Abuja – A Nigerian jurist, Justice Binta Nyako of the Federal High Court sitting in Abuja, on Tuesday, handed off from presiding over the trial of Mazi Nnmadi Kanu, the illegally-detained leader of the Indigenous Peoples of Biafra (IPOB).
Justice Nyako’s withdrawal from the trial followed Nnamdi Kanu’s application in open court, requesting her to recuse herself from the trial due to her disobedience of orders of the Supreme Court.
While Kanu’s lawyer, Alloy Ejimakor was trying to persuade the court to suspend the trial on the basis that his client was denied the opportunity to prepare his defence, Kanu, sprang up from his seat and ordered his counsel to sit down while the self-determination activist made reference to the judgment of the Supreme Court where alleged bias against the jurist was raised.
“Sit down! I say you should sit down!” Kanu roared from the dock.
Continuing, he said: “My lord, I have no confidence in this court anymore and I ask you to recuse yourself because you did not abide by the decision of the Supreme Court.
“I can understand it if the DSS refuses to obey a court order, but for this court to refuse to obey an order of the Supreme Court is regrettable.
“I am asking you to recuse yourself from this case,” Kanu stated.
At this juncture, the prosecution counsel, Adegboyega Awomolo, SAN, urged the court to ignore Kanu’s position, insisting that the Supreme Court directed that he should be tried on the pending seven-count charge.
“The Justices ordered this court to proceed with the hearing of the charge against the defendant. My lord, you should not recuse yourself on the basis of this mere observation which does not have anything to do with the Supreme Court. It is an incompetent observation. We urge this court to proceed with the hearing,” FG’s lawyer submitted.
Not done, Kanu, rose again from the dock, waving a copy of what he called the subsisting judgement of the Supreme Court.
He read a portion where the apex court held that actions of the trial court in the matter “rendered the impartiality of the judge suspect.”
“But my lord, you know that I love you. It is just that this court is allowing the defence to railroad me into a trial that is at variance with every provision of the Constitution,” Kanu added.
After she had expressed her dissatisfaction with the development, Justice Nyako said she was not willing to continue with the case.
“I hereby recuse myself and remit the case file back to the Chief Judge,” she held.
The court had earlier okayed FG’s request to shield the identities of witnesses billed to testify in the matter.
Kanu is facing trial on terrorism charges levelled against him by the then-President Muhammadu Buhari’s administration over his call and agitation for a sovereign state of Biafra. He was extraordinarily renditioned from Kenya in June 2021 by former President Buhari’s government and has remained in detention since then.
Mr Kanu’s initial arrest in 2015 triggered protests by his supporters. In 2017, Justice Binta Nyako of a Federal High Court in Abuja granted Kanu bail.
Upon his release, a military invasion of his ancestral home in Umuahia, Abia State, in September 2017, forced him into exile, hence he did not attend his trial on the next scheduled date and thereafter. From then till June 2021 when he was abducted from Kenya and was subjected to “extraordinary rendition”, and brought back to Nigeria, there has been a robust public debate as to whether he jumped bail or not.
But, the Appeal Court had discharged and acquitted Kanu of all terrorism charges. This judgment was later overturned by the Supreme Court which transferred the case back to the Federal High Court.
While deciding the appeal, the Supreme Court, on December 15, 2023, vacated the judgement of the appellate court and gave FG the nod to try the IPOB leader on the subsisting seven-count charge.
Mr Kanu, who holds a UK passport, has remained in prison, despite the Appeal Court ordering his release in October 2022 after ruling that he had been illegally arrested abroad.
Kanu’s attorney, Aloy Ejimakor, in January, clarified that the Supreme Court had settled the controversy on whether Kanu jumped bail or not.
The attorney said the Supreme Court also clarified that Kanu’s bail “should not have been revoked”.
In the Certified True Copy (CTC) of the judgment delivered in December 2023, the apex court declared that Kanu did not jump bail.
