By Festus Adedayo

As Eze Ogube Nnem Olo Kingdom in Enugu state, Lawrence Agubuzu, stood before him last week, President Bola Tinubu must be fascinated by his bravery. He had been there before. Igwe Agubuzu was delivering a goodwill message at the 2026 National Traditional and Religious Leaders Summit on Health held at the State House Conference Centre in Abuja. The president sat, cocooned by a panoply of power and no-smiling aides and operatives.

Standing confidently before the microphone, the Igwe asked Tinubu to release Nnamdi Kanu, leader of the proscribed Indigenous People of Biafra (IPOB). He offered alternatives. He could return him to Kenya, where his predecessor, Muhammadu Buhari, arrested and extradited him to Nigeria. According to the Igwe, Kanu’s continued detention is stoking the fire of quarrels and agitations among youths in the southeast.

Though he didn’t say as much, Igbo tend to see the Nigerian state as a reincarnate of British overlords whom his people fought to a standstill. It was along this narrative that Igwe Agubuzu accused Yorubas of revered monarch, the Ooni of Ife, of hypocrisy. “This same Imperial Majesty is arranging to confer a very high honour on Sunday Igboho, who, in my own part of Nigeria and the South-East, we see him as a counterpart of Nnamdi Kanu,” Agubuzu said.

Tinubu himself possesses such Agubuzu bravery. I once witnessed one of such. In January 2013, power surge had turned sections of the palace of Oba Lamidi Adeyemi III, the Alaafin of Oyo, into smouldering ruins. Leaders after leaders came to commiserate with the foremost monarch remarkable for his brilliance. A few days after, leaders of the Action Congress of Nigeria (ACN) were in the palace. They were led by its then National Chairman, Chief Bisi Akande; National Leader, Tinubu; Governor Abiola Ajimobi and many others.

When Tinubu was handed the microphone, just like the Igwe, he spoke the unthinkable and the unpleasant. While what the world saw reported the second day in the media was Tinubu’s statement that “The most unfortunate thing has happened, and we are here to sympathize with our host. We sympathize with the people of Oyo as the custodian of the great history of the Yoruba race,” Tinubu broke the calabash of dried corn (Igbagangan) into unrecognizable pieces. He said, in Yoruba, “Kabiyesi, we are here as your children. We know that no palace got burnt. You just wanted to see your children and we are here.” There was pin drop silence. What was Tinubu insinuating? Kabiyesi merely looked at him with superfluous wonderment. He who begets a murderous child will have to back the child.

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Chinua Achebe was one of the first post-colonial Nigerian writers to open the curtains for a global peep into the heroism of the Igbo race. In his 1958 famous book, Things Fall Apart, Achebe didn’t only portray pre-colonial Igbo society as sophisticated, the book became a canvas with which he painted a people’s structured culture, complete with their tradition, dignity and laws. Pre-colonial Igbo society indeed had heroes.

Last Wednesday, in Igwe Agubuzu, there was a reenactment of those Igbo acts of bravery. The internet immediately went abuzz with a viral video of the traditional ruler. The Igwe had looked at Tinubu in the face and delivered what he said was the candid voice of his Igbo people. It was a refreshing departure from the familiar face of Igbo leadership which kow-towed before power for a morsel to fill its stomach. Coincidentally, I was in the Southeast about this time. From every nook and cranny of Igboland last week, Agubuzu was garlanded as an archetypal hero of his people who, unlike other leaders, spoke truth to power unafraid.

However, there are two kernels of Igwe’s submissions that needed interrogation. While he conflated Sunday Igboho’s agitation with Kanu’s, the second is the general call for Kanu’s release which, I confirm, is an agitation that has gained currency in Igboland.

Nnamdi Okwu Kanu and Sunday Adeniyi Adeyemo, famously known as Sunday Igboho, have points of convergence. Both born during and immediately after post-war period of 1967 and 1972, they are products of the long-held acrimony of their people against the skewed foundation of the Nigerian state. They are both self-determination activists who believe in the advocacy for an independent Yoruba and Igbo nations and freedom from the manacles of the federation of the Nigerian state.

Kanu, British-born, through his advocacy for the independence of Biafra from Nigeria, founded the Indigenous People of Biafra (IPOB), which has now been proscribed. Igboho, on the other side, a barely literate thug of Oyo State who equally terrorized the people of Oyo by snatching their lands, morphed into his current activism during the tyranny of Fulani herdsmen who made life miserable for the people of the northern part of the state. His notoriety had earlier been established during the life-Modake war, in which he fought as a mercenary.

