By Seun Opejobi Aloy Ejimakor, Special Counsel to Nnamdi Kanu, leader of the Indigenous People of Biafra, IPOB, has said the Nigeria...
By Seun Opejobi
Aloy Ejimakor, Special Counsel to Nnamdi Kanu, leader of the
Indigenous People of Biafra, IPOB, has said the Nigerian Government knows it
can’t convict the Biafra agitator with the level of evidence available.
To this end, Ejimakor said it’s time to end the trial of the
IPOB leader.
Ejimakor noted that Kanu was not subjected to judicial trial
but trial by ordeal.
He stressed that the Nigerian Government is aware that
convicting Kanu will be impossible with the evidence on ground.
Kanu was first arrested in 2015 but was granted bail in 2017
but later fled Nigeria to Europe after a military invasion of his residence in
Abia State.
He was later rearrested in Kenya and subjected to an
extraordinary rendition back to Nigeria in 2021.
Upon his return to Nigeria, the IPOB leader has been through
several courts in Nigeria and the United Nations in a bid to secure his
release.
Despite his move, the Nigerian Government refused to release
Kanu amid court rulings granting him bail.
However, in a video he released yesterday, the lawyer
recounted Kanu’s ordeal right from when he was first arrested in 2015 up until
his rearrest in June 2021 in Kenya.
According to Ejimakor: “If Kanu was guilty then why is it
taking so long to bring him to trial between 2017 till today which is eight
years? It’s not really a judicial trial but trial by ordeal, trial by fire,
imprisonment before conviction. They just want to get much jail time from him
because they know that with the evidence available, a conviction will be
impossible and that was made worse with the extraordinary rendition which I
took as a civil violation to a Federal High Court in Nigeria and in October
2022, the court gave a judgment that extraordinary rendition was a violation of
his constitutional right and awarded a N500 million as damages.
“The United Nations which is the world court, the Nigerian
Court of Appeal, the Federal High Court, and state High Court awarded Kanu one
billion naira from where he had gotten four major victories against the
Nigerian Government with the latter winning nothing. What more do you need as
evidence of what is happening? What is happening is an act of persecution, not
prosecution, it’s time to end it and on Kanu’s behalf, I ask all men and women
of goodwill to speak up.
“Kanu is a poster boy for all the injustices that a great
race, the Igbo people and their cousins in the former Eastern Nigeria subjected
to since the founding of Nigeria. These injustices became more public since
2015 they escalated and how you fight back is not through a bullet.”
No comments