His Bondage, Our Freedom: The Beatification and Ascension of Nnamdi Kanu ~ By Jude Ndukwe

Yes, that was how a faceless ODENIGBO ended his disquisition on the widely acclaimed leader of the Indigenous People of Biafra (IPOB), Nnamdi Kanu, who, incidentally, is now seen as the new and courageous face of the Igbo people’s struggles for freedom from oppression, tyranny and internal colonialism as evidenced in today’s Nigeria.

Unfortunately, these struggles have always been put out, or, to sound less pessimistic, doused in “Judastic” style by the very same people leaders of the struggle have entered dangerous trenches for, all because they are afraid “one small boy would be recognized as the face of the Igbo struggle for emancipation over their old selves” who think leadership should and must come by age.

The fact is that no matter what anybody says, the buck of today’s Igbo light in our collective struggle for self-assertion has come to stop at Nnamdi Kanu’s table! Leadership is earned, Nnamdi Kanu has suffered enough for this cause that any attempt to vitiate the spirit of his struggle would amount to an attempt at committing “aru”, no matter how aged, powerful, influential or highly connected his opponents are.

One can understand the standpoint from which Odenigbo wrote his piece. He is obviously uncertain of how to handle the fact that the struggle of Kanu which many had dismissed with a wave of the hand when it all first started as a phenomenon that would just pass without quaking the nation one bit has come to assume such a gargantuan height that global foremost universities, international media of renown reckoning, and even governments of the world have recognized it as a subject capable of jolting world politics and redrawing the map of the world in no distant time if not urgently and wisely handled.

The belly ache which the Odenigbos of this world have developed over this matter is simply because they are not the ones driving this ferocious narrative.

The inference that Nnamdi Kanu abandoned his other three codefendants in the struggle because he accepted the bail which we all agree was too stringent and fundamentally flawed cannot be said to be true until those comrades say so themselves for we have situations in struggles where comrades would fervently entreat their leader to accept freedom even if they (comrades) would have to die in the process. They see the freedom of their leader as victory and their own conditions as libation.

This happens because such comrades see their leader as the symbol of their struggle and that his continued detention and humiliation could mean the death of the struggle. In this case, they are ready to die for their leader as long as he is alive to continue what they all believe in.

It was even possible that Kanu had rejected the bail condition but was under intense and immense pressure to accept it and help “fight the cause form outside”. In their reckoning, this could be another and even a better strategy to approach things.

Unfortunately, such strategies are not for public consumption, so Kanu would not be obliged to divulge such things. But those who are unaware of such internal workings would go public to cry foul over matters that are mysterious to them and germane to a successful struggle.

Even the great Ikemba, Chukwuemeka Odumegwu Ojukwu, himself “ran away” on self exile in the course of the Biafran war after “leading” about three million of our people to death, mostly by starvation, slowly and painfully, yet, he returned to a tumultuous welcome in 1982 and even earned several titles after his return. Did his “running away” and “abandoning” his comrades and the helpless Biafrans stop them from canonizing him as their leader? Certainly NO!
Ojukwu not only returned, he joined partisan politics and sought on three occasions to be a democratically elected president of the same Nigeria he so much wanted to opt out of.

I am sure that if Kanu were to do this today, the Odenigbos and his fellow idealists would have cried “Crucify him, crucify him”, yet, Ojukwu died and was buried an Igbo hero. His comrades never saw him as a betrayer because he left them and chose exile. Strategically, that might just be the best decision at the time and in that circumstance as the soldiers and the citizens of the then Biafra would see the arrest, humiliation, prosecution and possibly execution of Ojukwu as their own humiliation and death while the federal trops would always see his death as a sign of perpetual victory over the Igbo.

In order to avoid such feeling of great loss despite having lost millions of people already, it was possible Ojukwu was compelled by his comrades to accept the offer of asylum in Ivory Coast. And he did!
One can only imagine what it would be like if history has to say “…and Ojukwu was captured by the federal troops, publicly shaven, tied around the neck with a rope and walked round town naked with his hands tied behind him while he was flogged and compelled to dance for cheering children on the streets of Kano”. It’s unthinkable. In such circumstance, in order not to leave your people humiliated for life, such otherwise unpopular options like exile become attractive.

