There has been a heavy push by political elites, traditional rulers as well as Governors of the five South East states namely Abia, Ebonyi, Imo, Anambra and Enugu, for the unconditional release or should one say, State Pardon, of incarcerated leader of the proscribed Indigenous People of Biafra (IPOB); and this is not forgetting to mention the cacophony of noises and chants from Igbos and some few non-Igbos, all calling for the release of the man who majority of Igbos refer to as their ‘Supreme Leader’.
This renewed move to secure the release of Nnamdi Kanu is similar to the one made in 2017 when he was first arrested in 2015. This same set of hypocritical elites from the South East especially the then Governors were the ones upon his release, buoyed him to break his bail conditions which included not being in a gathering of not more than 10 people at a time among others. They turned him into a circus show, attending his rallies where at one of such rallies, he boasted publicly that he would go to Abuja and come back to the S.E. with the head of the then president. His idiotic boast was greeted with a loud cheer. And when attempt was made to arrest him, he fled the country and became a nuisance from his UK safe haven using his infamous Radio Biafra to instigate violence and chaos across the country, especially in his South East region. He was later rearrested in Kenya and extradited back to Nigeria in 2021.
Before his re-arrest, Nnamdi Kanu’s Radio Biafra was the medium he used to preach hatred and division and during the 2020 #EndSARS riots, he was strongly on ground using the same medium to direct his foot soldiers to properties of politicians and the public figures they should burn down.
Nnamdi Kanu is a very dangerous character and the greatest mistake President Bola Ahmed Tinubu would make is to bow to this fresh pressure to grant him any form of pardon without letting him go through his trial for alleged treason, properly. Any form of pardon for Nnamdi Kanu is a total victory for him and a get out of jail free card to continue the madness that has been on in the South East since he began his agitation for a sovereign state of Biafra. The day he was conferred with the title of ‘Supreme Leader’ by his Igbo people, he wore a toga of a messiah and this messianic spirit that enveloped his being kind of gave him a feeling of invincibility, thus, granting a man such as Nnamdi Kanu with a heavy load of delusion of grandeur on his head any form of pardon will spell doom for not only his region but his neighbouring region such as the South-South which he had annexed already in his twisted thoughts because, without consultation, he included almost all major towns and cities in the South-South region in his Utopian Biafran map which he released some couple of years ago before his re-arrest.
The Igbo ‘Supreme Leader’s Special Counsel, Aloy Ejimakor, in a media interview recently said the Nigerian government knows it can’t convict the Biafra agitator with the level of evidence available, and that is why, he said it’s time to end the trial of the IPOB leader which he tagged “trial by ordeal”. He stressed that the Nigerian government was aware that convicting Kanu will be impossible with the evidence on ground.
So, why is everybody calling for a ‘political solution’ and or pardon for Kanu if the defence team believes there are not enough evidence to convict the IPOB leader, if I may ask?
Ejimakor continued: “If Kanu was guilty, then why is it taking so long to bring him to trial between 2017 till today which is eight years? It’s not really a judicial trial but trial by ordeal, trial by fire, imprisonment before conviction. They just want to get much jail time from him because they know that with the evidence available, a conviction will be impossible and that was made worse with the extraordinary rendition which I took as a civil violation to a Federal High Court in Nigeria and in October 2022, the court gave a judgment that extraordinary rendition was a violation of his constitutional right and awarded a N500 million as damages”, Ejimakor said.
He continued: “The United Nations which is the world court, the Nigerian Court of Appeal, the Federal High Court, and state High Court awarded Kanu one billion naira from where he had gotten four major victories against the Nigerian Government with the latter winning nothing. What more do you need as evidence of what is happening? What is happening is an act of persecution, not prosecution, it’s time to end it and on Kanu’s behalf, I ask all men and women of goodwill to speak up.
“Kanu is a poster boy for all the injustices that a great race, the Igbo people and their cousins in the former Eastern region have suffered”.
I want us to examine carefully the last line in the last paragraph of Kanu’s lawyer’s interview: “Kanu is a poster boy for all the injustices that a great race, the Igbo people and their cousins in the former Eastern region have suffered”. In Kanu’s delusional dreams, he believes Biafra extends to all the states in the South-South region which his lawyer referred to as “their cousins in the former Eastern region”. Pray, who will jolt Nnamdi Kanu and his IPOB mob back to stark reality that he is not in any form the “poster boy for all the(perceived) injustices” of the people of the South-South especially the Urhobos? Who will remind that clown that if the South-South was looking for a ‘poster boy’ for all the alleged injustices against the region, it can NEVER be a character like Nnamdi Kanu? Who will remind Nnamdi Kanu that his Utopian Biafra begins and ends within the territory of the five South East states(Abia, Ebonyi, Anambra, Abia and Enugu)?
One can understand why majority of the Governors of the South East region are driving this ‘Free Nnamdi Kanu’ campaign initiative. They want to look good in the eyes of majority of Igbos who are ardent followers and worshippers of Nnamdi Kanu, the ‘Supreme Leader’ because that should guarantee them a second term in office if not for anything. That is the only selfish reason some of the Governors are into this, if not, why would any right thinking state leader call for the pardon of a man whose band of militia called IPOB ESN aka unknown Gunmen have held the entire region by its jugular since 2015 and since then, residents are forced to ‘sit at home’ every Monday in civil disobedience to constituted authority with the Governors seemingly helpless in the face of that? Anyone that dares to step out of his home in defiance of the IPOB unknown Gunmen’s sit-at-home order had met instant death. Soldiers and policemen deployed to protect civilians have suffered similar fate! The violence, kidnapping and mayhem being unleashed on the region by Nnamdi Kanu’s boys do not look like something that will go away soon. One of the South East Governors was quoted as saying he would not be able to stop the weekly sit-at-home declared by IPOB. That is one of the Governors now asking President Tinubu to grant Nnamdi Kanu state pardon; a Governor who is chief security officer of the state, a Governor who collects hundreds of millions monthly as ‘Security Vote’ publicly admitted he had no powers to guarantee the safety of lives and property of people who he swore an oath to protect.
