EDITORIAL: IPOB: Killers of Aba soldiers must face the law

Five soldiers at a checkpoint in Aba were killed by gunmen of the Indigenous People of Biafra (IPOB) on the 30th of May, who also burnt their operational van. The outlaws had been driving around the city in their enforcement of a sit-at-home order they declared in memory of those who died in the ill-fated Republic of Biafra, during the Nigerian civil war. The macabre display, which was one in a long series of criminalities perpetrated by IPOB, was barbaric, callous and unjustifiable.

Igbo leaders have seen it from this prism too, as evident in the reactions of the Ohanaeze leadership and governors of the South-east. President Bola Tinubu has directed security agencies to fish out the felons who masterminded the dastardly act so that they can face the full wrath of the law. It is in line with this goal that Governor Alex Otti of Abia State immediately placed a N25 million bounty on the killers, to encourage anyone with information or intelligence that could lead to their arrest, to volunteer this. A citizen of the state living in the United States, in a commendable show of shared concern, added N5 million, bringing the total sum to N30 million.

But we inveigh against the military’s avowal to “retaliate,” as contained in a statement issued by the Director of Defence Media Operations, Maj-General Edward Buba. This mode of vengeance is not in accord with civilised behaviour or the rules of engagement of the military. As it has often been the case, this will give fillip to impunity and the killing of innocent citizens in the area. This showed in their response to the 16 soldiers killed in Okuama, Delta State, in March this year.

The ideal, we think, is a painstaking investigation and operation, which, in the present circumstance, should leverage the N30 million bounty to yield the desired outcome. Already, the army’s laying of a siege to the state has resulted in the killing of six persons, suspected to be IPOB elements, in Igboro forest, Arochukwu Local Government Area. Some of the alleged killers have reportedly been nabbed. Utmost scrupulousness is needed to separate the wheat from the chaff.

The killing of soldiers and other security personnel with ease, which has become IPOB’s obsession, that has gone on without consequences, is the height of insecurity and assault on the sovereignty of the Nigerian state. Naturally, it instils mortal fear in the populace and a sense of total collapse of governance.

IPOB’s agitation for over a decade now, for the reincarnation of the moribund Biafran Republic, has claimed the lives of too many security operatives and civilians. In the first quota of 2024 alone, 102 people were killed in the region, according to data from the International Centre for Investigative Reporting. A soldier couple, A.M Linus and his unidentified wife, were killed and beheaded in Imo State in May 2022.

No state in the South-east has been spared this horrific tale since 9 August, 2021, when the controversial Monday sit-at-home order began, over the demand for the release of IPOB leader, Nnamdi Kalu, from custody. He has been under trial for a treasonable felony offence following his extraordinary rendition from Kenya by the Muhammadu Buhari administration, in violation of international law.

However, the 30 May sit-at-home is a Remembrance Day ritual in honour of fallen Biafran war heroes, first observed in 2014 without any disruption of public peace. But the weekly Monday sit-at-home order, being sustained by the Simon Ekpa-led IPOB, changed the nuance of the former. A sit-at-home order forced on people is a human rights infringement, more so when it is at the behest of non-state actors. Section 41 (1) of the Nigerian Constitution protects the right of freedom of movement of individuals.

However, there is nothing off-beam in the decision of a group of people to remember their kith and kin who died on the battlefield, provided that it is conducted within the ambit of the law. The ritual keeps history alive and acts as a veritable compass for the future, especially in ensuring that stumps of the past are avoided. It is a canon of human existence, which the philosopher/writer George Santayana put so didactically: “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”

The Jews hold memorials of the Holocaust annually, pertaining to six million of them who were crudely exterminated by the Nazis during the Second World War. Yet, it never takes a violent turn. Rather, conferences and candlelight processions are carried out in major cities across the globe.

The Allied Forces, comprising US, UK, France, Canada, and even Germany, gathered on 6 June in France to honour the heroes of the D-Day 1944 invasion of Normandy, 80 years after, in a seeming reminder equally proclaiming never to allow such violence and carnage to happen again. That great battle liberated France, nay the entire Europe, from Hitler’s annihilation. Encyclopedia Britannica estimates that 550,200 casualties were recorded, comprising those killed, missing and wounded.

Therefore, the cascading blood in the South-east and IPOB’s revanchist impulses must be brought to an end. To achieve this will require President Bola Tinubu’s demonstration of the larger heart of a statesman in finding a political solution, rather than legalism, to the Kalu miasma. His unduly prolonged trial, some have argued and rightly so, provides a toxic elixir to IPOB – which has become an umbrella for many criminal elements – kidnappers, armed robbers, cultists and political assassins. This is why the IPOB elements subservient to the rogue voice of Ekpa, based in Finland, do not comply with the cessation of the Monday sit-at-home order, which the IPOB that Emma Powerful speaks for has long called for.

Instructively, insecurity anywhere is insecurity everywhere in Nigeria, as the endless bloodletting in the North-east, from insurgency and banditry, and kidnapping in the North-west, eloquently indicate. Their victims cut across the ethno-sectarian mix. This being true and self-evident, the weekly mayhem in the South-east should be viewed accordingly by the authorities, who must find ways to end it.

South-east governors should work together to find a solution to the IPOB conundrum. The hoodlums’ irrational warning to WAEC, a regional body, not to conduct its Mathematics examination in the entire South-East on 30 May was a most cruel attempt to ruin the future of students from the region and education. It must not be allowed to repeat.

Many private businesses: trailers, goods, buses and shops belonging to diverse Nigerians have been burnt by IPOB. Banks operations are frozen each Monday or any other day that IPOB abridges people’s movement because of Nnamdi Kalu’s trial. As a result, Abuja should appreciate the import of Aba, Onitsha and Nnewi in the economic calculus or growth of Nigeria’s GDP and take pragmatic steps to end the IPOB spell on the South-east. Mr President, a legal resolution of the Kalu case, it seems to us, is a long shot. This IPOB quagmire should not endure any longer!