The Amnesty International (AI) inadvertently reignited the debate on the desirability or not of the death penalty when it released its 2017 annual report on the subject and the progress made so far on the abolition front. In the report, AI’s Secretary General, Salil Shetty, disclosed that Nigeria has the highest number of persons on the death row put at 2,285 with 621 of that number convicted last year alone.

According to the AI, there has been a steady increase in the number of persons on the death row in the last two years with 171 sentences handed down in 2015 and 527 in 2016.

This is contrary to the trend elsewhere in sub-Saharan Africa where Guinea became the 20th country to abolish the death penalty as punishment for any crime. Burkina Faso and Chad have also lately taken steps to repeal the death penalty either with new laws or proposed ones. This is a trend that AI welcomes, saying that: “The progress in sub-Saharan Africa reinforced its position as a beacon of hope for abolition.” It described the punishment as “ultimate, cruel, inhuman and degrading.”

The AI’s position is not surprising as it has been at the head of a strong international lobby to abolish the death penalty worldwide. For many countries though, the debate on the desirability or not of the death penalty often leaves them with a dilemma as AI in its report acknowledged and with some countries having to restore the death option after a hiatus. Some of the countries on the continent, which have taken this option in the last one year, include Sudan and Botswana. The Philippines has had to rethink its position on abolishing the death penalty too, as it restored it after some years of moratorium.

For a country like Nigeria, the debate rages on. According to the AI report, though 621 convictions were secured last year alone, no person was executed. This is significant and an indication of the growing reluctance by constituted authorities to apply the death penalty as a punishment for extreme crimes. Governors who have the responsibility, in accordance with the law, to sign the death warrants have been known lately to demur on it. This may be on account of the strong lobby against the death penalty as a form of punishment or the raging controversy on its real value as a deterrent. This is a debate all stakeholders in the national project cannot possibly run away from.

While the high convictions in a country like Nigeria can be justified on the sheer size of our population, which is about one-fifth of the entire continent, it is entirely up to debate the rationale for the continued retention of the death penalty as a form of punishment.

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The argument that it has perhaps never served as a strong deterrent to the extreme crimes it is fashioned to prevent can be discountenanced by the counter argument that the increasing reluctance by those in authority to apply the death penalty to the letter may be serving as encouragement to hardened criminals and therefore responsible for the new upsurge in willful homicides and premeditated murders.
The crimes the death penalty was envisaged to forestall in the first place are so weighty that it would be almost unimaginable what else would do. Do extreme and drastic crimes not require drastic penalties as deterrent? In the alternative, what punishments would be appropriate? And how do we assure justice and closure for the victims?

These questions are very important and must be answered one way or the other if we are ever going to resolve the question of the death penalty.

The extant AI report, as optimistic as it would want to be, also recorded a number of other countries that have had to go back on the moratorium on the death penalty in recent years.

This should signpost the difficulty many countries are having repealing the death penalty and finding alternative deterrents. It is a global dilemma with its application most prevalent in the Asia-Pacific countries where about 40 per cent of them still apply the death penalty to extreme crimes of premeditated murders and drug trafficking.

Nigeria may have to still hold on to the death penalty as a deterrent to extreme crimes, no matter the arguments to the contrary. Our belief is that if the authorities saddled with the responsibility of enforcing death penalty discharge it without let or hindrance, it can serve as a deterrent.