It is always like that in such situations. Americans had a feeling of victory and their pride restored the day they managed to take out Osama Bin Laden despite the fact that they had killed thousands of other terrorists. The terrorists themselves were always ready to move their leader out of the firing line even if it would cost them their own lives in the process. And it did to a great number of them, yet, they continued protecting Osama and removing him from America’s target. This is so because Osama’s death in the hands of America would be very humiliating to the Muslim world who believed in his cause even if thousand others had died for his sake.

Knowing all this, Ojukwu declared sometime long after his return: “As a committed democrat, every single day under an un-elected government hurts me. The citizens of this country are mature enough to make their own choices, just as they have the right to make their own mistakes”.

The great Ikemba suddenly turns a democrat, admitting that even the citizens have a right to make their own mistakes.
From the above, the notion that Kanu by accepting those bail conditions has abandoned the struggle is totally wrong. If anything, it has proved to our common traducers who might have given those stringent bail conditions with the hope that the IPOB leader would never meet it because of the very wrong but long held notion that Ndigbo are never united to achieve a cause, hence, the Igbo people would never ever rally round Kanu to help him meet the bail conditions because of the usual rancour that such mundane matters as to who would take the lead, who outshines the other, the saboteur theory among other things breed. The fulfillment of those bail conditions by the Igbo nation came to all of our foes as a surprise. What even jolted our internal colonialists was the speed with which the Igbo rallied round and met the conditions. Unbelievable!

They never wished Kanu left jail. They wanted him to rot there. The bail conditions were mere smokescreens to cover their judicial despotism. Is that not why the bail conditions were so, in the words of Odenigbo, strange, stupid and silly? But gladly, Ndigbo shamed them. They could not believe that we could find a Jew or a respectable Igbo leader or a senator who would be willing to risk their vast and choice landed properties, and their N100 million naira for the sake of a certain Kanu. But we did. They were jolted. It was a step forward for us, a feat worth celebrating!

Rather than vitiate the struggle, that action has inadvertently sent a very strong signal to the Fulani hegemonists that we are more united now more than ever to stand by one of our own when he is confronted by a common enemy. The Odenigbos of this world cannot just understand how Nnamdi Kanu has risen to become such a phenomenon that all senators of Igbo extraction have come to fight for their own. Such people wish they were the ones that senators are angling to pose for a photograph with. They wished they were the ones that the carnival-like atmosphere at the Federal High Court, Abuja, the day Kanu was granted bail, was for when supporters of Kanu held the city to ransom. They wished they were the ones that the federal government killed their supporters in the east, yet, the remnants braved the tyrant’s bullets and marched down to his own enclave singing war songs with their bare chests as bullet proof vests and the despot’s gun as their quickest route to paradise.

Even angels would be jealous of Kanu in such circumstance! So, I hope I have not been too hard on Odenigbo?

The false notion being created that the politicians who stood bail for Kanu would exploit him is most unfortunate. Would Odenigbo have had the temerity to even attempt to stand bail for Kanu even if it was for free? The fact of the matter is that a lot of people always find reasons to denigrate the good work of people.
I belong to another Igbo group where we were mandated as a committee to visit Kanu when he was in Kuje. We had made very good progress until someone suggested that those who visited Kanu were subjected to endless harassment and scrutiny by the DSS. Immediately, a majority of those concerned withdrew. It is these same people that would attempt to reduce the importance and significance of what the senators and others did by standing surety for Kanu. They entered into it with the full knowledge that their families, careers, businesses, possessions, and even lives were at risk especially under this devilish government. Yet, they went ahead anyway. That takes exceptional courage. Rather than vilify such men, we need to appreciate them, something Nnamdi Kanu rightly did but is being mortified for.

