Nnamdi Kanu’s abduction by Nigeria is criminal –Nnia Nwodo

By Henry Umahi

Former President-General of apex Igbo socio-cultural organization, Ohanaeze Worldwide, and two-time minister, Chief Nnia Nwodo, has condemned in strongest terms the continued detention of the leader of the Indigenous People of Biafra (IPOB), Mazi Nnamdi Kanu, saying: “The circumstances in which Nigeria abducted Nnamdi Kanu is criminal.”

In an exclusive interview in his Enugu residence, Nwodo said: “What is happening to Nnamdi Kanu is the greatest breach of our judicial practice ever noticed in this country. No man has been detained for this length of time without a conviction.”

He added that what is happening to Kanu attracts considerable opprobrium and disregard for the country.

The elder statesman also spoke about insecurity, hunger in the land, last Ohanaeze election and initiative to immortalize former Governor of Anambra State, Chief Christian Chukwuma Onoh, by the Anglican Communion.

What’s your take on the last election of President-General of Ohanaeze Ndigbo Worldwide?

I am actually the wrong person to be asked this question. Since I left Ohanaeze and the presidency went to Imo State, I have not been involved in the business of Ohanaeze. We have not held any Ime Obi meeting, except when Chief Emmanuel Iwuanyanwu was used to replace Amb. George Obiozor. Even the elections we had so far are like emergency procedures because, in actual fact, we should have had a general meeting of delegates coming from the states to elect our various presidents, from Iwuanyanwu to Nze Fidelis Chukwu.

There was one that came before Senator John Azuta-Mbata was elected. They were all done by Ime Obi, which is grossly unconstitutional. But they said it is doctrine of necessity; I don’t know what the necessity is. Does it mean that they cannot bring delegates from the states? Is there a problem about bringing them? Maybe the governors have security reasons why they recommended for them to do that. 

But, having been President-General of Ohanaeze, knowing the constitution and being a lawyer, I was reluctant to embrace it but thank God a Rivers State man came out and my dream was that a Rivers man should come out because you cannot deny a man his place of origin and his participation in the governance of the place. It is their turn and they brought a very qualified man. I hope he will right all the wrongs.

Many people have called for the release of Nnamdi Kanu but the powers-that-be remain adamant. What would be your reaction?

You are taking me into areas that I have for a long time decided to be quiet on. Let me tell you one thing: if you have occupied an office and you leave that office, it is wrong to speak for the man who holds that office. When you do so, you will be giving the wrong impression.

It is the desire of every Igbo man that Nnamdi Kanu should have his freedom. What is happening to Nnamdi Kanu is the greatest breach of our judicial practice ever noticed in this country. No man has been detained for this length of time without a conviction. His fundamental human right of freedom of movement as enshrined in Nigerian constitution has been abrogated with reckless abandon.

Even if they considered him to be a security risk, he could be observed. We have enough security officers in Nigeria to monitor his movements and monitor his operations, and see whether he is a security risk.

But to containerize him in four walls for years is a breach of international and local law. It is indefensible. After he has been found not guilty by court of law, he continues to be detained.

I do not understand it. I am a lawyer and I never learnt anything like this in the law school. The impression is given that it is because he is an Igbo man. There was a Yoruba man, Sunday Igboho, a campaigner for Yoruba self-determination. They wanted to arrest him and he went to neighbouring Cotonou, Benin Republic. They didn’t go to Benin Republic to seek his repatriation.

Eventually, he came back like a hero, moved around the whole country, travelled abroad and nobody harassed him. What kind of thing is this? There are some other militants who have boasted on the pages of newspapers that they have an army and that they are armed. Nobody has arrested them, nobody has arrested their soldiers. There are Boko Haram soldiers who carry automatic rifles, who carry grenades, who carry bombs, who have dealt tremendous damage to people and material properties, who have been reassembled after detention and put in the Nigerian Army, who have been received in State House under the Presidency of General Buhari.

Have you seen such a thing? What kind of country is this? One set of laws for one people, one set of laws for another. I expected that, given President Tinubu’s record for championing fundamental human rights, which earned him several detentions in his political days, I felt that he would have untied these knots. This country is too advanced for this kind of uncivilized laws and dispensation of justice.