BIAFRA
IPOB was formed in 2012 as a peaceful movement, but launched an armed wing in south-eastern Nigeria in 2020, saying it was doing so to defend the Igbo ethnic group.
IPOB wants a group of states in the south-east of Nigeria, which mostly comprises the Igbo ethnic group, to break away from the country and form an independent nation called Biafra.
Biafra campaign first gained impetus in the 1960s, when an Igbo army officer, Emeka Odumegwu Ojukwu, declared the birth of Biafra following killings of south-easterners in northern Nigeria.
But that attempt at secession ended after a bloody three-year war that led to more than a million deaths from fighting, starvation and a lack of medical care.
But the idea of Biafra has never gone away and despite arrests of his members, Mr Kanu’s movement has seen a recent swell in its numbers.
SELF-DETERMINATION
The right to self-determination is a fundamental and inalienable human right. It is enshrined in the Charter of the United Nations, the International Covenants of Human Rights (common Article 1) and the Covenant of the Unrepresented Nations and Peoples Organization.
Essentially, the right to self-determination is the right of a people to determine its own destiny. In particular, the principle allows a people to choose its own political status and to determine its own form of economic, cultural and social development. Exercise of this right can result in a variety of different outcomes ranging from political independence through to full integration within a state.
HOW NIGERIA WAS FORMED
On January 1, 1914, Lord Frederick Lugard, the governor of both the Northern Nigeria Protectorate and the Colony and Protectorate of Southern Nigeria, signed a document consolidating the two, thereby creating the Colony and Protectorate of Nigeria. Forty-six years later in 1960, Nigeria became an independent state.
Anniversaries are times for reflection, and given that today, just over 104 years after amalgamation, the country is still grappling with its national identity and a reanimated separatist movement, it is worth reflecting on how exactly Nigeria became Nigeria.
Before Europeans arrived in the territory that is now Nigeria, a number of different civilizations existed whose presence is still felt today. For example, in the north, Islam was predominant. In the nineteenth century, there were two Islamic empires, the Sokoto Caliphate and the Bornu Empire. To the southwest lay numerous Yoruba city-states that generally had in common animist religion and were only sometimes united. To the southwest was an Igbo kingdom, Nri, and a collection of semi-autonomous towns and villages in the Niger River delta. Such regions were linguistically, religiously, and politically distinct.
While other colonial powers, such as the Portuguese, became involved in the region by way of the slave trade as early as the fifteenth century, the British arrived in force only in the eighteenth century. It was not until 1861 that they formally occupied their first Nigerian territory, Lagos, in a bid to protect Christian converts and trading interests, and to further their anti-slavery campaign. In 1884, the British occupied what would later become the Southern Protectorate and the Northern Protectorate piecemeal from 1900 to 1903. By 1903, the British controlled the territory that comprises modern-day Nigeria, but as three separate administrative blocks.
As early as 1898, the British considered combining the then-three protectorates to reduce the administrative burden on the British and allow the rich south to effectively subsidize the much less economically prosperous north. (The Lagos colony was later incorporated into the Southern Nigeria Protectorate for budgetary reasons). This is what Lord Lugard was referring to in his infamous description of how a marriage between the “rich wife of substance and means” (the south) and the “poor husband” (the north) would lead to a happy life for both. Some have suspected that Lugard was also referring to the political supremacy of the north over the south. The name “Nigeria” was coined by the future Lady Lugard in an 1897 London Times article.
With Lord Lugard’s arbitrary conception of Nigeria in mind, one can begin to see the many and varied problems colonialism created in Nigeria, across West Africa, and around the world. Not least among these problems, for Nigeria in particular, was the problem of a unifying national identity. It is no wonder that diverse peoples, forcibly united into single states, sometimes turn to separatism. Contemporary examples range from Biafra (Nigeria), to Ambazonia (Cameroon), to Somaliland (Somalia), and to Azawad (Mali).