By Gideon Njoku
Detained Leader of the Indigenous People of Biafra, IPOB, Mazi Nnamdi Kanu, has lamented the destructive effect of the sit-at-home order in the South-east, and insisted that he was never in support of its declaration.
Kanu’s disclosure, through his lead Counsel, Professor Mike Ozekhome, SAN, has left not a few people confused as who then, authorised the order, and why he did not order that it be stopped immediately the Group began to enforce it.
IPOB had, in frustration, soon after Kanu was arrested in Nairobi, Kenya, and brought back to Nigeria by Nigerian authorities, ordered a sit-at-home to protest the manner of his arrest, detention, prosecution, and to pressurise the Federal Government into releasing him unconditionally.
The Group declared Monday of every week a sit-at-home day, as well as any day Kanu was billed to appear in Court.
To enforce the order, those who dared to disobey, including school children were met with violence and blood and death. In one school in Imo State, the Principal, an Anglican Priest, was killed for daring to let his students take the West African School Certificate Examination on a sit-at-home day. Businesses were destroyed. The economy of the Zone went down to zero. The irony: the order had no effect on Kanu’s fate.
Neither the Federal Government nor other Zones noticed. And the people of the South-east Zone suffered while other Zones moved on.
After a lot of pressure was put on IPOB with an explanation that the Group was punishing the people whose fight it said it is fighting, as well as destroying the economy of the Zone, IPOB reduced the sit-at-home order to only the days Kanu would appear in Court. Gradually, it cancelled it entirely unless it became necessary.
But the cancellation was rather late.
Things had gone awry. And the order hijacked by the self-acclaimed disciple of Kanu, Simon Ekpa.
Based in Finland, Ekpa and IPOB parted ways. When IPOB cancelled the atrocious sit-at-home order, Ekpa and his (IPOB) Group, allegedly, known as Autopilot, continued with it.
It has since worsened.
Aside from the every Monday enforcement in a number of areas in the Zone, Ekpa has raised the antenna. He now takes the pleasure of grounding the Zone for days at a stretch, and, atimes, for weeks no matter protestations from Kanu’s IPOB and the people and the leadership of the Zone.
Now, Kanu, for whom Ekpa claims he declares and enforces the order has said that he was never in support of the sit-at-home order from the beginning.
Making his stand known through Ozekhome, Kanu cried out against the order and said he wished he could, personally, address the people, and tell them he was never in support.
In a video shared by Dan Nwomeh, Senior Special Assistant, Mainstream Media, to Enugu State Governor, Peter Mbah on his Twitter handle on Monday, Ozekhome disclosed that Kanu does not, and has never believed in the sit-at-home. He said Kanu insists that “he could not be fighting for his people and at the same time shutting down their economy.”
He quoted Kanu as having “cited the effect of the sit-at-home exercise on the social, economic, cultural and political life of the people, lamenting that it has put them under psychological, psychical and mental stricture.”
Said Ozekhome: “As his lead Counsel and lawyer, he has told me that he does not believe in it. He cannot be fighting for his people and shutting down their economy. How do they feed? How will they train their children? Many a time, he cried to me in my presence that he wants to be released so that he can hold a world press conference and address the Igbo and Ala Igbo and the entire world to say, ‘Don’t stay at home on Mondays, go about your normal duties, go to work; because the Bible tells us it is upon the labour of your hands, I will bless the fruits of your labour’.
”So, I am now re-echoing again and again what Nnamdi Kanu has told me.
“He does not believe in that sit-at-home on Mondays which cripples the social-economic, social-cultural and political life of the people, putting them under psychological, psychical and mental stricture and torture.”