To President Tinubu, this is what will happen when (and if) you release Nnamdi Kanu without letting him go through his trial (and be jailed or acquitted) in court. He is already a ‘messiah’ of his Igbo people, he has a well-armed army, be ready to cede that part of the country to him because Nnamdi Kanu will not obey any terms of freedom. He has gone too far to turn back. He sees himself as a reincarnated late Odumegwu Ojukwu (the man who started this Biafra sovereign thing and even led the Igbos into a war for it, a war he lost). He speaks like Ojukwu, that is if any of you have watched videos of Ojukwu broadcasts during the Biafra war. The same song of: “ho yi, ho yi, ho yi, Odumegwu Ojukwu is another saviour” sang for Ojukwu in 1967 during the bloody Nigeria/Biafra civil war has been remixed with the removal of Ojukwu’s name and replaced with Nnamdi Kanu’s. That middle-aged man in the DSS custody at the moment sees himself as the ‘saviour’ of the Igbos and unfortunately, the majority of Igbos see him in that light. Only ONE per cent of Igbos see him as the irritant and cheap hustler that he is. Most Igbos are loud in the hero-worshipping of Kanu, a tiny per cent, for some reasons, do not publicly support him, but in their minds, they are with him. That is when you hear this kind of familiar line: “Well, not that I support what IPOB unknown Gunmen are doing in the South East o, but why did the Government arrest Nnamdi Kanu?” When you hear this from any Igbo, just know he is a closet supporter of Nnamdi Kanu and his IPOB.
If President Tinubu bows to the renewed pressure from the East to free Nnamdi Kanu and discontinue his trial because he wants to court the favour of Igbos, he would have made the biggest political mistake of his life. Peter Obi needs Nnamdi Kanu for his 2027 presidential ambition. I read recently in a news report where he was quoted as saying that Tinubu should free Nnamdi Kanu. Well, that did not come to many of us as a surprise. Peter Obi has never condemned the activities of IPOB unknown Gunmen. Even when they razed an entire village in the South East to the ground, Mr. Peter Obi always found a way to experience temporary amnesia, his memory comes back alive when bandits or Boko haram strike in the northern parts of the country. That is when Mr. Peter Obi’s X(formerly Twitter) handle comes alive and as usual he is always so fast to call Nigeria a ‘failed state’. Another of his popular cliché is “life in Nigeria does not worth much”. But in late May, six soldiers were surprised and killed in cold blood in Abia state by IPOB ESN unknown Gunmen, three of the soldiers were of Igbo extraction, I searched for a statement from Mr. Peter Obi condemning the incident and calling on the ‘perpetrators to be brought to book’ like he always said when an incident happens in other parts of the country, whoosai! Maybe I missed it on X. But weeks later, Mr. Peter Obi, the latest saint of Nigerian politics is calling for the release of a man whose private army has allegedly been responsible for hundreds of deaths in the South East region in his continued pursuit of a sovereign state of Biafra!
I hope someone is wise enough to tell President Tinubu that not even the release of Nnamdi Kanu will pacify the Igbos, that is not what majority of them want. They want the Nigeria presidency handed over to them on a platter even without an election and if that is not possible(of course, it is not possible), then give them Biafra. So, Mr. Tinubu has two options on his plate-abdicate the seat and swear in Mr. Peter Obi immediately or give them Biafra! So, which one can you do, sir, Mr. President?
Tinubu should sense the booby trap. His sixth sense should tell him something is not right and if I were him, especially with Peter Obi’s inclusion in the brigade of those calling for the pardon of Nnamdi Kanu, that should be more of a reason to give the issue a wide berth. If I were Tinubu, I would play deaf and allow the court to decide the fate of Nnamdi Kanu, because a plot is being hatched in the South East and Nnamdi Kanu appears to be the joker in the pack they are waiting for.
And just to ask here; what will happen to Nnamdi Kanu’s IPOB army? Oh, he will sign an undertaking that he would discontinue the agitation for Biafra, right? He would promise a disarmament, right? I dey laff! The world knows that it is always easier to give arms to hoodlums, it is almost impossible to retrieve the arms from them. Ask politicians who arm thugs during election period to snatch ballot boxes and intimidate political opponents how far they have been able to retrieve the guns they gave out. And what makes anyone think these IPOB ESN unknown Gunmen would be willing to return the arms when they have found a new lucrative vocation such as kidnapping and armed robbery to use the arms for? And like I said earlier, Nnamdi Kanu has gone too far to go back on Biafra. He sees himself as president of Biafra already, he smells ‘freedom’ for his people, he savours the ‘saviour’ tag always attached to his name. Kanu strongly believes he can achieve Biafra, so, he is willing to play along and get his freedom. Once out, he will begin the familiar vicious verbal and physical attacks on the Nigerian state; he would start to hold large rallies and he would be a president of the South East. Tinubu would not be able to take it, the South East Governors would play dumb as usual because they are protecting their political life, and then, security forces will attempt to go after Kanu once again. And once again, he will flee through our porous borders back to the UK which appeared to have tacitly backed his murderous incitement against Nigeria from her shores and the circle of cat and mouse chase will begin all over again.
Kanu is a very dangerous megalomaniac. Let the courts decide his fate.
Justin Akpovi-Esade is a journalist and social affairs commentator
