Life after death row: Freed pastor prays for Nigeria’s prisoners
Clinton Kanu spent 27 years in prison for a murder he did not commit. Now, he is fighting for prisoners’ rights.
Twenty-seven years ago, Clinton Kanu tried to help solve a case involving theft and a dispute over family land.
Back then, Kanu was an ambitious, charismatic consultant criminologist and an aide to government officials.
But when a man connected to the dispute died, someone accused Kanu of murdering him, even though witnesses had placed him more than 100km from the scene of the crime.
In 1992, he was arrested. He maintains his arrest was politically motivated.
“I was just lost,” Clinton Kanu told Al Jazeera. “Why must somebody condemn me to die?”
Looking back, he believes that he was a victim of corruption in Nigeria’s criminal justice system.
Excessive delays, with enormous backlogs of stagnant legal cases, made matters worse. Nearly 70 percent of the country’s approximately 47,000 prison inmates are awaiting trial, contributing to overcrowded prisons.
The maximum-security prison in Port Harcourt where Kanu was transferred after he was sentenced in 2005 held more than 4,000 inmates last year, although it was built for 804, according to figures from the federal government.
Kanu was sentenced to death by hanging or by firing squad, a common sentence in the country.
“Death by hanging. Can you imagine?” Kanu said. “Hang himself until he dies. Shoot me until I … what, what kind of sentence is that?”
Nigeria has the highest death row population – 2,000 people – in sub-Saharan Africa, according to Amnesty International.
The confinement and death sentence took a heavy toll on Kanu. He suffered physically and emotionally and had to receive treatment in the prison’s health ward for high blood pressure, insomnia, complications arising from diabetes, depression and stress.
His family suffered, too. While he was in prison, Kanu’s father, his brother Kingsley, his uncle and several of his cousins died. But it was his mother’s death that hurt him most deeply.
“My brother died. My mother died,” he remembers. “My daddy died. Cousins died. I loved my mother so much. I’m the first. My mother loved me so. It’s painful.”
“They detained me just for nothing.”
While imprisoned, Kanu tried several times to take his own life, but after his attempts failed, he says he realised: “God wanted me alive.”
So, he decided to make something of his time in detention.
He turned to counselling other inmates and enrolled to study theology along with 50 others. After seven years of studying in the prison’s college, he was awarded two doctorate degrees in missions ministry and counselling.
He was also ordained as a nondenominational reverend.
Then, things turned around. In 2015, his case went to Nigeria’s Supreme Court, which reviewed the details of the original trial. In 2019, the court ruled that there was no evidence against Kanu. He was discharged and acquitted.
“I’ve been discharged by the Supreme Court and acquitted,” he said. “They detained me just for nothing.”
He walked out of prison carrying his educational certificates in a bag packed with clothes donated by Christian organisations.
Now that he is free, Kanu says he wants to advocate for prison reform and be what he calls “a voice for the people”.
The time he spent behind bars gave him insight into the country’s prison system, where he says he witnessed corruption, torture and extortion.
Many facilities allegedly lack basic amenities like clean toilets and a constant supply of drinking water.
Prisoners are dying from treatable illnesses like malaria and tuberculosis.
Kanu wants to change that by trying to improve life for inmates and establishing a nonprofit organisation that will help people adjust to life after incarceration.
Although he is no longer behind bars in a maximum-security prison, he is without a job in a country where poverty is rapidly rising and employment is hard to find.
With no money, no connections and no job, he does not know how to get started. He has knocked on doors, visited government agencies and filled out job applications.
“We’re helping him.” Mike Agu, a local pastor, told Al Jazeera. “God is helping us to help him to impact the society. Incarceration for no just cause for 27 years is not a joke.”
This story was filmed by Chika Oduah in Nigeria and edited in Doha, Qatar by Al Jazeera NewsFeed’s Katya Bohdan.