Finland

Simon Ekpa has been arrested in Finland. The man who, from a sofa in Lahti, ordered the sit-at-home Mondays that have cost this region three years of Mondays, who announced governments in exile and armed wings from a laptop, whose voice on the phone has sent boys with machetes down the stadium road. Arrested, by Finnish police, for what the Finnish papers call incitement with terrorist intent.

I do not know how to feel and I am going to write both halves. Half of me, the half that stood in a shut market on a Monday and watched the woman under the umbrella lose her table, says: good. A man who makes war from a country where he is safe, on people who are not, is not a freedom fighter. IPOB itself disowned him a long time ago and said so. He has done more for Abuja's case than any minister.

The other half says: notice the pattern. Kanu, taken from Kenya. Ekpa, arrested in Finland. Every leader the movement produces ends in a cell somewhere, and the young men at the roundabouts who have never been to Kenya or Finland end in the ground, and the question of the referendum is never asked, and the Mondays continue anyway because fear has its own government now.

Biafra is not one man. I have believed that since Mama's flag. But every year it gets harder to say who it is, and I am tired of the men who claim it from abroad. I am writing that down as a Biafran, and as someone who will, if the man at the window ever says yes, also be claiming it from abroad. I intend to do it differently.