Section 36(5) of the 1999 Constitution presumes every accused person innocent until proven guilty, and Section 158 of the Administration of Criminal Justice Act 2015 establishes bail as the general starting point for an arrested or accused person, subject to the Act’s specific provisions and the circumstances of the case. On paper, Nigeria takes liberty seriously. In practice, the Nigerian Correctional Service told the House of Representatives Committee on Reformatory Institutions in February 2026 that of the country’s 80,812 inmates, 51,955 (64%) were awaiting trial, against just 24,913 convicted and 3,850 in other detention categories, inside facilities designed to hold roughly 65,000 people, according to correctional service figures reported by BusinessDay. For many years, most people behind bars in Nigeria have not been found guilty of anything, even as the Correctional Service asked lawmakers for over 198 billion naira, according to figures obtained by The Cable, to keep running the centres holding them.
The right nobody can afford
Although the ACJA contemplates release on recognizance and requires bail conditions not to be excessive, section 165(2) permits a court to require a deposit of money or other security before approving bail. That power can become punitive when the condition imposed bears little relation to securing the defendant’s attendance at trial. The provision has attracted criticism because monetary conditions can undermine equal access to pre-trial liberty.
Courts routinely demand sureties who hold landed property in expensive districts, or who occupy senior civil-service grades, before releasing a defendant. A former federal pension official on a two-billion-naira fraud charge once told a judge, as Channels Television reported, that he could not find sitting senators willing to pledge half a billion naira in Abuja property, which is exactly what his bail order required. The Nigerian Bar Association’s president said in a June 2026 statement that conditions like these, sureties on Grade Level 16 or 17, property worth hundreds of millions of naira, have turned bail into a tool for keeping people locked up rather than a mechanism for securing trial attendance.
In Dasuki v Director-General, State Security Service (2019) LPELR-49182(CA), the Court of Appeal set aside a bail condition requiring a Level 16 serving civil servant who owned property worth ₦100 million in the FCT to stand surety, criticising the practice of imposing such conditions. If conditions like these strain a former federal official with a defence team, an ordinary defendant with no public profile has no real chance at all.
Legal aid on paper
The Legal Aid Council is supposed to close this gap, but eligibility is capped at the national minimum wage, raised to seventy thousand naira a month under the 2024 amendment act, a little over forty dollars. Anyone earning that or less is, by definition, the population least able to produce a six-figure surety or hire private counsel. This is however subject to the statutory discretionary power of the Council to grant contributory aid to some people above that threshold.
A joint Nigeria Correctional Service and PRAWA survey, covered by The Guardian, found that a large share of awaiting-trial persons have no legal representation at all, and that those who do are often unhappy with what they get. That gap is where cases like Adeyeye Olawale’s happen, as HumAngle reported: arrested in Oyo State in 2019, his lawyer withdrew once his money ran out, and three years later he was still in Agodi Correctional Centre, waiting for a trial date that kept not coming.
What actually moves the number
None of this is unfixable, and Nigeria already has working models, even if they remain too small for the scale of the problem. The Reforming Pretrial Detention in Nigeria project, run by the NGO PartnersGlobal with Nigerian legal aid partners, paired pro bono duty solicitors with digital case tracking to speed up how pretrial detainees move through the system and resolve cases through mediation instead of letting them stall on a court calendar. A later phase, working through the Public and Private Development Centre in Adamawa State, cleared fines for defendants convicted with the option to pay, helping one jail-delivery exercise discharge 57 people and grant bail to 29 more in a single sitting, according to Gazette NGR. PRAWA’s own Fine4Inmates initiative used the same strategy to free 25 people across four states by simply paying what they owed.
These programs do not revolve around money. The real importance of such programs revolves around their concrete presence; someone reviewing the title papers of the surety prior to a family spending several weeks trying to satisfy a bail condition that is beyond their reach; someone explaining the recognizance paperwork to a family member that cannot read and comprehend it; someone who attends court so that a case is not delayed because no responsible person is present; and someone who remains in contact after release so that a court appearance delay does not create another warrant of arrest. Bail verification services, surety education, court representation, and post-release follow-ups are not charity acts, but concrete actions that allow those who have the right to exercise that right.
Nigeria’s Constitution does not make the presumption of innocence dependent on wealth. Yet the persistent pattern in custodial statistics suggests that, in practice, poverty often determines who obtains bail and who remains in detention. It is first and foremost essential to make sure that the bail conditions take into account the real objective of bail, which is ensuring the appearance of the defendant in court proceedings. It should never work as a disguised denial of bail.
In assessing an individual, the court must take into consideration such matters as the nature of the charge, the defendant’s connections to the community, fixed abode, job or means of living, his state of health, family responsibility, previous history in court procedures, possibility of absconding, and possibility of influencing witnesses or the investigation. The court should not simply set the same financial and property-related conditions for everyone.
A condition involving having two civil servants at a certain grade, a landed property owner with a certificate of occupancy, or a surety who has landed property at a certain place may not be feasible for a poor defendant. This way, an individual might end up in custody even when he has been declared eligible for bail by the court. In effect, this would mean holding someone in custody because he is poor.
In addition, reasons for restrictive bail requirements must be provided by the court on the record, and there must be a readiness to modify those requirements where compliance is not possible. If it is not possible for the accused to provide himself with a surety that owns property, the court should consider options like recognizance, supervised release, reporting, verified address, or family guarantee.
CONCLUSION
The problem is not simply that people are denied bail. It is that bail can be granted in principle while remaining inaccessible in practice. When a defendant is unable to satisfy a financial, property or surety condition that bears little relation to the actual risk of absconding, the distinction between being granted bail and being able to obtain release becomes meaningless.
Nigeria does not need to abandon the legitimate safeguards that bail provides. It needs to ensure that those safeguards are proportionate, individualised and realistically attainable. Courts should consider the circumstances of each defendant and use alternatives such as recognizance, verified addresses, reporting requirements, supervised release or other appropriate conditions where these can adequately secure attendance at trial.
The starting point should be simple: poverty should not determine whether an accused person remains in custody. A person presumed innocent should not spend months or years behind bars simply because they cannot produce the kind of surety or property demanded of someone with greater means.
Making bail accessible is therefore not about being lenient on crime. It is about giving practical effect to the presumption of innocence, protecting the right to liberty, and ensuring that pre-trial detention remains what it is meant to be, a measure to secure the administration of justice, not a punishment for being poor.