Today, we know they are already after the Deputy Senate President, Ike Ekweremadu, for his role in securing bail for Kanu. Certainly, they would come after the other senators and citizens who were actively involved. Umunnem, is this how we would abandon them, and allow them be on their own? God forbid! I have always fought in such causes, unpaid, unappreciated. I will fight it again if it all comes to this!
The days when Igbo sons and daughters would be rubbished while raising enemies from among them to cause disunity have since gone. We are wiser and more united now, and this wisdom and unity reflect in our ability to speedily meet Kanu’s strange, silly and stupid bail conditions; even if it meant getting an angel as surety, am very sure one of us would have volunteered to be sacrificed so as to go and get an angel down here. That is how united the Igbo have become under an unbending tyrant. That is the good coming out from our current tribulations!

No lover of freedom and human dignity would condescend so low as to so vehemently question another man’s choice of religion. Only terrorists do that, and we do not do that in Igboland as long as whatever one has as his or her religion does not promote or support violence. That is the true and pure spirit of the Igbo. While Odenigbo is so fixated on Kanu’s choice of Judaism, Islam is rising with supersonic speed in our dear region. Odenigbo wants us to believe that Judaism is not ideal because it is occupying what he called parts of Palestine but he forgets that Palestinians themselves have vowed to wipe Israel out from the face of the earth and are doing everything to achieve that. It is a two-way war.

Israelis live everywhere in the world, never would you hear of them making trouble anywhere despite holding a very large chunk of the world’s wealth. But while Odenigbo criticizes Judaism, he seems to prefer seeing the rise of Islam in the east, the result of which is not going to be fantastic in the very near future. If that rise is not contained, obviously suicide bombing will become a pastime in our land as it is in the north. Did I hear somebody say God forbid?
To say that Kanu sold out or that he was paid to accept the bail conditions is one of the stupidest things anyone would say. If he had not accepted it, these same people would call him names and say does he want to die in prison? Kanu was sick, he was frail. We all saw it. He needed medical attention. Unfortunately, the idea of a man that needs medical attention in the myopic view of the Odenigbos of this world is one who is chained to a hospital bed, with heavy bandages around his head, feeding intravenously and loses his ability to talk or even hear but only communicates with hand signals.

The few days Nnamdi Kanu spent in freedom saw him recover. He is back to taking his medication as and when due and not at the whimsies of prison officials. He sees his doctors at will and for as long as he wants and not by the allotted times of his shacklers. He eats as recommended to aid the efficacy of his drugs etc. he does not have to be hospitalized to prove that he was sick, man!

It is only natural that Kanu should pay “thank you” visits to those who had the audacity to support and associate with him publicly despite the obvious dangers when a lot of people especially his kinsmen were afraid to even have his name mentioned near them for fear of the tyrant.

As an Igbo son, I am not taught to be ungrateful. I am taught that gratitude precedes offence, ethnicity, religion and such other primordial considerations.
Nnamdi Kanu is a grateful person. Perhaps, Christianity he so much feigns to practice has not taught Odenigbo that gratitude is a virtue God holds so dearly. Fortunately, Judaism has taught Kanu that within the short period he embraced the religion (or what else do you want me to say?).
Kanu’s ordeal has brought closer to us the other brothers from the south west we so much love to loathe. While our leaders kept away from their own, leaders in the south west not only spoke but also openly associated themselves with Kanu and his cause. Whatever reason anyone might adduce for this is enough to have such a person openly associate with Kanu. If you cannot do it, do not put down those who are doing it even if you see them as enemies. The more of them we have on our side the better for our collective cause and vice versa.

Fortunately, as hard and bad as it might sound, Kanu has become the rallying point for all and sundry who see the Fulani colonialists as our common foes; whether they are the politicians, the activists, the rich, the poor, the elite, the commoner, the Igbo, the Yoruba, Nnamdi is the galvanizing force. The least we can do for this young man is to support him and guide him where necessary with genuineness of purpose and not for any mundane or pecuniary motive.
Nnamdi’s bondage is a symbol of our collective freedom, and the search for a credible Igbo leader stops here for now! Sadly, this is the truth many including Odenigbo do not either want said or want to hear! That everyone is now talking Igbo is because of this great phenomenon Nnamdi Kanu.

Let us leave it at that for now!

Jude Ndukwe