By Abimbola Adelakun
During a recent interview, Peter Obi was asked how he would address political agitations across the country if he were the president. He responded that he would dialogue. Referring to the detained IPOB leader Nnamdi Kanu, Obi added that his incarceration “does not make sense”. He said, “Some people said because he (Kanu) used vulgar words and everything. I’ve not seen it…” First, Kanu’s case is not a matter of “some people said” but the history that unfolded right before our eyes. Second, I appreciate that Obi wants to be a peacemaker, but if he ever becomes president, he would be repeating the mistake of the Muhammadu Buhari administration by gratuitously bestowing official recognition on every agitator.
Kanu’s story is a quintessential example of how not to manage divisive elements in a country. The IPOB movement was severely mismanaged due to the high-handedness of the Buhari administration. Obi is right that the genesis of Kanu’s problem was his uncouth language, but his case also got far more complicated than that. Initially, Kanu was hardly more than a social media influencer who capitalised on Igbos’ disenchantment with the country following the 2015 election to start broadcasting. Some of the comments in the broadcast were intensely provocative but not substantially different from what people write about their leaders on Twitter in democratic countries. His Biafra Radio’s marginal audience likely had more people who listened to his vulgar commentary as a guilty pleasure than an ideological interest. Kanu’s adoption of “Biafra” itself can be said to be more for the edginess it aroused than any serious secession attempt.
If he had been left alone, Kanu by now would have faded into the same obscurity as his counterparts go into when the public gets sated with their antics. Look at it now; we have mostly moved on from arguing about Biafra’s history to debating the details of June 12. Tomorrow, another historical event will arrest our attention. The IPOB movement would not have become an albatross if Buhari had had enough leadership confidence, self-restraint, and common sense. Buhari’s response to different phenomena was disproportionate. When he should have demonstrated more decisiveness about killer herdsmen, he was lethargic. On IPOB, he went overboard. He confused the faint stirrings of Biafra for a return to history, and he went at it with needless ruthlessness. It was no thanks to his lack of proportion that Kanu moved from the margins into the centre of public attention.
Some of us only got to hear about Biafra Radio after the government announced it had jammed its signals. Think about that. In the age of the internet, a government announcing that it had jammed a radio station was an open invitation for all of us to be curious about the contents. That was the beginning of Kanu’s popularity.
In a serious democratic country, someone like Kanu would have been publicly ignored but privately surveilled. In a place like the USA, a fringe group arises now and then to challenge the government, but the state is too prudent to be drawn into a contest of wills with them. What they do is to put them on the radar of the FBI, who will monitor them, infiltrate them, and wait for them to make a wrong decision so they can finally take them down with the intelligence they have collected. Unlike our own DSS filled with sadist administrators who get a kick from strong-arming even mini-dissidents, they take a far more measured approach. The DSS made the same miscalculation with Sunday Igboho, going to the extent of turning their organisation into a joke when they invaded his house. Apparently, they were stupid enough to believe the silly tales about Igboho’s supernatural power!
In October 2015, Kanu was arrested and charged with sedition, ethnic incitement, and, of course, treason—an offence fast losing meaning with the frequency they slam it on people. If a dog’s barking on the street upsets the president, you can bet it will face treason charges. Although the meaning of “treason” gets bastardised with the way they cheaply slam it on people, it has official implications. Charging Kanu with treason gave the FG the impetus to unleash their medieval instincts on his supporters, and that radicalised many of them. Watching their fellow Igbos killed by security operatives under the bigoted Buhari government pushed many from amused onlookers to political survivalists. The conspiracy theorists who had expressed fear for their Igbo lives under Buhari started to look prescient; everyone’s guards necessarily went up.
Within a week of his arrest, Kanu wrote an apology to Buhari for the “uncomplimentary remarks” he made about him in an August broadcast. At the time, the public was still protesting his arrest, but he was already eating his own words. Yet, by the time he was released on bail in December, the politics had changed. Kanu transformed from a clout chaser to an insurgent with a following. Some saw him as a messiah. The adulation went into his head and turned him into an idol. We saw people—literally—bowing to worship him. Right before our eyes, the comedian became a crusader, a content creator, and now a national contender. Kanu serially violated the terms of his bail, and the DSS, still imprudent in their approach, tried to arrest him with the full force of their rage. He escaped them and ran abroad, becoming a fugitive from (in)justice.
From the comfort of his abroad abode, what started as a gig morphed into a full-blown enterprise complete with fundraising efforts to support the cause. Thanks to digital technology, Kanu could direct his foot soldiers. Some of them, disillusioned with a country that saps their life, found a moral purpose in the IPOB movement. They went at it with the force of their conviction and were met with the brutal glee of a country that never hesitates to cut down on its own.
In January 2022, when some leaders met Buhari to ask for a pardon for Kanu, he refused, saying, “Kanu has been insulting us. He has been given incorrect figures and comments against us. He needs to account for what he did.” Reading that, I thought it was interesting that Buhari’s case against him was not something he did to Nigeria per se, but that Kanu made his government look bad. He made a similar statement in November 2021 when other Igbo elders visited him. That must explain why they could go all the way to find Kanu abroad and abduct him to Nigeria while the terrorists within the country freely post videos on social media.
In January 2024, when Buhari’s aide Femi Adesina released his book, he alluded to the meetings Buhari had with Igbo elders over Nnamdi Kanu but added one interesting detail. He quoted Buhari as saying, “I feel it is a favour to give him (Kanu) that opportunity (of a trial). The government could have mobilised to eliminate him where he was, but we did not do that.” That was the President of Nigeria praising himself for not carrying out the extrajudicial murder of a Nigerian citizen. If they can confess that publicly, who knows how many people they have assassinated like that?
The injustice of Kanu’s trial is that he is the one being made to answer for IPOB when he should be standing in the dock with his biggest accomplice, Buhari. His administration did not merely mishandle the whole affair but, in fact, triggered the sentiments that fuelled IPOB. The truth is, Kanu is toast for now. The only condition under which Tinubu (forget the courts; the trial is a charade) can release him is if it will help his 2027 re-election. If not, he will be in jail until his matter becomes a matter of àbùkù for them.
The Punch
