It took about 10 riveting years and incompetent legal defence to earn the Indigenous People of Biafra (IPOB) leader Nnamdi Kanu a life sentence. A Federal High Court in Abuja presided over by Justice James Omotosho handed down the sentence last week, ending years of legal rigmarole begun since his arrest in October 2015. IPOB itself was founded in 2012. While delivering his judgement, the judge said of Mr Kanu that “He remained arrogant, cocky, and full of himself without realising the magnitude of his crime and the effect of what he has done against his people in the south-east.” But moments after the sentencing, many notable members of the Southeast elite groaned that they were disappointed and had expected his crimes to be expiated by his freedom fight justifications. A day or so before the sentence was handed down, some 44 members of the House of Representatives acting under the aegis of Concerned Federal Lawmakers, mostly south-easterners, incomprehensibly asked the federal government to discontinue the case in favour of a political solution.
Former senate president Adolphus Wabara decried the life sentence as unjust and tantamount to jailing the whole Igbo race, especially when some Boko Haram commanders had in contrast received lenient sentences. Foreign Affairs minister of state Bianca Ojukwu surprisingly groaned that the judgement was not the outcome they expected, indicating that she was saddened by how the whole affair ended. A political solution would be found, she whined. Some other south-eastern political elites and commentators have threatened electoral backlash should Mr Kanu remain in jail by the next elections. Former Anambra State governor Peter Obi ignored the juridical part of the Kanu affair and adopted sophistry suggesting that the arrest and trial should not have happened in the first instance. In sum, the dominant and vocal Southeast elite are behind Mr Kanu to a man and are unalterably opposed to his jailing. Those in favour of the outcome of the case, including the thousands of victims who suffered untold losses, are not only in the minority, their voices are muted. Given the prevalent mood in the Southeast, their voices will likely not be heard, going forward. Worse, they may even suffer some backlash.
The resentment manifesting in the Southeast is a reflection of the curious logic expounded by their elite. They ignore the deaths and destructions, the economic losses, the trauma suffered by the region, and the dislocations. Instead, they focus on Mr Kanu himself, his charisma, his apparently disarming imperiousness, his legal and radio histrionics, and his boldness and claims of being a freedom fighter. Does the region really believe his story, especially his cartographic fantasies of including parts of Kogi, Benue and the entire South-South in Biafra? Having spread all over Nigeria transacting businesses of all kinds, thus transcending their spatial limitation, do the Igbo political and business elites really support self determination? The truth may never be known. But what is known at the moment is that Mr Kanu’s supporters compare the jailing of their freedom fighter, particularly what they describe as the harshness of his jail term, to how the so-called repentant and captured Boko Haram fighters have been treated. Sen. Wabara even persuaded himself to believe that Mr Kanu never projected violence. Indeed, those who have taken umbrage at his jailing appear to think that the collateral damage suffered by thousands of Igbo in the heat of IPOB campaigns makes the victims expendable and their blood desirable to be shed ‘to water the tree of liberty’.
It is unclear why those who have bawled at alleged serial miscarriage of justice expected the judgement to favour Mr Kanu. In the strictest consideration of the law, and in every material particular, there was no way, even with the best defence, the IPOB leader would have been exculpated. But never one to let bad enough alone, he worsened his own case by repeatedly sacking his legal teams, and finally taking over his defence and botching it. Secondly, despite his personal failings, the weakness of his political cause, his promotion of indiscriminate violence, and his megalomaniacal inclination, it is shocking that someone as abusive and narcissistic like US president Donald Trump could be the darling of the Southeast elite. Has the region not suffered enough? Or do they think the cause of Biafra Mr Kanu claimed to be fighting could be divorced from his personality? Looking at the Southeast, the tragedy is not just the foibles of Mr Kanu but the irresponsibility of the regional elite. Had they sensibly read through Mr Kanu’s motives, and had they courageously defied him and his methods, the Southeast would have escaped the atavism he promoted and the tragic losses many Igbo families endured while Igbo-on-Igbo violence bled the region.
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While nothing could exculpate Mr Kanu, given the weight of evidence before the court, the Southeast elite were justified to compare the treatment meted out to Mr Kanu with the mild treatment meted out to terrorists and bandits in the North. Since the outbreak of Boko Haram and later banditry, a powerful section of the northern elite has been supportive and even protective of their terrorists. They inspired an ill-conceived and ill-advised programme of deradicalisation and rehabilitation of so-called repentant Boko Haram fighters, while victims of insurgency enjoy incommensurate attention. And ultimately, they have seemed reluctant to promote or back measures that would lead to the extermination of the insurgents and bandits. Without saying so openly, the ham-handed manner the insurgents and bandits have been treated has given rise to the suspicion that the region sees the militants as a potential standing army for political purposes or projection of power in the event of a fight ensuing between warring ethnic groups for the soul and body of Nigeria. It is not unlikely that the Southeast reasons the same way. If there is any question or confusion about the ineffectiveness of the fight against banditry, insurgency and IPOB, the answer may be located in the special relationships the regional elites have formed with their militant groups.
President Bola Tinubu has the unenviable job of presiding over a government whose members are still torn between the nation’s interest and ethnic, religious and primordial affinities. The case is so bad that some cabinet members’ loyalties cannot be assumed at a time the country is at war with itself. There are some powerful interests in the North sponsoring terrorism, sometimes due to economic/mineral resources interests. And there are also now clearly many powerful interests supporting Mr Kanu and what he represents, and who resent and defy the special treatment they believe the northern militants have received from powerful interests in and out of the federal government. These influential regional interests have given indications that their militants can be deployed during national elections for social, religious, political and territorial objectives. The Southwest remains a comparatively peaceful region today partly because its elite, after some initial hesitations, finally ensured that their incubating militants did not hatch. Time will tell whether they did right, or whether they have not become too complacent and liberal for their own existential good.
Whether other regions outside the Southeast show outrage or not, the campaign to free Mr Kanu will acquire impetus in the coming weeks and months, especially as conjured stories of his treatment in jail get disseminated. Expect passions to be inflamed, as disgruntled regions synergise their efforts to render the Tinubu administration impotent. Abductions will become rife, rescue efforts will be stymied by sabotage, and great national distress will be fomented. But the Kanu affair will be nothing more than a symptom of a great underlying disease gnawing at the body politic. The main will thus disease require brilliant and radical measures to extirpate, assuming that the powerful and embedded interests in the country can be neutralised first.
