A former presidential aide, Reno Omokri, has said that 98 percent of Nigerian death row inmates in three Asian nations he visited come from one geopolitical zone in the country.
Omokri, who was Special Assistant on New Media to former President Goodluck Jonathan, said this in a Facebook post on Monday.
Declining to name the geopolitical zone for fear of backlash, he urged state governors in the zone to educate their citizens against drug peddling.
The Herald can report that some Asian nations that stipulate the death penalty for drug peddling include Saudi Arabia, Malaysia, China, Thailand, Vietnam, Cambodia, among others.
In September 2022, Vanguard reported that “hundreds of Nigerians arrested and detained by the Saudi Arabian authorities on suspicion of drug peddling are now rotting away in various prisons”.
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In 2019, the Nigeria Drugs Law Enforcement Agency (NDLEA) disclosed that 73 Nigerians were on death row in Malaysia for drugs trafficking.
In his Facebook post, Omokri said, “The Government of Nigeria has to urgently do something to reduce the number of Nigerians on death row for drug offences in various Asian nations.
“Even if the Federal Government can’t save them from execution, at least our embassies should visit them and make their last days on Earth more liveable and less of an ordeal.
“I visited some of them in different nations and they are in a terrible shape. Abandoned and dejected. No visits, no consular services. Nobody deserves to go through that in their last days on planet Earth,” he said.
Omokri added, “And governments of a particular geopolitical zone, which I can’t mention because I am not that brave, have to educate their youths on risk involved! Why? Because in the three countries I visited, 98% of those on death row for drug offences, are from that geopolitical zone.
“And I suspect that the 2% who were bearing names that sounded like Northern Muslims names, were not really Northerners. They could not speak Hausa, and their accents sounded like they were from the same geopolitical zone as the others.”