What is happening to Nnamdi Kanu attracts considerable opprobrium and disregard for our country. How can a Nigerian staying in another country in the world expect to have his fundamental human rights observed when you don’t do so in the country? How do you excuse it? How can decisions of the Court of Appeal be disregarded by a government, which took an oath of office to respect the law of the land?

All right, if Nnamdi Kanu talks a lot, he has freedom of speech, he has freedom of opinion. What is wrong with a man saying ‘this is how I want my country to be run?’ Have they found Nnamdi Kanu planting a bomb? The circumstances in which Nigeria abducted Nnamdi Kanu is criminal. It is a violation of international law and the duplicity of the United Kingdom in handling that matter when he has a British passport is a matter that rises to heaven for justice. They won’t do that to a white British citizen.

I was trained in the best traditions of British education. I went to London School of Economics and Political Science and I read law there. They won’t do that in their own country. This is despicable. This is why I was reluctant to speak; I don’t speak in parables. I say my mind. You have led me into the political arena, I have no choice but to do this.

Our people expect someone like me who had been President-General of Ohanaeze to speak their voice. The treatment of Nnamdi Kanu is bad; it is crying to heavens. President Tinubu must redeem his image, if he has any claims to his antecedents as a fighter for human rights.

How would you describe the state of the country?

It is too early for me to make an opinion as an elder statesman. When a man has been in office for less than two years, I think it is important to give him an opportunity to familiarize himself with the environment.

But I can tell you that I am worried about a few things. The level of hunger in the land is despicable. I will advise the federal government to take three things very seriously: agriculture, road development and education.

What they are doing so far in the management of our refineries is commendable. You know, the mobility of goods and services makes goods cheaper. I expected that, by now, we would have had the federal government mobilize a road army like Germany did when they were in our times.

We would have put every road in the country under indigenous rehabilitation. We have a lot of young men who are doing nothing. It doesn’t cost anything to buy caterpillars, bulldozers and what have you. All these foreign contractors who are here are not doing anything that our engineers do not know even better than them. The people they bring to work with them are not engineers. They are foremen with very little technical education or on-site training.

We have very good structural engineers, road engineers and water engineers. If we had a land road development army of young men who are working and supervised by professionals, it will cut down the cost of developing roads in Nigeria. We should concentrate on the major artery roads that link north and south, east and west, west and Middle Belt, South-South and everywhere. This bogus highway they want to build across the ocean is a waste of time. I don’t see why roads that are inland are ill-maintained and you want to build one on water. When it breaks down, the trailers will fall in there. It is sure to break down because nobody will comply with the weight measures. Nobody will.

The police are on the road and we see what they do. It’s funny to say it. The enforcement of law in this country is sub-standard. There is no obedience to the law.

But if we had internal roads linking all the major arteries of this country, goods will move cheaper, faster and sell cheaper. If I were President of Nigeria, I would form a land army. There are a lot of young people who are doing nothing. If you put them as hands, they will learn how to drive caterpillars and bulldozers, they will learn how to do culverts, they will learn how to do gutters. It doesn’t take rocket science. In less than three months, they have learnt it. And the cost of keeping them on the site is cheaper than putting foreign contractors there.

There is nothing the foreign companies will tell us that our engineers don’t know about. Our engineers are grossly underutilized. We will sharpen their capacity and their capacity for export to neighbouring countries to build their roads. Look at what Bukina Faso and the other countries that left ECOWAS are doing with road development. These are people teaching us what to do.

If I was president of Nigeria, I would have asked every local government in Nigeria to give me two miles of land every year. I will clear the land, do boreholes for them and fence it for the owners of the land. I will give them seedlings that can grow in those places and institute a marketing board that will buy their products and export them so that they earn good foreign exchange. That’s how the First Republic thrived with marketing boards. Palm kernel and palm oil helped the east. Cocoa helped the west. Groundnut helped the north. Something you know that works, why did you allow it to fail? By the time we export the produce for three years, we will build import-substitution industries. We will use the raw materials here and we will reduce the volume of our import because there will be mass production of rice, maize, beans and yam.

