The call recently by the Director-General of the National Agency for Food and Drug Administration and Control (NAFDAC), Prof. Mojisola Adeyeye, for imposition of the death sentence for fake drug dealers is certainly borne out of her concern for the serious harm such people are inflicting on members of the society. The call, however, once again reignites the hair-splitting debate over the constitutionality, propriety, and philosophical underpinning—or otherwise—of the death penalty in Nigeria.
In justifying her call for the death penalty for illicit drug convicts, Adeyeye described illicit drug peddlers and drug barons as “merchants of death,” who prioritise making huge amounts of illegal money at the expense of the lives of their fellow human beings. She, therefore, argued that the proper punishment for convicted drug peddlers is the death penalty.
In the same vein, the Chairman/Chief Executive Officer of the National Drug Law Enforcement Agency (NDLEA), Brig. Gen. Buba Marwa (rtd), made a similar call during the debate on the amendment to the provisions of the 2004 National Drug Law Enforcement Agency Act last year. During that debate, the two chambers of the National Assembly were divided over the issue of the death penalty for drug peddlers.
While the Senate prescribed the death penalty, the House of Representatives prescribed life imprisonment. However, during the adoption of the report of a conference committee of the two chambers, the National Assembly opted for life imprisonment for drug peddlers.
Admittedly, there has been a considerable rise in the crime rate, especially among youths, due to the increasing rate of drug abuse. It is estimated that 15 million Nigerians, aged between 15 and 64 years, abuse drugs. The impacts are visible. Drug and substance abuse, especially among the country’s largely youthful population, is increasingly fuelling political thuggery, constituting both a present and future danger.
However, the death penalty may not be the solution to the menace of illicit, fake drugs and adulterated products in Nigeria or even any other capital offence. The debate over the death penalty, as in other countries, has persisted in Nigeria over the years. Although Section 33 (1) of the 1999 Constitution allows the death penalty in certain circumstances, Nigerian state governors are no longer signing death warrants.
The last death warrant signed by a Nigerian state governor was in 2016, when Governor Nasir El-Rufai of Kaduna State signed the death warrants for two men convicted of murder. El-Rufai’s decision was highly controversial as it reignited the debate over the death penalty in Nigeria, especially since there had been a moratorium on executions for many years in some states.
Since then, many governors, including those in states where the death penalty remains legal, have refrained from signing death warrants, reflecting a broader shift towards advocating for the abolition or moratorium on the death penalty in Nigeria. Despite the moratorium on executions, people sentenced to death still remain on death row. Keeping these condemned prisoners in indefinite incarceration is a violation of their fundamental human rights and personal dignity, as enshrined in Section 33 of the 1999 Constitution and Article 4 of the African Charter on Human and People’s Rights, which has been ratified and domesticated by Nigeria.
When an accused person is sentenced to death and is not executed because their death warrant has not been signed, they begin to serve a separate penalty—an uncertain term of imprisonment under mental torture. They die day by day as they await a hangman who may never come. As a result, their fundamental human rights to the dignity of the human person and personal liberty are violated.
This was why the Supreme Court, in Peter Nemi v. Attorney-General of Lagos State, held that the right to life is available even to condemned prisoners or prisoners on death row until their execution is carried out according to the law. Therefore, to deny them their fundamental rights merely based on a death sentence cannot stand the test of civilised conduct, as it debases their intrinsic worth as human beings.
The long-standing position of this newspaper has been that human life is inviolable and cannot be deliberately and intentionally taken away by a human being—only God, the Creator, has that power. Human life is the first and greatest gift, most eloquently conveyed in the Latin maxim: vivere viventibus est esse (“To living things, life is existence”).
In this regard, it is our view that drug barons who are convicted should not be sentenced to death. It is also our view that the fate of those on death row should not remain in limbo simply because state governors are undecided about whether to sign death warrants. If state governors refuse to sign death warrants, they should at least commute death sentences to life imprisonment. Keeping prisoners on death row in indefinite incarceration, subject to the whims, caprices, or procrastination of state governors, is, to say the least, a monumental injustice that cries out to the heavens for remedy.
More importantly are findings that the death penalty is not a deterrent to capital crime and that some condemned prisoners are victims of miscarriage of justice, Therefore, the country’s lawmakers at all levels should consider abolishing the death penalty altogether by quashing its provisions in our statutes—just as many countries are now doing.
Alternatively, lawmakers should promulgate new laws stating that those sentenced to death should have their sentences automatically commuted to life imprisonment without requiring the state governor’s ratification. Another option is to enact a law stipulating that if a state governor fails or neglects to sign a death warrant within three or four months, the death sentence should be deemed commuted to life imprisonment.
In Lagos State, the Administration of Criminal Justice Law, 2015, should be leveraged to address this issue, particularly Section 470(1)(c) of the Act, which empowers the Administration of Criminal Justice Monitoring Committee to ensure that correctional centres are decongested to the barest minimum.
•Editorial By Guardia Newspaper
