DQ BIG STORY: The curious, unending trials of Nnamdi Kanu

Loathe him or love him, the leader of the Indigenous People of Biafra (IPOB) Mazi Nnamdi Kanu (MNK) remains an enigma. He continues to represent many things to many people. MNK evokes a lot of passion; noble sentiments from his legion of admirers and fierce detraction from his traducers. He is a phenomenon and has remained an issue in contemporary political discourse in Nigeria and beyond.

Since most of his actions and inactions hold significant meaning, it is understandable why his latest disavowal of his trial by Hon. Justice Binta Nyako made the headlines.
To the Nigerian state, Kanu is a terrorist but his teeming supporters see him as a prisoner of the Nigerian state. It is this wide perception of Kanu as a political prisoner that has made many eminent Nigerians join the persistent clamour for a political solution to his current incarceration.

Among the notable voices that have been raised for him to be freed are those of the late First Republic Aviation Minister Daara Mbazulike Amaechi; Afenifere leader Chief Ayo Adebanjo; human rights activist Senator Shehu Sani and past leaders of Ohanaeze Ndigbo, Dr John Nwodo, the late Prof George Obiozor and Chief Emmanuel Iwuanyanwu.

The intervention of Iwuanyanwu, like that of the others before him, was truly remarkable but unlike that of others, Iwuanyanwu’s is believed to have pushed him to his death.

According to the recent disclosure by his son Jidechukwu Iwuanyanwu, the late President General of Ohanaeze Ndigbo World died from complications arising from his over-exerting himself in an effort to visit and see the IPOB leader, Mazi Kanu in detention.

According to Jide, Chief Iwuanyanwu, who died on July 25 last year, had obtained permission from the DSS to visit Kanu in the secret’s police’s custody. But when he got to the Maitama Avenue, Abuja, headquarters of the DSS, the overzealous DSS officials would not even allow him to be driven into the premises and dropped off where he could easily access Kanu’s cell.

Instead, out of a seeming urge to humiliate him – for whatever reasons – they made him, a well-known Nigerian statesman, an 82-year-old, slightly overweight man with underlying health issues, to walk all of 500-metre plus distance to see Kanu in his cell, and back.

As Jide further disclosed, his father, apparently from exhaustion and other underlining health issues, fell sick later in the night of that day and was taken to the hospital from where he never came back alive.

Despite all this and more, the government has remained adamant, holding Kanu in DSS custody for almost four years now, apparently unwilling to either expeditiously try him or work out a political solution to the saga and release him.

SO, WHAT IS IT ABOUT NNAMDI KANU?

Why has the federal government failed to properly try Nnamdi Kanu or release him as part of a political solution to the current travails of the leader of the Indigenous People of Biafra (IPOB), a self-determination group agitating for the restoration of the defunct Republic of Biafra. Kanu has been detained in DSS cell since 2021. Why has the government practically pulled out all the stops to keep Kanu in detention all of these four years?

KANU’S OFFENCE

Kanu touched raw nerves when he began forcefully campaigning for for the restoration of Biafra using Radio Biafra, which he founded way back in 2009. While most Nigerian leaders are touchy about Biafra, they seemed to have played into Kanu’s as his forcefully persuasive messaging about the marginalization of his people, a reason they must be allowed to opt out of the union through a referendum, resonated widely with many in Igboland and in Nigeria as a whole.

But the problem was not with Kanu’s campaigning using the radio; the problem seemed to have been with what many have described as ‘verbal fusillade’ with which he attacked the Nigerian political establishment which he believes is acting dog-in-manger – neither letting the ‘Biafrans’ go or meeting their aspirations, just holding them down in an oppressive vice-like grip. As analysts have argued, Kanu spoke/speaks truth to power in an offensive way.

Long used to negative narratives about members of his ethnic group, Kanu, a forcefully persuasive speaker, was soon to turn the table against a certain ethnic group which he persuasively demonized as the real eternal villains, the anti-progress wedges, of the Nigerian political and economic federation.

Many from that ethnic stock were riled by Kanu’s relentless, not to say remorseless, demolition of their carefully packaged image, cultivated over the years, as the ruling princes who know better about governance and leadership than any other group in Nigeria. To put it directly, Kanu’s attacks exposed their ‘truths’, putting them on the defensive, even in disarray, for the first time in a long while in Nigeria’s tortuous political history. The became the butt of innuendos, projected as the face of violence and destruction in Nigeria, even elsewhere in Africa. T put it another way, many began to fearlessly, not to add unrestrictedly, attack members of that ethnic stock for their alleged negative contributions to the progress of Nigeria.

On the other hand, Kanu’s messaging projected his own stock as the patriotic and most hard-working group in Nigeria who are, however, unwanted in the country and should, therefore, be allowed to go.

The people so ‘defamed’, or, better still, their leaders, waited for the right time to strike at Kanu. And it happened that their torch-bearer was the Nigerian Khalifa at the time.

That ‘right time’ came on October 24, 2015 when, soon after arriving in Nigeria for a visit, Kanu was arrested in his Lagos hotel, and was later to be charged with “criminal conspiracy, intimidation and membership of an illegal organization,” charges that the government coupled up into a treasonable felony charge, but which his lawyer, Ifeanyi Ejiofor, described then as “frivolous”.

