Court grants Kanu N8bn compensation, unbans IPOB

An Enugu state high court, on Thursday, awarded N8billion in compensation to the leader of the Indigenous Peoples of Biafra (IPOB), Nnamdi Kanu. The trial judge, A. O. Onovo, also unbanned the separatist group, Indigenous People of Biafra (IPOB). Onovo said the order by South-East governors banning IPOB was “illegal”, “unconstitutional”, and “null and void”.

Apart from the governors, the federal government, in 2017, similarly proscribed the group and designated it a terrorist organization.

Kanu had filed a lawsuit challenging the action. He described the organization as one comprising “Igbo and other eastern Nigerian ethnic groups, professing the political opinion of self-determination.” He also prayed the court to declare his “arrest and consequent detention and prosecution as illegal, unlawful, unconstitutional and amounts to infringement of the applicant’s fundamental rights.”

In addition, he urged the court to declare that “self-determination is not a crime and thus cannot be used as a basis to arrest, detain and prosecute the applicant.”

He equally asked for N8bn in damages “for the physical, mental, emotional and psychological trauma he was subjected to.”