torture homes that have been discovered showed that many of the inmates were deposited at those facilities by their own families, who viewed the purported reformatories as handy and accessible to send their troublesome children and persons addicted to drugs, or who may have committed petty crimes. “We have identified…(that) most of them were brought in by their parents from across mostly northern Nigerian states,” media reports cited Kaduna State police spokesman Yakubu Sabo saying after the raid.

In a related instance, The PUNCH newspaper reported the pastor of the church that was unmasked in Lagos, Joseph Ojo, saying the inmates were brought to him for healing by their own families. Defending the manner in which they were held, he said: “The people were chained because of their condition. If I did not chain them, they would run off. Many of them had put me in trouble in the past and that was why I chained them. When I see that they are healed, I unchain them.” Then, his presumed operational alibi: “This is not a psychiatric hospital. All of them came for prayers and they had been taken to different psychiatric hospitals before they were brought to the church for deliverance. I saw the medical papers of some of them, it was after their parents tried conventional medicine and they were not cured that they brought them here.”

It is helpful there is a presidential directive in place for security agents to root out embedded torture homes posturing as religious instruction reformatories and deliverance centres across the land. But the magnitude of the problem also suggests we should probe deeper to unravel and address the sociology underpinning the trend.

For instance, the apparent ubiquity of illicit rehabilitation centres and high numbers of their inmates index a pervasive drug problem in the citizenry. A recent survey arrowheaded by the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) and the Center for Research and Information on Substance Abuse, with technical support from the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC), underscored this trend – showing there are some 14.3million grown-up Nigerians affected by the drug scourge at the latest count. Harsh socio-economic circumstances may be one reason so many people seek ‘escape’ in drugs, and concerted steps need be taken by government to reconnect them with ‘ungilded’ reality.

Also, that a good number of families take recourse to these illicit centres in seeking help for their troubled wards points to inaccessibility, or more likely unaffordability, of the formal systems of medicare and educational instruction. Besides that government need address the cost factor to make these systems more accessible to citizens, relevant stakeholders including traditional institutions should step up to roll back the 13.2million out-of-school-children population that this country currently parades.

But the remedy isn’t all about government and other power centres. There is need for acute awareness on the part of all citizens, so as to be in a position to alert security agents to purported rehabilitation centres nestling in our neighbourhoods. Just like the ‘church’ in Ijegun, Lagos, was reportedly brought to the attention of the police by a civil society activist, there is need for active citizen intelligence to ferret out torture homes embedded in different neighbourhoods and communities.