The legal team of Indigenous People of Biafra (IPOB) leader, Mazi Nnamdi Kanu, has rejected the life sentence handed down by the Federal High Court in Abuja on Thursday.
The team vowed to challenge the conviction at the Court of Appeal.
Justice James Omotosho sentenced Kanu to life imprisonment after finding him guilty on multiple terrorism-related charges.
The judge said he chose to temper justice with mercy despite prosecutors’ push for the death penalty.
Adegboyega Awomolo, a Senior Advocate of Nigeria who led the prosecution, had argued that the offences warranted capital punishment.
“The punishment prescribed for the offences in Counts One, Two, Four, Five and Six, pursuant to Section 12H of the Terrorism Prevention Amendment Act 2013, is death,” he told the court.
But speaking outside the courtroom after the sentencing, Kanu’s legal consultant, Alloy Ejimakor, described the conviction as a miscarriage of justice.
“The sentence is overbroad, cruel and unusual. How can you convict a man for making media broadcasts from a location that was never named, and (they) never tied that broadcast to any single incidence of violence, or even someone slapping someone, not to talk of terrorism?” he said.
“You convict him of terrorism for mere words? In the Federal Republic of Nigeria, what kind of precedent is being laid?”
Ejimakor said the defence would take the case to the Court of Appeal and, if necessary, to the Supreme Court.
“We are pretty sure the justices will agree with us that today was the symbol of the travesty of justice that everybody has been suspecting all along. If the Court of Appeal disagrees with us, we head to the Supreme Court. But by God Almighty, Mazi Nnamdi Kanu is not going to stand convicted. It is going to get overturned,” he said.
Awomolo, meanwhile, urged Nigerians to take national security seriously and avoid ethnic divisions in responding to the case.
“When you look away, compromise, or you show fear, you are encouraging the miscreants, the vandals, the criminals, the terrorists to fester,” he told journalists outside the court.
“I was in court there when somebody was saying, oh Yoruba, oh Hausa, oh Igbo, we are all Nigerians. We must love one another. We must not compromise the security of the country on the basis of those primordial sentiments.”
He added, “Let it be a warning to those who may think they are bigger than Nigeria. The law is bigger than every one of us.”
Kanu, who has been in detention since 2021, was first arrested in 2015 on charges related to his leadership of IPOB, a group that advocates for the secession of Nigeria’s southeastern region.
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