The Independent (Banjul)
OPINION AND ANALYSIS
April 12, 2001
Banjul, the Gambia
The prison is another world removed from the world outside. A lot happens in the world outside but a lot also happens in the solitary confines of a prisons that could startle the rest of the world outside if it.
A just-released Gambian convict has revealed facts and figures of corruption and human labour exploitation as they happened in prison. As he writes, for five years the ex-convict had witnessed shady business deals of the prison underworld.
While the government is unaware of the vast untapped human resources in The Gambia's prisons, some unscrupulous senior officers of the prisons make huge gains by way of prisoners labour. Many a convict serving a term of sentence in the Mile II Central Prisons comes out with a punitive phrase written on his warrant by a presiding magistrate - saying "you are sentenced to serve so and so term with Hard Labour."
One of the objectives of punishment in a penitentiary is to kill the evil proclivities in criminal offenders and in doing this, fan in him the fire of repentance by making him work the inscribed Hard Labour. For decades, the government has not been keeping a proper contact with the prisons department. Its only body of inspectors to the prisons is the visiting committee whose reports of the prisons goes to the Presidents Office and Department of Interior, but unfortunately this committee is perfunctory.
Many didn't as well know why government closed one of its provincial jails in the North Bank Division twenty seven years ago to open Jeshwang Prison Camp. Though the prison camp is with minimum security, but rich in agriculture and with a large substantial acreage for gardening. It is in this prison camp where warders apply forced labour on prisoners over working them like those former ghetto prisoners of Warsaw - Sobibor and Treblinka without the slightest compunction, referring themselves to the not to do with 1948 ordinance of the prisons specifying the hours prisoner could be kept working outside.
It has been a long time practice to generate income from prisoners' labour and the selling of agricultural produce of the camp without paying it into any government treasury. Prisoners are made to go round in Bakau Fajara and the KMC surrounding to fetch logs fallen in homes intending to build new houses. They order them to chop down huge mango trees bearing fruits in the prisons to burn the logs into charcoal, violating The Gambia's Forest Cover Act. The coal is in turn put into bags at D35 - 40 each and they can sell as much as 116 x D35 monthly. Tons of cassava too are sold yearly in big amounts.
The superintendent in charge of Jeshwang Prisons didn't only limit herself to the gains confined within the immurement, but went further to make special appeal on behalf of the prisoners for a visiting prison's minister to assist inmates with a sewing machine. The request was granted and a sewing machine trade marked FLYING DOVE was handed over to the station officer at the Jeshwang Prison Camp for the welfare of the prisoners. This time the station officer brought her own 9 - 13 disc pattern designing electric machine trade marked ELNA and opened a small sewing industry inside the prisons. She brought four prisoners from the cells, skilled in tailoring and under the supervision of one corporal a warder to work the prisoners from 8am to 4pm prostituting government electricity. The dresses and bed sheets made by the small prison sewing industry are exported to America and the United Kingdom to earn foreign exchange. Sometimes the officer in charge of Jeshwang jail would take credits for sewing materials for the prison's main supplier of food items to facilitate the business.
The station officer has seen thousands and was not praising hundreds. She proceeded to reinvest the accumulated amount of money from the coal and dress business into poultry, accelerating her incomes. In bringing the poultry into being, the same visiting pastor to the prisons gave a packet of corrugated iron sheets and probably with a handsome amount of money towards the construction and management of the poultry.
The poultry project started in 1998 and its first production was in 1999. Although at one time it has sold some 500 broilers at D35 and the plucking job, however awkward or strenuous was accomplished by the prisoners and some four female warders after a long hard work. The poultry maintains a stock of over one thousand (1000 and 850 layers. The eggs collected depend on how many layers survived in a day among these given numbers hence they lay eggs daily. Mostly they can collect as much as 900 eggs and a crate of egg at D35 each. The profit of the sale proceeds trickled down to an individual officers' pocket who claimed to have owned the poultry. But the issue of ownership over the poultry in the jail has remained a very low voice. However other officer are fooled into believing that special welfare funds are being raised for them, but none has so for benefited from them.
Would you believe that with all the hard work that prisoners are condemned in and outside the jail, they were only paid 10 butut daily and D3 monthly. With the recommendation of a social welfare officer who is a visiting committee member, the interior ministry this year allocated D25, 000 for prisoners earnings, this time D5 monthly.
