Opinion
UCHECHI Okwu-Kanu, the wife of the leader of the Indigenous People of Biafra IPOB, Mazi Nnamdi Kanu, currently in the custody of the Department of State Service in Abuja, Nigeria has again raised alarm over the fragrant and perpetual detention of her husband despite the several Court judgments in his favour.
Mrs. Okwu-Kanu made this known in an exclusive chat with a UK journalist, Matthew Campbell.
Uchechi Okwu-Kanu is used to danger and intrigue. A few years ago, talking to her husband on the phone from the family’s home in Peckham, she heard gunfire and asked what the noise was. There was a pause before he yelled: “They’re shooting at us.” Then the line to southeast London went dead.
Nnamdi Kanu, her husband, a British citizen campaigning for restoration of the breakaway state of Biafra in Nigeria, narrowly escaped death that day at the hands of government soldiers. He went into hiding.
The danger was not over. When his five-year-old son sent him a Father’s Day WhatsApp greeting in 2021, saying: “You’re the best daddy in the world”, Kanu replied: “Daddy loves you so much” and promised to call soon.
But he never did. Shortly after sending that message he was kidnapped in Kenya, chained to a wall and beaten severely before being taken bloodied and blindfolded to Nigeria.
He has been detained in isolation since then in Abuja, the capital, at the headquarters of the Department of State Services, Nigeria’s domestic intelligence service.
To his legion of supporters, Kanu is a Robin Hood-like hero but for the Nigerian government he is a terrorist inspiring secessionist violence to restore Biafra whose brief existence decades ago triggered a humanitarian disaster.
Appearing hooded in court in Abuja, Kanu, 55, has pleaded not guilty to 15 charges relating to terrorism and treason that are punishable by death.
Fearing for his life and her own, Okwu-Kanu went into hiding with their two children in Yorkshire after her husband was seized. She has appealed repeatedly, thus far in vain, to the British government for help in securing his release.
“It’s so disappointing,” she said. “He’s a British citizen kidnapped in a foreign country, but they don’t seem to care, it makes them complicit, in a way. They are putting commercial relations with Abuja above the rule of law, basic human rights, and decency.”
Last year Nigeria’s court of appeal found that Kanu had been the victim of “extraordinary rendition” and called for his release. A report by the UN Human Rights Council’s working group on arbitrary detention reached the same conclusion, stating that Kanu had been subjected to eight days of “torture and ill-treatment” by Kenyan special forces and was taken to Nigeria “with no prior hearing before a judicial or administrative body”, let alone access to a lawyer.
However, the UK government has stopped short of acknowledging that Kanu’s removal from Kenya was a case of extraordinary rendition. A court in London this year dismissed a case brought by Kanu’s brother, Kingsley, arguing that the government’s posture had frustrated efforts to secure his release.
Nigeria’s supreme court is due to issue a ruling on September 28 on the court of appeal’s order to free Kanu. “If the government has a real case against him, why didn’t they apply for his extradition from Britain?” said Okwu-Kanu.
The Foreign Office said: “We continue to provide consular support to Kanu and remain in regular contact with his family and legal representatives, and the Nigerian and Kenyan authorities.”
Kanu ran Radio Free Biafra from Britain, later forming the Indigenous People of Biafra, a banned group in Nigeria. It wants to resurrect the defunct separatist state of Biafra that existed from 1967 to 1970. Kanu has insisted, however, that he has never advocated violence.
He was born in 1967, a few months after Biafra declared independence from Nigeria, Africa’s most populous country, unleashing three years of civil war and a blockade by the Nigerian military. An ensuing famine killed two million people, mostly children whose suffering was brought to the attention of the world in the haunting images taken by the photographer Don McCullin for The Sunday Times Magazine.
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September 19, 2023 @ 8:50 GMT|
Tags: Don McCullin Matthew Campbell. Uchechi Okwu-Kanu
