When ex-Presidential aide, Reno Omokri said Nnamdi Kanu’s mouth will kill him not many Nigerians took him seriously. Omokri must have thought he was being predictive or prophetic but he never knew he was attempting to prevent a fractured pottery from falling; it did not matter. Even as at the time the ex-presidential aide made the glaring prediction, Kanu, the leader of the proscribed Indigenous People of Biafra (IPOB) has proven to be a disaster that happened long ago. The only thing that would have prevented the disgrace he faces today was if his mother had miscarried at his conception. Short of that the IPOB leader was born destined to end in infamy.
Interestingly, Omokri is someone known for his pointless ripostes; he comments on issues that even a mentally limited person will be wise to keep quiet over. From all indications, he seems to know Kanu better than any other Nigerian, kindred spirit in the business of irresponsible loquaciousness. But it all ends there. The spin doctor is not in the business of sending young people to confront military Armored Personnel Carriers with crude weapons. That is suicide mission, the kind Kanu has committed to sending his people on in the recent years that he has been in the business of extorting his kinsmen with a fraudulent claim of working to restore the defunct Biafra republic.
Had Kanu remained in the United Kingdom and not returned to Nigeria in October of 2015, he might perhaps have retained the aura of a charismatic leader that once surrounded him. In between changing adult diapers for his charges as social care worker, Kanu would have been able to keep running the usual circuits, like the Igbo World Congress of September 2015 where he made his “we need guns and we need bullets” pitch, which he used to shaft gullible Igbos out of their money. He would have by now been able to offset the same London mortgage he was in a hurry to pay off.
But that is not the dramatic Kanu way. He possibly thought his rants were not being heard loud enough so he had to move closer home to be escorted straight into the slammer. Contrary to his earlier rants, he was arrested and kept in captivity and Nigeria did not burn. In fact, he had to regularly throw tantrums during court appearances for him to remain relevant in the news in a country where it became apparent that he was stale news. It was under such irrelevant condition that he morosely accepted to be let out on bail, by the same government he claimed not to recognize, to attend to his failing health – it turned out he never attended to his health because there were no indication that he sought psychiatric help after his release. His braggadocio ended with him abandoning his so called comrades in jail while he pranced about town receiving obeisance from misguided followers. Thus end the season one of how Nnamdi Kanu’s mouth will kill him.
Perhaps in a bid to create the impression that his rants about securing a Biafra republic for his deluded followers, Kanu violated every bit of his bail conditions and did so much damage to the Igbo cause between April and September 2017 before fleeing like the common criminal that he is. In that space of time he managed to antagonize other ethnic nationalities with his uncouth language to the point that quit notices were being issued to Igbos to leave parts of the country. In the referenced period, he managed to get more Igbo sons killed than anyone thought was possible – he sold them the dummy that they Biafra has been recognized by foreign interest to the point where he inspected a guard of honour mounted by comical looking IPOB members, which left one to query if mental illness can be contagious.
He bragged so much about possessing caches of firearms and even nuclear warheads, which took on some air of credibility given the fund raising he had done at the Igbo World Congress. We went on to then threaten that IPOB has the capacity to shut down the system such that there would be no general elections if his group did not get referendum. That declaration that there will be no election in Igboland and a growing belligerence with criminality on the part of his members brought down Operation Python Dance II, a training drill by the Nigerian Army, upon the south-east. The brainwashed IPOB members that attacked the troops taking part in the exercise in the false belief that it was the start of Biafra War 2 where shocked to discover that while Kanu had firearms stashed away in his father’s house he did not have enough to take on that single detachment of the army; they must have been supremely confounded that the whole money raised for him was not spent on weapons. (More surprise awaited them when they discovered that Kanu places the death of his family dog, Jack, was more painful than the human IPOB members that died in the confrontation with the military).
Kanu fled the military response to his organization’s provocations. He might have remained a hero had he continued to remain in hiding since there was a rising cult following of the Biafra leader who sacrificed himself in pursuit of a separatist agitation that failed before it was conceived. But the myth of a martyred IPOB leader dissipated with the realization that Kanu was somewhere in Ghana eating peppered ‘suya’ when his followers were still mourning the death of loved ones that he sent to their early graves. That sighting was treated as a conjecture for a long time until Kanu surfaced almost one year later at the Wailing Wall in Jerusalem. There is something wrong on too many levels for a dead leader to surface to share in the joy of the living. Not everyone wants a living martyr.
It was the season during which he somehow managed to upgrade IPOB into a terrorist organization that was proscribed by government, effectively ruling out the prospect of the organization being able to drive the discourse about securing a better deal for Igbos in the modern day Nigeria. The curtain fell on season two of how Nnamdi Kanu’s mouth will kill him and how it has killed the Igbo nation.
Whoever scripted Season Three of how Nnamdi Kanu’s mouth will kill him should never be forgiven for the very fact that it covered a period that destroyed the Igbos’ political fortunes in the country. He emerged from hiding to galvanize the south-east against registering to vote. He declared a boycott of the 2019 polls and aggressively propagated that message only to lift the boycott a few days to the elections, and secretly at that such that his people are holding the sloppy end of the stick as things stand today. He projected his hallucination unto others and created the myth of Jibrin of Sudan, claiming that President Buhari has died and has been replaced by an impostor look-alike. His opposition challenger, Atku Abubakar became a Cameroonian in Kanu’s hallucination, which prompted some people to question why the authorities in the United Kingdom are yet to commit him to a care home.
Kanu ranted so much that it became difficult to keep track of the issues he talked about owing to the degenerative psychological breakdown he is suffering from. It became inevitable that the third season of his show was ending on a disastrous note as people learnt to focus on more important and developmental issues instead of being mired in barely intelligent expositions of the IPOB leader. The curtain fell on the third season with the world remembering Kanu as basket case.
The fourth season is unfolding and it has proven to be the disaster of the three previous seasons rolled into one for Kanu. His source of funding has been exposed as the extensive network of scammers and fraudsters that were indicted by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) in the United States. Curiously, shortly before their indictment went public, Kanu had unleashed IPOB upon Igbo political leaders – a former Senate President, Ike Ekweremadu was the first to have a taste of what Kanu’s vision of Biafra was meant to be. The senior politician was beaten up in Nuremberg, Germany where he had gone to celebrate a festival that is sacred to the Igbos. The outrage that greeted this sacrilege did nothing to deter Kanu and IPOB to retrace their steps. He instead threatened to attack more Igbo leaders.
Unfortunately for Kanu, the Igbos are not helpless neither are their leaders unaware of what to do. Without any prompting from these leaders, many Igbo youth groups have requested for Kanu and those in the Diaspora that share his idea of vitriol and violence – laced engagement should be returned home for treatment. One can easily guess that the treatment they have in mind is some extended stay in Kuje Prison, especially since the IPOB leader is a fugitive from justice. For running his mouth to incite IPOB militants against Igbo leaders, which provoked the attack in Germany, something larger than a python is now chasing after Kanu. The entire Igbo nation is now angry that Kanu overstepped his bounds; they want his head for desecrating the highly revered Igbo tradition. This is Season Four still loading, let’s wait to see how lower this scoundrel will sink in this iteration before his mouth finally buries him as predicted by Reno Omokri.
Abiodun a public analyst wrote from University of Ibadan, Oyo State.