By Obi Nwakanma

It is Christmas today. But there is no Christmas celebration for Mr. Nnamdi Kanu. Why? Because, to all intents and purposes, Mazi Kanu, IPOB leader, is held hostage. He is no longer officially a ward of the prisons.

He is now held hostage by order of an official of this government intent on settling a private score. It is now ideological and personal. Kanu is held on the orders of Mr. Abubakar Malami, the Attorney General of Nigeria because he thinks he can. 

In other words, Kanu’s detention is not by an order of the courts, it is illegitimate hostage-taking based on the whims and caprices of a powerful figure of the Buhari administration. It is serious and it is taking the powers of the Attorney General of the Federation too far.

Where the Attorney General, the presumptive custodian of Law in Nigeria, engages in hostage-taking, in the name of the Federal Government, using some obscure detention rule, and out of spite for his victim, he risks bringing down the entire edifice on which the rule of law is built. He must thus be indicted.

It is now imperative for that process to be considered, and for the Office of the Attorney General of the Federation to be investigated for serial abuse of power by the National Assembly. This is particularly so because Malami’s action – his decision to take Nnamdi Kanu hostage in defiance of the courts – continues to threaten the peace and security of Nigeria. It is war mongering.

For if Mr. Nnamdi Kanu had been freed as the courts ruled, the situation in the East would have been long resolved, because there would be no more fuel to the lint of the presumed crisis of the East. I will come back to this point.

But let us first place in context the basis of the claim of this Sunday’s ‘Orbit’: The Nigerian courts have freed Nnamdi Kanu. In a clear judgment of the Court of Appeal, the Federal Government lost a case in which the Buhari administration tried Kanu as a terrorist. 

In that landmark decision, a panel of the court boldly and unambiguously told the Attorney General that Mr. Kanu has no case to answer. It fully discharged Kanu from the ruling of a lower court. “In view of the fact that the trial court lacks jurisdiction to hear this case because the process of extradition of the appellant from Kenya to Nigeria was unlawful since due process was not followed, this appeal succeeds,” the Appeal Court ruled.

It basically asserts that Nnamdi Kanu was held under illegal detention orders. But in a turn, amounting to a very serious abuse of his powers as the Attorney General of the Federation, Mr. Abubakar Malami defied the orders of the court, and continues to detain Nnamdi Kanu on very washy grounds without a basis in the laws of the federation. 

Nigeria is not under any emergency rule, and the National Assembly has not yet granted, or conferred any extraordinary powers on the Attorney General to detain a citizen of Nigeria under any guise, or presumption, including the presumption of law. The consistent fact of this case as it now stands is that Abubakar Malami, presumably on the assent of the President, ordered the kidnap, rendition, and incarceration of Mazi Nnamdi Kanu. 

In doing that, the Attorney General turned Nigeria, and presumably by the express authority of the President of Nigeria, into a terrorist state! Nigerian cannot afford the image of a terrorist state. Nigeria cannot afford to be a nation without laws or due process. It drives away investors. It stanches the flow of visitors and tourists.

It limits the bounds of the kind of international amity which Nigerians can enjoy as a free and democratic state. It humiliates Nigeria. It distorts its laws. It provokes the possibility of radical defiance by a large segment of the population who would no longer trust the institutions of laws because of its selective application. 

Distrust would crash the protection that commonly held principles of law provide. If those for whom laws are made begin to distrust its protection because those who should safeguard its highest principles deliberately undermine it, then we create disorder. Under this Attorney General, Nigeria has broken so many laws against the general interest of the federation, and Malami must understand that while the President might enjoy immunity, he, the Attorney General, has no such privileges, and there is no statute of limitations to kidnaping and hostage taking using the resources of the state under his care. This is what Malami has done. He is using the office of the Attorney General to settle personal ideological scores. It may be Nnamdi Kanu today. 

But Malami should watch his own back because what he uses today to oppress Nnamdi Kanu might be deployed against him tomorrow to force him to account for his serial misuse of the law under his watch, and nothing can protect him from this. Wise men have long known that power is transient. And this is why the balance of justice must be kept at all times.

