The Mazi Nnamdi Kanu Defence Consortium, a legal team advocating for the release of the Indigenous People of Biafra (IPOB) leader, has refuted claims by Nigeria’s Defence Headquarters that insecurity in the South-East has declined since Kanu’s imprisonment.
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Major General Michael Onoja, Director of Defence Media Operations, had stated that Kanu’s detention, coupled with intensified military operations, had contributed to stability in the region.
Responding on Friday, Onyedikachi Ifedi, Esq., representing the Mazi Nnamdi Kanu Defence Consortium, argued that it is not Kanu or IPOB, but rather the Nigerian government that has been responsible for the insecurity that has affected the South-East in recent years.
In a statement titled, ‘The Nigerian military cannot whitewash history – their hands are too soaked in blood’, Ifedi described Onoja’s claims as an attempt to rewrite history.
“Major General Michael Onoja’s recent claim that “security has improved” in the South-East because of intensified military operations and the imprisonment of Mazi Nnamdi Kanu is not merely false. It is a cynical rewriting of history — and an insult to every life destroyed by state violence in Nigeria.
“This narrative collapses under one simple truth – The Nigerian state created created the crisis it now pretends to be fighting.
“Long before anyone uttered the word “separatist,” the Nigerian military had already turned peaceful, unarmed citizens into targets,” the statement said.
The Kanu defence team pointed to the ‘Nkpor massacre’, during which peaceful mourners and demonstrators were gunned down; the killing of unarmed youths at National High School, Aba; the bloodbath that trailed a Trump solidarity rally at Port Harcourt, and the invasion of Kanu’s home in Umuahia, where 28 people were allegedly killed, to justify its claim that the Nigerian government was behind the violence and insecurity in the South-East.
“For the Nigerian military to now declare itself a “stabilising force” is grotesque. The same institution that repeatedly opens fire on civilians cannot turn around and present itself as the guardian of peace.
“Rather than confront its own record, the Nigerian state reaches for the same tired scapegoat – Blame IPOB. Blame Biafra. Blame Nnamdi Kanu. This is propaganda — not security analysis,” the statement added.
Continuing, the defence team insisted that it was not IPOB that organised the cult wars, political militias, and criminal networks unleashed across Igboland. According to the group, the incidents were engineered and funded by politicians and security collaborators who found chaos politically profitable.
The statement observed that General T.Y. Danjuma, rtd, openly accused elements of the Nigerian military of colluding with killers and turning their guns on innocent citizens.
Faulting the military spokesman’s claim that security has improved in the South-East, the defence team argued that “security cannot be measured by silence created through fear, disappearances, arbitrary detentions, and military occupation”.
“That is not peace — that is repression. What the Nigerian military calls “gains” are in reality communities terrorised into silence, courts manipulated to justify indefinite detention, and endless attempts to break Mazi Nnamdi Kanu’s spirit and force abandonment of the Biafra question. That project will fail.
“No amount of British-crafted spin, Abuja propaganda, or military chest-beating can erase the facts that Biafrans were killed long before they demanded self-determination — and they were killed precisely because they demanded dignity,” the defence team declared.
The statement added that the international community is increasingly aware that the Nigerian state frequently manufactures enemies to distract from corruption, insecurity, and elite failure.
Rejecting the military spokesman’s claims as “dishonest, reckless, and historically illiterate”, the defence team insisted on the unconditional release of Nnamdi Kanu, stressing that his detention violated domestic and international laws.
The group also demanded an independent investigations into “massacres” carried out by the Nigerian military across the federation, as well as an end to the “deliberate criminalisation of peaceful political expression in the South-East”.
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