Omoyele Sowore, the presidential candidate of the African Action Congress (AAC) in the 2023 general election has condemned the continuous detention of the leader of the Indigenous People of Biafra (IPOB), Mazi Nnamdi Kanu.
According to him, detaining Kanu for over three years is a confirmation that the Nigerian State has an Igbo problem.
Sowore, who said this during an interview with Rudolf Okonkwo in 90Minutes Africa on Sunday, added that the pro-Biafra agitator is a victim of the post-civil war treatment that the country has meted out to the Igbo.
“Nigeria has an Igbo problem. It’s like when a father is dying, they will tell their children, I have a problem with Igbo people; please continue from there,” the political activist stated.
Kanu escaped from Nigeria in 2017 while on bail, standing trial on charges of terrorism in a Federal High Court after an invasion of his residence by the Nigerian military.
On June 27, 2021, he was arrested in Kenya by Interpol, working with Nigerian security officials, and brought to Nigeria in an act of extraordinary rendition.
On October 22, 2022, the Court of Appeal in Abuja declared the extradition of the IPOB leader illegal and ordered his immediate release.
The Nigerian government, however, continued to hold him in detention and filed an appeal at the Supreme Court against the Appellate Court order.
The Supreme Court, in its ruling, acknowledged the illegality of Kanu’s extradition but insisted that it was not enough to set him free and ordered that the terrorism of Biafra agitator should continue.
Kanu has since remained in the custody of the Department of State Services (DSS) while facing seven counts bordering on terrorism at the Federal High Court.
Sowore, who himself has been in and out of the detention facilities of the DSS, said he didn’t expect that the Bola Tinubu administration would follow the path of the Buhari administration in holding Nnamdi Kanu prisoner.
“I expected that the first act of Tinubu in office would have been to release Nnamdi Kanu. But the fact that it got worse shows that there is a kind of conspiracy going on,” the former University of Lagos students’ union president indicated.
“I also know that there are some Igbo elite who are complicit in his detention because there was a time when there were discussions about his release, and they said it should hold on until after the election, Sowore added.
“And now, after the election, the devil seems to have intervened more strongly.”
The political activist expressed his lack of faith in the possibility of Kanu getting any justice from the Nigerian judicial system because the president influences the system.
“Kanu is the official prisoner of whoever is the president of Nigeria. They report his condition to the president daily,” he explained.
“There is no way he’s going to get justice from the courts unless the Nigerian State decides to let him go.”
