Nnamdi Kanu, as I previously stated, is a self-proclaimed self-determination agitator but his ways and utterances are those of a separatist. Not only does he want a separate Biafra nation, his Biafrans are to have nothing to do with Nigerians of other ethnicities. While they could have relations with or even annex other smaller groups that Kanu likes to include in his extended map of Biafra that goes far beyond the geographic core of the South-East states to the South-South states and communities in Rivers, Cross River, Bayelsa, Akwa Ibom, Delta and even Benue and Kogi states, they, by his estimation, certainly cannot have anything to do with people from the core Yoruba or Hausa- or Fulani-speaking states.
While he identifies as a Judaist, he is on record for scolding Igbo people that are members of so-called Yoruba Church, that is churches led by Nigerians of Yoruba extraction. For him the argument is not just that the Igbo should be allowed to determine the direction they want to go politically, it is rather that they are better than all others and should have control and the right of first choice over everything. They just should not and cannot cohabit with others of supposedly inferior make-up. That seems to be his position. For this reason, he and the organisation he leads thrive on propaganda in which he demeans and twists up the national history of other Nigerian groups to fit his account of Igbo exceptionalism.
He gets unnecessarily aggressive and voluble in his self-created intellectual bubble where everything Igbo or about the Igbo is right and proper while the opposite is the case for other Nigerians. Can anyone imagine what things would look like if everyone has to think and act with and from the same mindset? Raining insults and spewing curses on others and practically inciting ethnic strife, Kanu has but a one-track mind. What would it look like if any Yoruba or Hausa or Fulani agitator pompously tells their own story of ethnic superiority – story of how the Igbo are weak and subservient to others and on the basis of that demand that the agitator’s group be treated preferentially?
I know the story has always been of how the Igbo are marginalised and victimised without equal attention paid to how those who speak in the name of the Igbo (which is not the same thing as the Igbo themselves) have played their politics or chosen to relate with others. Either way, is the dishing out of insults and excessive display of aggression the answer to the problem, real and perceived, of Igbo exclusion from national politics? What about reaching out to and winning the support of others? Where does fiction end and fact begin? It was Kanu’s propaganda machine that spawned the Jibril Al Sudan story about President Muhammadu Buhari being a clone of the person we all know bears that name.
It was a totally fictitious story and when it was shown that such claims are scientifically implausible, Nnamdi Kanu and his supporters doubled down on it and insisted that Buhari was dead and had been replaced by a lookalike politician. I knew an elderly, non-Igbo woman who fell for that garbage of a tall story as were many others who could have gone to war to prove its veracity. Nnamdi Kanu’s word was either the law or the gospel. You either take it or have it rammed down your throat. A lot of what transpired in Justice Binta Nyako’s court was a disgraceful abuse of process, an insult to the judge in particular and the country’s judicial system at large.
Nnamdi Kanu could and ought to have been held in contempt of the court. He was utterly disrespectful. Had another judge risen to the occasion and done what the law demanded in such circumstances, then would there have been the usual hue and cry about group or individual victimisation. But the politicisation of the entire trial basically tied the judge’s hands and it felt at once sorry and shameful that she was so shabbily treated in her own court. Kanu would have had a hard time had he been compelled to prove some of his claims about a huge sum of money exchanging hands to facilitate his conviction in exchange for the judge’s husband and son standing trial for corruption being provided a soft landing. Was it in his alleged solitary confinement at the DSS detention centre that Kanu learned of those wild claims he purveyed as facts?
When you consider his wilful arrogance and disdain of other opinion, it is not difficult to see why he was easily picked up like a chicken and extraordinarily renditioned. He is too much in love with his own voice. Even before he escaped from the country while on bail in 2017, he had become a power house and something of a principality in the South-East. He was his own master and confidant. He operated from his Afaraukwu, Abia State residence, as if he was a sovereign, receiving obeisance from his supporters who bowed and fell at his feet while seizing every opportunity to challenge the authority of the state. Symbols of state power were anathema to many who acted in his name. This, in addition to his separatist agenda, is a major part of what differentiates his type of agitation from that of others he is often compared to.
It was in this situation, while he was on bail, that his people again clashed with military personnel who took the battle into his home and took out several of his followers during the operation Python Dance exercise in the South-East. This was what forced him into exile where he could have remained for good had he not turned his energy into the active promotion of treasonable activities and ethnic disaffection through his broadcasts on his so-called Biafra radio. The circumstances of his arrest speak volumes about his person.
The Igbo like any other Nigerian group are guaranteed their right of self-determination. Nnamdi Kanu need not monopolise the narrative around that. That right was long recognised before he was born and the idea that the peace of the South-East that has been mostly disrupted in the last five years by IPOB-related activities is dependent on his release is stretching the truth. Kanu’s IPOB may have unleashed a monster that has gone beyond its control in the form of the Eastern Security Network. If only to respect the wish of the South-East political establishment, a political solution should be found to his matter and he should be released. But it can’t all be on his own terms. Justice Binta Nyako is the third on Kanu’s recusal list. How many more are left to go?
