Kanu: IPOB shades government over ‘engineered insecurity’ in Southeast, cites ‘judicial absurdity’ in Omotosho’s guilty verdict on leader
The Indigenous People of Biafra (IPOB) has again pooh-poohed the Justice James Omotosho ruling on Nnamdi Kanu, describing as ‘judicial absurdity’ the life sentence on “a man who was in solitary confinement and couldn’t have committed the crime he was accused of committing.”
In a statement issued by the group’s Media and Publicity Secretary, Comrade Emma Powerful, against the backdrop of allegations by Kanu’s lawyers that the federal government is denying the IPOB leader access to computers to compile his documents to enable him to file an appeal against his life imprisonment by the Abuja High Court presided over by Jamaes Omotosho, IPOB said the statement by Powerful had become necessary in light of what the group called “a dangerous lie that has been carefully constructed to justify the continued detention and conviction of our leader.”
Insisting that the insecurity in the Southeast was engineered by “desperate political actors in order to paint Kanu and ‘the peaceful IPOB’ black, the group recalled that immediately after the extraordinary rendition of Mazi Nnamdi Kanu in June 2021, “desperate political actors, many of whom have long envied his influence, unleashed violence and chaos across the South-East.”
Their aim in allegedly creating such chaos in the Southeast, IPOB further alleged, was to create insecurity “and blame it on Mazi Nnamdi Kanu, so they could later claim they were right to abduct, detain, and jail him.”
“These are the same people who rushed to proscribe IPOB, after Ekwulobia and Aba mega rallies in mid-2017 where millions trooped out just to catch a glimpse of our leader, even though the Abuja Federal High Court had earlier in March 2017 ruled that IPOB is not a terrorist organisation. In plain terms, a group declared lawful by a court was later branded ‘terrorist’ through ex-parte, for political convenience,” IPOB charged.
“These are the same people that killed IPOB members that organised and attended President Trump Solidarity Rally in Igweocha (Port Harcourt) on 20 January 2017. Again, Biafrans killed without justification.
“It is painful to note that yet again, the same forces behind the manufactured insecurity are the same ones who unleashed Operation Python Dance, a military operation that targeted Mazi Nnamdi Kanu for assassination and led to the killing of unarmed civilians across the South-East with 28 murdered in his country home.”
Noting that the “most shocking of all is what followed in court,” IPOB lamented that Justice Omotosho allowed himself to be persuaded by reports of insecurity in the Southeast to pass a guilty verdict on Kanu, as he, in his judgment “repeatedly cited insecurity in the South-East from 2022 onwards and blamed it on Mazi Nnamdi Kanu—despite the fact that Mazi Kanu had already been abducted, rendered to Nigeria, and locked in underground solitary confinement.”
“Let Nigerians and the world pause and think,” IPOB said in what seemed an emotional appeal to the conscience of the world.
“Mazi Nnamdi Kanu was held incommunicado in the custody of the (DSS) in Abuja. He had no phone, no visitors, no access to the outside world. Yet he was blamed for events said to have happened in the South-East, outside prison walls. This is not justice. It is judicial nonsense.”
“Let us state the absurdity clearly,” the Biafran self-determination group stressed. “A man in total state custody was convicted for crimes allegedly committed while he was in chains.
“In any sane country, such reasoning by a supposed learned judge would attract instant condemnation from fellow judges and the legal fraternity. But in Nigeria, the plot was so well executed that many people stopped asking basic questions.”
According to the IPOB, there are many questions that should have been asked by all people of good conscience but nobody has asked them, certainly not the presiding judge who was supposed to ask such questions but refused for what may have become obvious reasons.
“(For instance), whom did Mazi Nnamdi Kanu kill? Who came to court to say Kanu killed their brother, sister, or parent? Where is the evidence—bodies, witnesses, forensic proof? There is none. Absolutely none,” the pro-Biafra group sneered.
“Those who planned this deception did a thorough job. They confused the public, silenced questions, and drowned the truth in propaganda. But no lie lasts forever.
“If these Igbo politicians and their external sponsors had been honest enough to admit that the insecurity story was deliberately created just to jail Kanu, our leader would have willingly sacrificed himself if it would have saved the innocent Biafrans who were killed simply to build a case against him.”
Warning that the blood of the innocent killed in ‘Biafraland’ cries out, IPOB, called on the international community, foreign governments and parliaments, human rights organisations, lawyers and judges of conscience, “to look beyond propaganda and confront the truth,” namely, that Kanu’s conviction “is built on manufactured insecurity, no evidence, and the criminalisation of political dissent.”
“History will remember those who spoke the truth—and those who used chaos to silence a man,” IPOB declared.
