[Mubarak wrote to the head of the prison to protest about prison conditions and about the failure of the authorities to bring him before a court. His privileges were then withdrawn.]
My family received a brief reassurance from a delicate prison contact that I was alive and in Kano, but the contact was sanctioned for this and wanted never to help me again. Moreover, lawyers appointed by the Church to intervene were subjected to prevarication and mind-games, and even the former Head of Plateau State failed in his attempts to see that my rights were respected.
Then a prisoner who was soon to be released came up with a plan. If he reported that he had encountered someone answering a particular description who had then been killed in jail, the authorities would have to acknowledge my location and status which would save me from actually being killed. This was now a real risk as some prisoners had been told by the delicate contact who I was.
Soon I began to receive provisions from outside the prison and visits from Abuja officials, lawyers, and family members. I realised that something had worked and that my freedom was imminent – or at least my relocation to a safer prison was. But these possibilities quickly vanished when the authorities determined that I was ’a Muslim’ once more and took steps to protect me from being harmed by the mob. They expected that my conversion to Islam would last. However, a prison keeper told my mother when she was visiting me that although they had succeeded in converting me, I mingled with Christians rather than with my Muslim brothers. My mother replied that I had always had friends from across the divide.
My long wait stretched into months but I was now able to write letters and give them to prisoners who were due for release. I wrote to Dr. Leo Igwe and others – people I was in contact with before 2019 because the rest had been wiped from my memory. I have since heard from a therapist that this was the result of traumatic experience. I had thought that PTSD was suffered only by servicemen who had seen death and carnage. I now know that torture doesn’t have to be physical.
I was now faced by threats and intimidation from convicts and hardened criminals – sometimes individually and sometimes in unison. It seemed that they were obsessed by me. When I reported this to the supervisors they cautioned me not to confront my abusers as they were dangerous and even the staff were wary of them. It seemed that there was a hierarchy in the prison, and that only the tough survived, so I decided to toughen up.
It then became obvious that you earned respect – even adoration – if you stood up to bullies. So gradually I stood up for myself and also for others who were being bullied by inmates and keepers alike. Some of these ‘keepers’ were in fact prisoners who had been given the role of monitors or dictators in large cells containing 200+ prisoners as a way of keeping some kind of order.
I confronted the staff with evidence that delegating their duties to inmates amounted to a breach of their contract with the government and I told them, that if I ever became free, I would make sure that justice was done. And since they expected that I would soon be free, they made sure that they kept in my good books.
I achieved even greater prestige when I was sentenced to 24 and 16 years. I was now officially a boss and a wicked man, and thus top of the pecking order. I now had rights and special meals. My bed space was inviolate, my sitting area became a palace, and my arbitration was law.
Only two categories of prisoner outranked me – those on death row and those sentenced to life imprisonment. Those like me who were serving sentences spanning decades came next. This gave immediate respect and status. In fact, the more you had raped, murdered and devoured, the greater your respectability. It was a disgusting example of a Darwinian survival of the fittest or of a food chain. Those at the top were the ones with the fangs, claws, canines and talons.
(To be continued….)
By Mubarak Bala