1. How the word was applied
IPOB was proscribed in September 2017 by an order of the Federal High Court obtained by the government in a hearing that IPOB did not attend, days after the army had raided the home of its leader during an operation named Python Dance. No trial of the organisation's conduct took place. The word terrorist was applied by application, not by verdict. In the years since, the government has used that label to justify the shooting of protesters, the mass arrest of young men, and the treatment of anything Biafran, a flag, a song, a broadcast, as a terrorist act.
2. What the rest of the world says
The United Kingdom, where Nnamdi Kanu is a citizen and where IPOB's radio station was founded, has not proscribed IPOB. Neither has the United States, the European Union, nor the United Nations. A United Nations working group on arbitrary detention found in 2022 that Kanu's seizure in Kenya and detention in Nigeria were arbitrary and called for his release. When only the accusing state uses the word, the word describes the state's fear, not the organisation's nature.
3. What IPOB actually asked for
From its founding, IPOB's stated demand has been a referendum on independence for the peoples of the former Eastern Region. That is a political demand made in words. Its methods have been broadcasts, marches, sit-at-home protests, and lawsuits. You may find the rhetoric of its leader excessive; I sometimes do. Rhetoric is not terrorism, or half the politicians in Abuja would be on the list.
A terrorist organisation is defined by what it does to civilians. Count the civilians IPOB has been convicted of killing. Then count the Biafrans the state has been convicted of killing. Both numbers are zero, for very different reasons.
4. The violence is real, and it is not one thing
I will not pretend the south-east is peaceful. Since 2021 thousands of people have died there: police officers, soldiers, sit-at-home enforcers, market women, boys on their way to school. Attacks on police stations and prisons have been carried out by armed men. IPOB has repeatedly disowned the enforcers of sit-at-home and the faction that ordered them from abroad. Security forces have carried out their own killings, documented by Amnesty International, that have never been prosecuted. Criminal gangs use the chaos. To pin all of it on one organisation is not analysis. It is a decision about who is allowed to be a victim.
I condemn every one of those killings. A movement that claims to speak for a people starved to death has no business starving their Mondays or taking their sons. If you are reading this and you have a machete in the name of Biafra, put it down. You are doing Abuja's work for it.
5. The double standard
Nigeria runs a programme, Operation Safe Corridor, that receives surrendered Boko Haram fighters, feeds them, retrains them and returns them to communities they attacked. Men who burned schools and took girls are offered amnesty. Meanwhile a Biafran with a flag is shot, and a broadcaster is kidnapped from Kenya and, in November 2025, sentenced to life in prison. I am not asking for Boko Haram to be treated worse. I am asking why a people who have never bombed a market are treated as the greater threat, and I think the honest answer is that they are the greater threat, to a particular idea of Nigeria, not to any Nigerian's life.
6. What I ask
- Lift the proscription, or defend it in a court that IPOB is allowed to attend.
- Release Nnamdi Kanu, or retry him in a jurisdiction that did not kidnap him.
- Hold a referendum. If the south-east votes to stay, I will accept it. If it votes to go, so should Abuja.
- Prosecute every killer, in uniform or out of it.
- Stop using the word terrorist as a way of not having the conversation.