Today, Mr. Malami holds Nnamdi Kanu hostage using the privileges of his office. Next year it might be Malami held in the stockade. Last week, Mazi Kanu’s lawyer and members of his family reported that even the DSS in whose detention facility Kanu is kept on the orders of Malami is starving him. They feed him once a day. The DSS complained to Kanu’s Attorney that they have no money to feed their prisoner. This is unconscionable. 

The lawyer also reported all kinds of torture and other inhuman and humiliating conditions meted out to Mr. Kanu by the DSS. They had to resort to crowd funding to feed the IPOB leader. The Attorney General and his goons are not only keeping Mr. Kanu against the express orders of the Nigerian courts, they are now attempting to starve him to death. This is unconscionable.

So, the question is, why is Malami keeping Nnamdi Kanu by force rather than by law? Why is he intent on murdering him while held hostage using starvation? Why is he using the power of the Attorney General to hold Kanu hostage in the first place, even as the courts to all intents and purpose have freed him? These questions bring me to the point I was making earlier, to which I now return. Why give fuel to the issue of political agitation in the South-East?

 It is actually simple: it is about keeping the South-East of Nigeria in a state of restlessness and disorder. Investigations by various independent Study Groups, and by the Igbo Security and Intelligence Research Group (ISIR), in a briefing to certain key Igbo interests, last week, noted that the current administration continues to see the South-East as the key “outlier” in its short and long term goals, and, as a result, they are using the IPOB defiance to “simulate continuous conflict” in South-Eastern Nigeria. What are the long term goals? To destabilize the South-East and bring it to its knees to the point where it can no longer offer any resistance should such a necessity arise. 

How can the South-East, zone of the so-called separatists, be enjoying peace, while the rest of Nigeria burns? The startling fact seems to be that while Nigerian security operators continue to manufacture and fund crises and conflicts in the East, and accuse the IPOB and the ESN of the troubles – the killings, the kidnappings, the extortions, and the general sense of insecurity – they deliberately inseminate foreign armed bandits that are invading and killing Nigerians from Eha-Amufu to Lokpanta and beyond in the South-East.

Under coverage, these hooded fighters and killers, some of them Igbo, many of whom include ex-cons freed from prison breaks, are given let, and are surreptitiously armed by shadowy operators inside the Nigerian security forces to cause and simulate mayhem in the South-East. There is also the drug cartels angle. 

There are very worrying speculations that shadowy figures inside the Nigerian security operations are involved in the manufacture and distribution of crystal meth in the South-East, and are using the money, in a way reminiscent of the Iran-Contra situation, to fund the deliberate destabilization of the South-East.

They target Igbo youth: first to damage them with crystal meth addiction, and then arm and handle them as part of their internal security operations in the South-East. Many of these killings are related to this drugs business, with the Russians, the Italians, the Asians, the South Americans, the Brazilian angle, fighting turf wars to establish a beach head in the South-East for the drug trade. There are strong speculations about the active connivance of the Nigerian security services. 

It is all very sophisticated and perverse. This administration has unleashed the demon of hunger and unrest in the South-East and they blame the IPOB which has repeatedly denied any involvement in the violence because it (a) gains nothing from it, and (b) it is against their pacifist method which is the reason behind the sit-at-home in the first place.

But the Buhari government continues to scapegoat IPOB, because it is convenient. Abubakar Malami continues to hold Kanu hostage because he understands that once Kanu is released, there will no longer be any logical reason to blame IPOB for the atrocities committed in the South-East by the Federal Government. 

It is imperative that at the end of this administration, the incoming National Assembly must be compelled to investigate the Office of the Attorney General and the National Security Agency and their operational policies in the South-East.

If the National Assembly fails, the incoming President must institute a judicial panel of inquiry on the conduct of an Attorney General who ordered the invasion of the homes of Supreme Court judges; humiliated a sitting Chief Justice; ordered the arrest by the DSS of the Central Bank governor, and authorized the illegal and violent rendition of a citizen from a foreign land. The Nigerian Bar Association must also conduct its own inquiry on the Attorney General for hostage-taking and misuse of his powers.