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Igboho’s fame rose in January 2021 when, upon the brutal murder of one Dr. Aborode, he gave an ultimatum to Fulani herdsmen to vacate Ibarapa area of the state. He enforced this decree. Full stop. While both Igboho and Kanu preach violent seizure of power from oppressors of their people, their modus operandi differ. Igboho’s anger and violence were directed solely at the oppressors of his people. Kanu’s are not. While in the southeast, I stumbled on baffling statistics of Kanu’s Igbo people who have been violently unalived, either directly by his orders or through his body language.

There are obvious systemic wrongs done Nnamdi Kanu and his Igbo people by the Nigerian state. They indeed haven’t been forgiven for the “sins” of the civil war. On Kanu, it is common sense that no responsible nation could stand by watching the level of animalism his advocacy has turned into. His ancestral home in Afaraukwu Ibeku, Umuahia, Abia State, was raided by the Nigerian military on multiple occasions, most notably on September 2017, in what the Nigerian Army described as “Operation Python Dance II”. The invasion followed widely circulated images of IPOB leader inspecting members of the Biafra Security Service (BSS) dressed in combat uniforms, which his followers celebrated as a counterweight to the State Security Service (SSS). This was a blatant affront to Nigeria’s sovereignty.

Again, in February 2020, soldiers surrounded Kanu’s family home as he prepared to bury his parents, leading to renewed tension in the area. There were alleged killings on that occasion.

Since 2012 when Kanu began his violent advocacy, thousands of his own brothers and sisters have been killed and sources of livelihood castrated. A pathetic case of a Lagos-based businessman from Enugu who came home in 2021 is always recalled with dread running down spines. He had gone to the Amechi Road, Awkunanaw Enugu area on a Monday and was shot dead by Kanu’s bloodthirsty IPOB/ESN hounds. Igbo policemen killed within the period must be in their hundreds. His five-year sit-at-home order has led to tremendous economic asphyxiation of his people. On the sixth day of assumption of office, precisely on June 5, 2023, the Enugu government, under Governor Peter Mbah, moved IPOB and Simon Ekpa-led IPOB faction known as Auto Pilot heavily. It resulted in the root of that malady in the Coal City. Till today, a substantial part of the Southeast is still under the excruciating hold of that Kanu pronouncement.

At various times, Kanu breathed fire, proclaimed violence and killing like a psychopath. In September 2015, in a heated address he delivered to the World Igbo Congress in Los Angeles, he thundered, “we need guns and we need bullets to prosecute war against Nigeria.” In same 2015, shortly after Dr. William Kumuyi, General Superintendent of the Deeper Christian Life Ministry, like all clergy, proclaimed the continued unity of Nigeria, Kanu threatened the old man’s life for what he said was his audacity. “Pastor Kumuyi should be stoned and dealt with thoroughly if he comes to Aba for his planned crusade,” he said.

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In another instance in 2017, a video of his blowing hot and proclaiming open death threat to ex-Nigerian president, Olusegun Obasanjo, went viral. This same Obasanjo had received threats from his own people for his Igbo-centric persuasion. Reacting to growing threat that Kanu’s IPOB posed to Nigeria, Obasanjo had told a gathering in Abuja that everything humanly possible must be done to stop IPOB. In a reply to the ex-president, as he talked to a gathering of supporters in his Afaraukwu Ibeku home, Kanu asked IPOB to eliminate Obasanjo and his lineage if any harm comes to him. In another viral video, he was seen boasting to his followers that he was ready to march to Abuja and return with President Buhari’s head, as they cheered him on.

On some other documented occasions, this same Kanu had said, “Nigeria should prepare for war, we are coming to annihilate you, my secret service are already studying the zoo and strategizing” and “If you find anybody in your village asking after Radio Biafra, kill the baboon Hausa, Fulani or Yoruba bastard. Let them keep searching as we keep tweeting for #Biafra.”

Other ethnic groups, even his own Igbo people of Enugu, received his deathly rhetoric: “Niger Deltans,” he once said, “are cowards; we know what to do to them. Akwa Ibom, Bayelsa, Delta, Rivers, Edo, and Cross Rivers states are our territory, and anybody who tries to oppose us will be crushed.”

So also are rhetoric such as, “Yoruba Pentecostalism is the reason why Fulanis are invading us today” and “Any army they (the Federal Government) send to Biafraland will die there. None will return alive, even if it requires sacrificing my people I will do it.”

On several occasions, Kanu called for attacks and killing of Yoruba people and destruction of their properties and businesses in Lagos. Its height was during the EndSARS riots when he specifically called for the burning and destruction of key infrastructure in Lagos. In 2020, he announced the creation of a non-state sanctioned paramilitary organization called the Eastern Security Network (ESN) which essentially coordinated the killing of his own Igbo people.