Nollywood actor and Labour Party chieftain Kenneth Okonkwo has attributed the prolonged detention of Nnamdi Kanu, leader of the Indigenous People of Biafra (IPOB), to ethnic bias.
In an interview on Wednesday, July 3, Okonkwo asserted that Kanu has not committed more severe offenses than other separatists whose charges have been dropped.
“Nnamdi Kanu has not done anything that other people from other zones have done. We know about Sunday Igboho of the Yoruba nation agitator. We know of the Boko Haram people who say that they want a different country where Western education is an abomination. These people have been released, not just that they have been released; in the case of Boko Haram, they have been reassimilated into society and given plum jobs. Why is Nnamdi Kanu’s case different? There is an ethnic and some unnecessary bias that is keeping that man in jail,” Okonkwo stated.
He argued that the government should release Kanu, either conditionally or unconditionally, to foster peace in the South-East.
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“As a lawyer, I have watched the legal issues very clearly, and I saw that even in the courts, from the high court to the supreme court, there are discordant tunes amongst them. Even in the issue of bail, some of the tiers of the court have granted him bail. Even in the issue of the charges, some tiers of the court have quashed all the charges. So, you can see that the government has a lot of places it can stand to release the young man and bring peace to the South-East. He is now more like a political prisoner. The longer Nnamdi Kanu is in prison, the taller he becomes and the shorter the government becomes,” Okonkwo added.
Kanu has been in the custody of the Department of State Services (DSS) since his extradition from Kenya in June 2021, facing terrorism charges at the federal high court.