Kanu, also a British citizen, was detained at Kuje Correctional Centre, the FCT, until April 28, 2017, nearly two years later, when he was granted bail by the Federal High Court Abuja, under the rule-of-law regime of the federal government presided over by the Vice President and Acting President at that time, Professor Yemi Osinbajo.

However, when President Muhammadu Buhari, who had taken Kanu’s attacks as a personal affront but was sick in a London hospital for months then, came back to the country on August 17, 2017, matters relating to the Kanu saga took a turn for the worse. On September 14, 2014, without revoking Kanu’s bail bond, without any indication he was violating the terms of the bail for which he had to be brought to order through arrest or something like that, Nigerians woke up to hear the federal government had sent soldiers to attack Kanu’s family house, apparently to arrest him and bring him to the Khalifa.

According to reports, some 15 persons and the family dog were killed in the process, but Kanu managed to escape and flee to London.

KANU’S SECOND ARREST

To be sure, the bitterness towards Nnamdi Kanu by the leading lights of the Buhari Administration did not subside at all, even after the IPOB leader’s escape to London. While the Federal High Court presided over by Justice Binta Nyako was pushing for Kanu’s trial to resume and threatening his sureties, including then South East NASS caucus leader, Enyinnaya Abaribe, to present Kanu to court or go in for it (a threat that was not actioned because even Justice was handicapped by the inexplicable attack on Kanu’s family house by soldiers hwile his bail subsisted), the federal authorities were apparently plotting Kanu’s arrest, by hook or by crook.

Their chance came on June 27, 2021, according to reports, when Kanu was abducted from Nairobi Kenya by Nigerian agents and their Kenyan counterparts, and extraordinarily renditioned back to Nigeria to continue with his treasonable felony trial. He has been in the DSS custody since then.

KANU, TINUBU AND BUHARI

One of the ‘illegalities’ which the Appeal Court sitting in Abuja accused the FG of committing against Nnamdi Kanu was his extraordinary rendition from Kenya. The other was, of course, the invasion of his family house at Afara-Ukwu, Umuahia, during which several people were reportedly killed. For such illegalities and other points of law, the Appeal Court discharged Kanu and asked the government to release him.

But Buhari, through the then Attorney General and Minister of Justice, Abubakar Malami, bluntly refused and appealed to the Supreme Court, which ruled last December, more than a year after Malami had left office, that Kanu should face tial. While acknowledging the “illegalities” committed by the prosecution against the defendant, the Supreme court, however, ruled that those were enough reason to not continue with Kanu’s trial.

While Buhari would seem to have had a personal grudge against Nnamdi Kanu, what with the IPOB leader’s relentless attacks on the former president’s ethnic stock, the question many have asked is, what is President Tinubu’s own? What axe does he also have to grind with Nnamdi Kanu?

TINUBU EXPECTED TO MAKE A DIFFERENCE

For a president who was brought up in a sociocultural milieu that hitherto placed truth and rule of law over and above personal glory and acts of impunity as a means of achieving his leadership objective, the drama that played out on Monday, February 10- at the Federal High Court, Abuja, the FCT, left much to be desired.

The world saw on prime time how a judge who had earlier recused herself from the IPOB leader’s case came back to insist on continuing with the case – to which the defendant himself, practically taking over from his lawyers, stridently objected. This should alert President Tinubu to acts of judicial impunity being committed on his behalf by lieutenants who should know better. That the prosecuting attorney from the AGF’s office was supporting that act of impunity again, leaves much to be desired.

Many Nigerians, both home and abroad, had expected that President Bola Tinubu, soon after assumption of office, would leverage the leeway provided by the several court rulings that ordered Kanu’s release, to release him. That he has not done that is a source of puzzle to many people. And so, the inevitable question remains: why is the president not acceding to all the appeals from prominent persons and circles in Nigeria to release Nnamdi Kanu?

If Buhari had a personal act to grind with Kanu and, perhaps, Kanu’s people, does President Tinubu have one too? Many argue that the only time that Kanu came close to having an issue with the president was during the #EndSARS, which the Administration’s officials and associates of the president have continued to blame, rather falsely, on Kanu. Would that be reason enough for the president to seemingly jeopardize his good political standing with critical quarters within the Nigerian political establishment to hold on to Kanu illegally? Would it be enough for the president to have sanctioned the curt treatment the Adeola Ajayi’s DSS boys meted out to Chief Iwuanyanwu, Tinubu’s late elder stateman friend, who later died from exhaustion after that tortuous and humiliating visit to Kanu at DSS headquarters?

Nor is there, in our view, anything to gain politically by President Tinubu from the continued incarceration of Nnamdi Kanu. Would a Tinubu eyeing 2027 not gain a thing or two from the release of Nnamdi Kanu, who has mass followers in the South East/ South South and across Nigeria?

It is instructive that the two main actors in the Kanu prosecution – the Attorney General and Minister of Justice Lateef Fagbemi, and the prosecuting attorney, Adegboyega Awomolo, are Tinubu’s kinsmen, so to say. The president should leverage their positions to settle the Kanu case out of court, once and for all, and get the thumbs-up of the IPOB leader’s kinsmen.

It is high time he did that.