By Nnamdi Elekwachi
In 2017, the Defence Headquarters, DHQ was too rash to declare the Indigenous People of Biafra, IPOB, a terrorist organisation citing illegal possession of arms, blocking access to public roads and utilities, forming the Biafra Secret Service, the Biafra National Guard, and so on.
What the Defense Headquarters did was wrong because under the Terrorism Prevention Act of 2011, only the Attorney General, the National Security Adviser or the Inspector General of the Police can lawfully designate or declare a group a terrorist organisation. When the Defence Headquarters, DHQ was reminded that such a declaration was unlawful, the Attorney General had to come in to continue from where the DHQ stopped. That was how the group became a terrorist organisation under the Nigerian law.
The same Defence Headquarters, DHQ a few days ago, released a statement expressing a desire to secure the extradition of Simon Ekpa, following the arrest of the self-proclaimed Prime Minister of Biafra Republic Government in Exile, BRGE, who operates from Finland. The said statement was as rash as the declaration of IPOB as a terrorist organisation by the same Defence Headquarters in 2017 after the group’s proscription by the five South-East governors.
Granted, Mr. Simon Ekpa’s project towards actualising a plebiscitary restoration of Biafra lacks tact, is filled with propaganda and hate against the Nigerian state. Sometimes too, and this is becoming more frequent, Ekpa, followed by over 160,000 subscribers on X, had used his social media handles to claim responsibility for the killing of Nigerian security personnel, issue sit-at-home orders in the region, claim that Biafra naval rocket [sic] had neutralised Nigerian terrorist joint border patrol contingent near Cameroon, etc. But all that do not mean that Finland – Ekpa’s country of adoption – whose citizenship Ekpa holds will easily release Simon Ekpa to the Nigerian government in the absence of an extradition treaty.
What Nigeria and Finland have maintained over sixty years and counting for now is a bilateral relations that never contemplated the subject of extradition. Also, the two nations don’t have mutual criminal assistance (or mutual legal assistance) which makes nations work together in stopping a criminal or person of interest to a requesting state from escaping in a country to whom a request (for extradition) has been made, otherwise known as the ‘requested state.’
Again, Simon Ekpa is a Nigerian national who holds Finnish citizenship. That means that he has access to all the rights a Finnish is entitled to, both in Finland and outside. According to the Finnish extradition article, a citizen is not to be easily handed to another country with whom Finland has no extradition treaty for prosecution, not even to countries of the EU or the Nordic countries, except where the severity of the offence for which the requesting state (in this case Nigeria) is seeking extradition has been proven. If found guilty of ‘public incitement with an intent to cause a terror attack,’ as Ekpa is being accused of, that is when the request has chances of being granted at the discretion of Finland. And for this to happen, Ekpa may likely lose his Finnish citizenship first.
Again, since there is no treaty obligation for an extradition deal nor mutual legal assistance between the two countries, Finland will be using her own laws, not Nigerian laws which recognise Ekpa and IPOB as terrorists, to try Ekpa whose claims hearing is set to start on Friday, November 22, 2024.
Nigeria would have had an extradition option were Finland a member of the Commonwealth of Nations. The London Scheme for Extradition within the Commonwealth, known simply as the London Scheme, is an agreement (not a legally binding treaty though) that helps over fifty Commonwealth states work together on extradition. Finland is not a Commonwealth state, so that option is never likely.
Ekpa became a rallying point for radical Biafran separatists following the forceful rendition of Nnamdi Kanu back to Nigeria from Kenya in 2021. Given Ekpa’s radical stance on the restoration of Biafra, the IPOB family was soon ruined by ideological cleavages resulting in factionalism. On the one hand there is what may be called the mainstream IPOB, and on the other hand there is what may be called the unconventional radical faction led by Simon Ekpa. There are court cases between factions, and sometimes sit-at-home orders have had to be refuted countless times by a faction, yet the call by governors of the region to end the sit-at-home orders had been honoured in the breach than in the observance, so lawlessness writs large in the South-East region. Lives had been lost, properties destroyed, as businesses had shrunk, but the State of Biafra, which Ekpa and co. promised to declare or decree into existence on November 24, 2024, has yet to see the light of day.
Nigeria has to understand that even if it succeeds in bringing Ekpa back to face trial on her own soil, the agitation will not end. The landscape of the Biafran struggle in 21st-century Nigeria has to be mapped and understood. Founded in 1999, the Movement for the Actualisation of the Sovereign State of the Biafra, MASSOB sprang up and began pushing an agenda for a separate state of Biafra in the early 2000s. When the Obasanjo and later Yara’dua governments arrested and detained Ralph Uwazuruike, the MASSOB leader, weakening his group, Nnamdi Kanu, who was managing Radio Biafra for MASSOB, rose from the ashes of the group and emerged on the scene. Like Kanu, Uwazuruike was detained and had to face trial at Justice Binta Nyako’s court. Uwazuruike was later released by Nyako to bury his mother. Nnamdi Kanu wasn’t that lucky when his own parents died.
The Biafra agitation of the 21st century has followed a successive style under different names. There was the Biafra Independence Movement, BIM and the Movement for the Actualisation of the Sovereign State of Biafra, MASSOB, and then the Indigenous People of Biafra, IPOB, in that succession.
Repatriation, incarceration and rendition will not address the Biafra question of the 21st century. Arrest Ekpa today, another faction may rise. Organisational names have changed, so also ideology, but the agenda to carve out the State of Biafra from Nigeria has not ended. Sometimes it is even fuelled by economic factors and serves as a conduit for making money by so-called agitators.
Today Ekpa has injected more radical fervour into the Biafran stream. He founded the Biafra Liberation Army and the Biafra Republic Government in Exile, BRGE. That too is a shift, albeit gradual, from Kanu’s IPOB family and ESN. In the case that he was extradited to Nigeria to face the law, I do not know how that solves or addresses the challenge. Uwazuruike, Kanu, Ekpa, and others have spoken. All the campaigns to restore Biafra is fuelled by the same thing: marginalisation or exclusion. That is what has to be addressed.
The Defence Headquarters should allow the Attorney General or ministry of foreign affairs to deal with the issue of the extradition for now, not releasing short statements in areas it has no say. In any case, I do not know to the extent such extradition, if it were to happen, would bring relative peace to the South-East. Ekpa has been detained in connection with illegal money transfers; he was later released. Now, considering Nigeria’s rights record, will a civilised nation hand over its citizen to Nigeria?
The South-East Is highly militarised, the high concentration of roadblocks and checkpoints in the name of interdiction is not encouraging. The region is also heavily policed, giving an impression of war that scares away investors. In the midst of all this, most people will see non-state actor groups as regional mercenaries and saviours because there is no federal presence. The worst for the South-East is that regional leaders are silent while the region burns in the name of agitation.
Nnamdi Elekwachi, a historian writes from Umuahia, Abia State.