Our children will carry fried yam to school as their lunch. Akara will become a national and international commodity because beans will be everywhere. Those who don’t know akidi will discover it; those who don’t know okpa will discover it. These are proteinous food that will save a lot of people who are sick of diabetes today. It is great vision that makes a country.

Health is important and education is paramount.

But an educated man who has no work to do is a sick man. So, the government must find a way to start public infrastructural development and agricultural production of immense proportion and create incentives for private business people to invest in it.

Look at the amount of money we pay our public officers. Is it not shameful? Where in Africa is this done? One senator gets a car worth about N300 million. What nonsense is that? Not to talk about their allowances for housing and other things. And they are not doing anything productive. They are increasing the inflation. If you pay money that is not paid for goods and services, it is inflation.

What are they running to the villages to do? Are they local government area chairmen or councilors? This is nonsense.

All these allowances that are paid to legislators should be turned into agricultural fund to build farms. If they start the farms, we start paying and they generate certificates as we pay. If you must give them money to make them relevant to their constituency, tag it to projects. So, we will see what each senator is doing from the money that he is given. But we just dash them money to buy expensive cars and go on holidays abroad and what have you. It’s status symbol. What kind of developing country does this?

Newspapers no longer have the circulation that they used to have because illiteracy has caught up with us. Who wants to hear anything? You waste your time researching on a lecture believing that you are contributing to the development of your country but no one listens. Even this interview we having, how many people are going to read it? Nigerians are in difficulty about getting their daily bread, not to talk about buying newspapers.

We have shrunken to such little level that brain power has been destroyed. There is nobody who has developed the world without brain power. Look at our lecturers, are they paid well? When I was in the university, the moment somebody made a first class or second upper, he was a material for lecturing. The university chooses the best to become lecturers. They send them overseas to go and get another experience and they bring overseas people to substitute them. I was taught by white men; I was taught by an Indian. I had the exposure from secondary school. My children can’t go to the kind of school I went to? It means that there is a slump in the standard.

What is the cause of insecurity in Nigeria?

It is poverty. Another thing is inequality of access to the facilities this country offers. You have a classmate who has suddenly become rich and you don’t know how he earned the money. You have a classmate who has won election to the House and suddenly he has expensive cars and beautiful homes just for winning an election.

It is a disincentive to hard work.That is why there lots of robbers and kidnappers. They want to make quick money and become as big as their classmates who have gone into politics and business. Can you imagine that in GRA Enugu I buy water although since Governor Mbah came, there has been a little improvement but it comes and goes.

But I used to bath at Coal Camp as a child in the open place. There used to be shower near the cinema. After playing football, we go behind the cinema and take our bath in the shower section. Water was available 24 hours. In CIC where I attended secondary school, there was water all the time. At 6am during the harmattan, it was a big challenge to stand in the cold shower but we did it. That time there was no heater that people enjoy now. That’s how we grew up.

Our generation was more intelligent. We were trained in a good way. After the shower, you go and do your morning function. Because my father was a minister I was told to clear the toilet when I came to school. I was crying every morning and it was bucket toilet; there was no flushing (water) toilet at that time. Nobody cared whether my father was a minister in the eastern region. It was the only way to make me level with everybody.

After I did it for three weeks, the white man called me, took me to the chapel and prayed for me. He said I passed the test and sent me to the urinary. I thought urinary was a promotion. It was full of spirogyra, the whole floor was green. My classmates came to help me but they drove them away. I used a shovel to remove those things and I brought disinfectant, detergent and iron sponge. After three weeks, if you enter there, you won’t like to go away. I used the detergent that my mother bought for me to clean the place.

My father told me they were trying to test me, that I should continue to do it. I was made prefect of my class. I was made senior refectorian and I was made assistant senior prefect. If I had reached upper six, I would have become senior prefect. I was the youngest in my class but they took me through a responsible terrain that I acquired resistance, resilience and confidence in myself. That’s what training is all about.

But we don’t have it today. If you make the mistake of sending your child abroad you have lost the child. Many people have sold their property to send their children abroad and, unfortunately, when you send them, they lose our culture, they are no longer Nigerians.

Far more depressing is the demonstration effect of people in governance. Their appurtenances of office keep everybody in shock; these are people who campaigned for us to put them in office. When they passing the road, they are in a long convoy. In this expensive fuel time, a senator or House of Representatives member will put six cars on the road at the same time. Does it make sense? What are they telling the people? The petrol consumption will train many people in the university or grade some roads in their constituencies.

