Pronouncement that bail is free in police stations in the country, as recently made by the Lagos State Commissioner of Police, Mr. Abiodun Alabi, is a pertinent reminder to both the citizens and policemen of the sacred principle of liberty of the individual as a fundamental right enshrined in the Nigerian Constitution. In other words, no one should be detained upon mere suspicion but based on the order of a competent court prosecuting him or her for heinous crime. The commissioner’s statement is also a reminder that giving and taking money at the police station for the purpose of securing bail for a suspect is also an offence of bribery, which is also punishable as a corrupt act. He stated that bail is free and that anyone paying for bail will face prosecution. While the commissioner’s warning is applaudable, it is not enough to stop the deep racketeering surrounding bail grant in police stations, and mostly initiated and sustained by police officers.

The commissioner warned police officers against collecting bribes or bail money from individuals who have cases with the police. He also warned the public to desist forthwith from corrupting police officers by bribing them in order to secure bail. In his own words: “Bail is free and it is written everywhere in police stations. I want to warn that any police officer caught collecting bribes or bail money from members of the public will be seriously dealt with. I want to equally warn members of the public to stop corrupting my officers with bribes. If you don’t know, understand today that those who collect bail money and the giver are culpable. We are going to start prosecuting the giver and taker of bribes and bail money. If you go to the police station to ask for the release of your relatives and the offence is a bailable one, and the policeman or woman in charge of the case, or the investigating police officer, asks for bail money, tell him or her that bail is free.”

The commissioner is right for denouncing this corrupt bail system. The grant of police bail should be free from corruption in Nigeria. In a nutshell, bail is simply the process by which an accused person is temporarily freed from detention or temporarily released from detention to sureties or on self-recognizance or on other conditions given to ensure his attendance in the court whenever he is required, until the determination of the case against him. The relief offered by bail is to serve the purpose of preventing the punishment of the innocent so that the presumption of innocence is constitutionally guaranteed to an individual accused. The constitutional right to bail is ingrained in the trite law that every accused person is presumed innocent until proven guilty by a court of competent jurisdiction. That is why the 1999 Constitution stipulates that any person who is arrested or detained shall be informed in writing within 24 hours in the language in which he understands the facts and grounds for his arrests or detention. And where a person has been arrested either for the purpose of charging him to court or upon reasonable commission of an offence, such a person must be charged to court within a reasonable time not exceeding 48 hours.

In practice, however, bail is not free in Nigeria. There is thriving bail racketeering which not only removes the ‘free’ tag of bail but also makes the granting of bail expensive. The perpetrators of this organised crime have set up a coercive, fraudulent, extortionist, or otherwise illegal coordinated scheme in order to extort money from bail applicants and their lawyers. Contrary to the inference of the Commissioner of Police, bail applicants and their lawyer do not willingly offer bribes to policemen in order to grant them bail. The usual corrupt practice is that some corrupt policemen order bail applicants and their lawyers to satisfy certain difficult or onerous conditions before granting them bail in order to extort money from them. And because bail applicants are scared of losing their freedom upon detention, they do everything possible to fulfill the onerous conditions. For example, at the Police stations and even in some Magistrate Courts, a bail applicant cannot be granted bail without the payment of an extortion fee ranging from N50,000 upward of N300,000. Sadly, this practice has been extended to the various State High Courts and the Federal High Courts where the extortion fee ranges from N250,000 to about 1 million depending on the nature of the bail application. A bail application on a high profile case attracts a high extortion fee.

Therefore, until the police who are enforcers of law do the correct thing to arrest and sanction their men working against free bail in police stations and the courts, it is incorrect to say that bail is free in Nigeria. Despite the following inscriptions: “Bail is not for sale,” “Bail is your right. “Do not pay for it,” “Givers and receivers of bail will be liable to prosecution” conspicuously engraved on the walls, information seats and notice boards of our various police stations, magistrate courts and high courts, bail, in reality, is not free in any of the places. Oftentimes bail is granted on a cash-and-carry basis, that is, on the payment of an extortion fee failure for which bail is refused.

This is sad. Consequently the thriving bail racketeering in police stations, magistrate court and high courts should be dismantled forthwith. Corruption of the bail application process is the worst tragedy that can befall a nation. The police hierarchy in Nigeria should arrest and prosecute corrupt police officers extorting money from bail applicants before granting them bail to serve as a deterrent to other police officers. The bail application process should be transparent and not shrouded in secrecy. Judges, magistrates and the police should be lenient in granting bail especially for bailable offences.

Finally, the government should take concrete steps to overhaul the country’s criminal justice system. For example, awaiting trial inmates who ought to be brought to court for hearing of their respective bail applications oftentimes are not conveyed to court for lack of “Black Maria” vehicles to convey them to court on court days. Even when they are arraigned in court, the trial is marred by endless adjournments at the instance of the police for the court. Magistrates who lack the jurisdiction to try certain offences and even grant bail on them should not continue to remand suspects in detention under the cover of “Holden Charge,’’ which is unconstitutional. Dumping of suspects in correctional centres without trial and without bail must stop. Suspects who cannot be charged to court within two or three months should be granted bail as stipulated in our Constitution. Without a complete overhauling of the country’s criminal justice system the bail system in Nigeria will continue to be mired in corruption.