GRAND Knight of the Order of Knights of St. Mulumba, Lekki Sub-Council, Architect Jonny Ngonadi, in this interview with Okey Nwankwo, speaks on the Order’s activities including the release of over 600 prison inmates and other issues.
What informed your recent visit to Ikoyi Prison?
Our visit was part of the Sub-Council’s Prison Ministry project where members reach out to prisoners in the spirit of the bible. We visited the inmates to fulfil the demands of the Catholic Church’s teaching on corporal works of mercy, visiting people incarcerated in prisons. The Prison Ministry was set up about five years ago and it is charged with planning and executing our vision for those in prison. The interaction enables us find out why they are in prison, and their expectations from us.
Jonny Ngonadi
We visited Ikoyi Prison because it is the one nearest to us within the Lekki axis. The visit was revealing. We discovered that many of the inmates are awaiting trial. Some have stayed several years; most of them were incarcerated over trivial offences such as wandering. Many do not have lawyers to defend them nor relatives to assist with legal procedures. We organised some of our members, who are lawyers to take up their cases. So far, we have secured the release of over 600 inmates awaiting trial.
During our quarterly visits, we prepare food, buy medicine and daily essential needs that are legally permissible for the inmates. In the course of our interactions, we found out that some of the inmates are intelligent young people, who lacked relations to help them through school and to enable them realise such dreams, we arranged tutorials for them. They were registered for both GCE and JAMB with some gaining admission into the National Open University of Nigeria (NOUN). Today, four of them have graduated from NOUN. Others who could not go to school were encouraged to take on vocational programmes available in the Prison.
Apart from Prison Ministry, what other work of mercy is your Sub-Council engage in?
We also reach out to the poor: the homeless and motherless babies’ homes. Our Sub-Council partners Ozanam House established by the Justice Peace Development Center, Catholic Archdiocese of Lagos, to cater for pregnant young girls. When young girls mistakenly get pregnant, they lose face in the family and society and atimes, they are driven from their families or schools. They naively may resort to abortion. Ozanam House is there to give succor to such girls through counselling and others. We also partner with other Catholic organizations in supporting this initiative. Our support is part of our pro-life programme.
We have a committee that visits secondary schools and market women organizations of different categories within our Lekki axis, and organize seminars for them on pro-life. We teach them self-control and counsel them that if they make a mistake and get pregnant, while they are not married, they should not commit murder by procuring abortion.
Your group recently held a pro-life vigil. Is it one of the awareness programmes?
The vigil is part of our pro-life programme. We usually hold the vigil around September. It is to call attention to the plight of the unborn child and encourage people not to consider abortion as an option. It involves talks and teachings on the sanctity of life. We have another outreach programme called pro-life rally where we match a great distance, distributing leaflets on the sanctity of life. Apart from the two programmes, we hold seminars for members only, and another one, for the public, to tell them about advanced studies which have shown that contraceptives are injurious to the human body.
How do you find balance between the conservative stance of the Church and the free life stance of the world?
This is where you see contradictions. The world preaches free speech, freedom, free movement, and at the same time, places a burden on you. It prevents you from killing another human being. The world says ‘it is a free
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