With my low understanding of the functions of government my intuition persistently tells me that it is illegal to do an unauthorized work especially with government property. So how come this superintendent at Jeshwang Prison Camp claimed ownership of the poultry project which has produced a gross income of over half million (D500,000) from 1991 - 2001.
A security detainee - 'November 11' prisoner very disciplined and dutiful, works as poultry manager assisted by two fellow prisoners. Three appointed prison warders permanently worked there too with one other warder mounting interchangeably, routine night duties at the poultry site. I asked myself whether this prison commercial activity is a matter of INDIVIDUAL PRIVATISATION, taking the law into their own hands for purposes other than what it dictates. Is it a way of claiming their share of the government's scarce resources or either something else that allows such perpetrations in the prisons service.
On many occasions some senior officers like the Commissioner of Prisons would give instructions to one Sgt. Darboe to use water in the camp as prisoners mould cement bricks for him and private individuals. S.P.O Malang Badjie did the same. The latter didn't limit himself to the brick laying deal but further used his office at the Juvenile prison wing to be renting plastic chairs owned by the prisons. Perhaps, Mr. Badjie is keeping the amount accrued from savings as special welfare fund for the wing. Although, I couldn't commit to memory all the number of bricks loaded from the prisons for these senior officers, but between the months of December 2000 and January 2001, we loaded three consignments of some cement bricks on vehicles registered as GPS 4 BJL 700 bricks and 610 while a commercial truck BJL 3616 A collected 500 bricks for an unknown destination.
In another activity, the Commissioner of Prisons used some prisoners skilled in metal work to make special steel windows and roofs worth lots of thousands for his Kanilai home.
With all this huge amount raised by these prison authorities, Jeshwang Prisons is without light when Nawec goes off and the camp has a very powerful generators that idles in the shed it has been housed without diesel fuel for 6 - 7 months. The inmates of the camp often sadly eat their dinner in graveyard darkness, then dozed off for the next day. Sometimes prisoners would invest light from such fires as stocking a cotton cloth in an empty mentholatum tin and burned the cloth stocked in the tin into carbon. They would later use a razor blade or any sharp metallic object to strike it on the hard concrete floor of the cell to produce small sparks of fire into the burnt carbon in the tin and fire is ingeniously produced to avail light. This invention of fire is known as Tenda, a jail language may be mistaken for Tinder. As an inhabitant of the prison camp then, I made complaints of this lack of electricity in the prisons when the authorities were making huge amounts of money through organized labour which could have fixed the fuel cost for the stand by generator. One morning one of my fellow inmates who was being used as a watch agent branded a RED BAND disclosed the complain I made to the authorities that I wanted to pursue the matter with a visiting member of parliament to investigate such complaints in the cabinet from the Minister of Interior.
Shortly after, I was blamed me for trying to smuggle some money into the jail. I was bludgeoned nearly to death and made to spend one month and three days in solitary confinement at a place in the gaol known to be BAMBA-DINKOO literary in Mandinka meaning a crocodiles' den.
After my punishment in the den, I was whisked to the Mile II Central Prison on transfer with special warnings to keep away from making such complaints.
I think readers would excuse me for remembering this now that the prisons authorities had used prisoners to empty the camps two main septic tanks without paying sanitary workers for the past two months to soak away the sewerage. The prisoners who were doing that job which of course was not salubrious contracted incurable fungal infections in the toes. I promised the inmates that I would take up the matter with the National Environment Agency office personnel to inspect behind the cells of Jeshwang Prisons and the sewerage dumped directly into the swamps behind the Central Prisons. This place is where the fish from the sea come to lay their eggs and this is doing a great ecological damage to the environment.
In Mile II, I decided as a prisoner to put all these things from my mind until I return to normal life and to my family to inquire if the Interior ministry is turning a blind eye to the swindling commercial activities going on in the prisons. Or is the entire honourable Assembly not aware of these massive fraudulent activities in the prisons department of The Gambia. Please inquire and put a stop to it.
From the eye of a concerned ex-convict that sees secretly
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Copyright © 2001 The Independent. Distributed by AllAfrica Global Media (allAfrica.com). |