It is because the leadership is also not showing an example. How many airplanes have we bought for the president? Is it necessary while we are owing so much money abroad?

The British Prime Minister travels in British Airways, he has no presidential jet. I have traveled in the same plane that he traveled in. I have seen it inside and I have seen it outside and I see that those things don’t mean anything.

You are a member of the governing council of Christian Chukwuma Onoh College of Education, why wasn’t a university established instead?

It was not the concept of the council, we are beneficiaries of a rich concept developed by the Anglican Communion of that Diocese, and we share in their aspirations for that institution for the following reasons:

Education has plummeted in our society. The quality of education has gone down. It has gone down because of the pervasive influence of materialism in our society, which has invaded every profession that you know. It is only a minority of those who belong to professions now that stick to the rudiments of the profession because of the adverse influence of economic survival. People have cut corners and done a lot of funny things.

But no part of our society forms society better than the education sector. If you look at what is happening today in our system, the education sector has been polluted by materialism of monstrous proportions.

I will give you an example: I started primary education in a place called St. Patrick’s Iva Valley which is a rural school here, very close to coal mines. The reason my parents took us there was there was a reverend father there called Rev. Father Michael Eneja, who was puritanical in his adherence to discipline and fear of God.  So, they felt that we could not obtain a better preparation for the true life without strong moral values. The point I am trying to make here is that my class mate in that place was the junior brother of my father’s driver. My father was minister of commerce and industry.

There was no school for the minister’s son and another one for the driver’s son. I went with my father’s driver’s younger brother to the school, the same class. I was beating him in some subjects and he was beating me in some subjects. He ended up going to university like I did. He ended up becoming a permanent secretary in the state ministry of agriculture. And I ended up becoming a minister under Alhaji Shehu Shagari and Abdulsalami Abubakar. Had he taken the federal sector, he would have still become a minister.

So, education was easily accessible. Background didn’t matter. The people my father was paying their school fees in College of Immaculate Conception (CIC), Enugu were my class mates and they were beating me in physics, chemistry, biology and mathematics and I was beating them in english language, english literature, history and bible knowledge. But they were beating me in objective subjects. So, when they were in positions one to six, I was struggling for between seven and 10 or 12. And my father said to me one day in Igbo that those whose fathers served him that I will serve them. I said, God forbid.

All I’m trying to prove is that accessibility to education has become more favourable to the rich. The rich send their children to the best schools because they can pay the best teachers. They can buy biology and physics lab equipment. They equip their schools better than anywhere else.

It is only the missions that can compete with them but even the missions have become expensive. I went to CIC, I’m not sure that you can get into CIC easily now just by passing. They must have a way of admitting a percentage based on affordability because of the investments that are going on there.

Our society has failed to give our children a future. So, the Anglican Mission, a religious organization, thought that we should start a college of education and build it in Ngwo on the outskirts of Enugu where the hussle and bustle of the city is less.  It’s on top of a hill; the atmosphere for learning will be there.

“Secondly, for the man who fought for the creation of Enugu State, he was leader of WAWA Movement which metamorphosed into Enugu State, I don’t see any building in Enugu named after him. It is very painful. I haven’t seen any. If there is street named after him, it must be Onoh quarters which he built. I don’t see government having named an important building after him. A man who made such huge sacrifice that we should have a state. But as they say, charity begins at home. So, his home parish and diocese decided to build an institution of learning that continues to promote his philosophy of: show the people the way.

That’s how the school came about and the church is running it by its own means in these difficult times. The church is sustained by charity and people’s charity purse  has diminished now because of the economic situation. So, all of us have decided to put ourselves there, contribute whatever we have in terms of ideas and if we have little we can give.

We are hoping that in the process, governments around Enugu that he looked after, including Anambra State, will be sympathetic to making some reasonable investment in the place because of the fact that he was a pathfinder. The institution is devoted to training in education so that we can train people there who can return us to the society that we came from. We have missionaries teaching them in the fear of God. We have Prof. Agu Gab Agu as chairman of the governing council. They have models to follow.  There are many professors and professionals in our council.