There was excitement at the Ado Ekiti Correctional Centre in Ekiti State over the weekend as a Non-Governmental Organisation, ‘Jesus is My Lord and Saviour’, fed and donated items to over 490 inmates.
The organisation donated a generator, toiletries and other items to celebrate the new year with inmates as a way of preaching the gospel and bringing relief to occupants of the facility.
The Executive Director of the NGO, Mrs Oyenike Daramola, who said the gesture was a way of fulfilling the mandate of God on giving to the needy, revealed that she started prison evangelism in 2005 at Kirikiri Maximum Security Prison in Lagos.
“I started this work in 2005 visiting prisons and making donations. I strongly believe that these inmates can leave this place better and can still be useful to their nation. We must help them and make them happy.
“My organisation also performs post prison reform by empowering freed inmates. We have done this for over 10 ex-convicts who are now doing well. Many of them are even donating and funding this organisation.
” The post-prison rehabilitation is very strategic to Federal government’s reform agenda because many of these inmates were found going into crimes after being released due to lack of employment and stigmatization.
“The best way to really checkmate all these militating factors is by ensuring that proper facilities are provided to give them vocations and skills while in prison, then empowerment can follow after they regained their freedom,” Daramola said.
Speaking at the occasion, Assistant Comptroller, Ado-Ekiti Correctional Centre, Mr. Mathew Ajagono, praised the NGO for the gesturing, adding that the government had been doing its best but couldn’t do everything.
Ajagono stated that the government alone can’t adequately provide the feeding, vocational and training facilities as well as carry out other reforms on inmates without private organisations’ contributions.
He therefore called on companies and individuals to partner with the Correctional Centre to provide necessary support, skills acquisition and rehabilitation for the inmates in order to reform them.
“Inmates are in correctional centres to get reformed and not to become more hardened to commit more grievous crimes. We are all sinners, those in prisons are only victimised and it will be wrong to abandon them to their own fates, “he noted.
The NGO, which had a vision to build a rehabilitation centre in the facility, presented prizes to inmates with outstanding records as best singer, most well behaved, most hard-working, among other qualities.