By Sources within the Kuje Correctional Centre in Abuja told SecretsReporters that an inmate who must appear in court pays N30,000 on every court day before the vehicle taking him to court moves, and that the money is collected through the Officer in Charge of Court, the officer handling court movements at the centre.
The sources said the payment comes before transport to courts in Apo, Maitama and other locations across the Federal Capital Territory, and that an inmate who cannot produce the N30,000 is left behind in the centre while his case is called without him.
Under the Nigerian Correctional Service Act 2019, conveying remand persons to and from court is a function of the Custodial Service itself, and section 17 of the Act backs the production of an inmate before a court with sanctions where a custodial centre fails to produce the inmate on a court order.
Accounts reaching SecretsReporters from inside the centre described a second price placed on sickness, under which inmates and their families buy the medications and drips the clinic does not supply, pay the hospital bills when a case is referred outside, and carry the cost of the transport that takes a sick inmate to the hospital.
Section 23 of the same Act places healthcare services in custodial centres on the Service, and section 25 provides for the removal of sick inmates to hospital, the same treatment and movement the sources said now wait on money from the inmate and his family.
At the centre of the accounts is one inmate held at Kuje with a serious liver condition, his abdomen swollen, whose name the sources did not give and whose case carries the heaviest price named inside the centre.
The sources said about N300,000 is demanded in connection with the man's treatment and his transport to hospital, and they present his case as a death approaching inside the walls, a sick man held in a cell while the money that stands between him and treatment is raised or not raised.
The allegations land on a service already examined from inside government. The Independent Investigative Panel set up by the Minister of Interior and chaired by Dr Magdalene Ajani inspected 86 custodial centres across 23 states and the Federal Capital Territory, and its chairman described a pervasive culture in which human rights had become commercialised inside the correctional system.
They also land under a Controller-General whose hold on the Service has just been lengthened, Sylvester Ndidi Nwakuche, whose tenure President Bola Tinubu extended in October 2026 to 26 May 2028, and in the same Service whose feeding contracts SecretsReporters exposed in its N873 million shortfall investigation published on 8 November 2026.
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