In the years that followed, the Nigerian government would go on to extraordinarily rendition Kanu from Kenya, a process executed outside the framework of formal extradition law and in violation of multiple international legal instruments governing arrest and transfer. And even when its own court later ruled on the procedure, holding that Kanu’s rendition was unlawful and ordering his release, the state refused to comply with these directives, reinforcing the perception that it had no substantive case grounded in due process.
During this same period, as remains the case today, Nigeria was grappling with expansive national crises that exposed the state’s uneven approach to security and its absence of democratic accountability. Bandit groups overran rural and resource-rich communities, displacing thousands and disrupting agriculture and local economies.
Extremist factions expanded their operational reach, and corruption scandals continued to surface across public institutions while citizens sank deeper into poverty and misery. Farmers in multiple states were driven from their lands by armed militias as security and government agencies oscillated between denial, contradictory briefings, and responses that were either ineffective or plainly absurd.
In Kaduna, for example, Nigerians watched former governor Nasir el-Rufai openly admit that his administration paid violent Fulani militias to appease them and halt the killings in Southern Kaduna. It was a troubling revelation that showed how the state treats ransom and negotiation with mass murderers as acceptable policy in the North even as it criminalises and imprisons political agitations in other parts of the country.
All of this context is essential to understanding the national question, the unresolved crisis that has shadowed Nigeria since the 1914 Amalgamation. The post-colonial Nigerian state is one in which terms of belonging remains contested. What does it mean to belong to this country? Who belongs? On what terms? And who gets to decide? Every major political conflict since independence has emerged from grievances rooted in these unanswered questions and compounded by various structural inequalities. Nigeria remains yoked to profound mismatches in power, citizenship, and federal practice. One set of rules appears to operate in one region while another takes shape elsewhere, producing decades of resentment and distrust
The 1999 Constitution, often touted as the grundnorm, remains a document that was never collectively negotiated or ratified by all the peoples whose destinies are bound to it. Its legitimacy has always been weakened by its origins in military decree rather than popular consent. This foundational defect feeds the uneven application of justice across the federation. Movements in the South are frequently criminalised with remarkable speed, while armed actors in parts of the North are met with accommodation or strategic leniency.
Within this same constitutional framework, religious extremism thrives in several northern states under state-sanctioned Sharia systems even as the broader political order punishes ethnic, social, and political dissent elsewhere.
As long as these inequalities persist, Nigeria will continue to generate factions, insurgencies, protests, and agitations. This is the terrain from which figures like Kanu emerge.
In this broader landscape, his sentencing, subject to appeal or future executive discretion, functions as both a conclusion and a diversion. It ends a chapter on one man’s excesses but distracts from the long history of state complicity in creating the very conditions that enable radicalisation.
At this point, the Nigerian state must be held accountable alongside Kanu, not only for the devastation in the East but for its repeated failures and chronic lack of political will to advance the aspirations of its people.
The Nigerian state must stand in the dock of history through a deliberate political process that finally renegotiates the terms of coexistence among its many peoples. That process must deliver a new constitution, produced through a sovereign national conference or a constituent assembly made up of directly and democratically elected representatives from all geopolitical zones, and ratified by the public in a national referendum — replacing, once and for all, the discredited 1999 military decree.
It must devolve real power — security, resource control, and decision-making authority — away from an overcentralised state so that no Nigerian ever again feels like a conquered guest in their own homeland.
It must establish a legislated Truth, Justice and Reconciliation Commission with full powers to drag into the open the civil war, the massacres of communities and protesters across different moments in our history, and every calculated act of marginalisation and structural injustice that continues to shape national consciousness.
The work of this Commission must culminate in a binding national record of truth, enforceable recommendations for reparations and criminal accountability, institutional reforms, and a compulsory framework for memorialisation that anchors the country to its history with honesty and dignity.
Without such foundational reforms, Nigeria will remain trapped in a cycle of repression and rebellion. New forms of violence will grow out of unresolved historical trauma. And the legitimacy of the state will continue to corrode, leaving the country in a permanent state of rupture.
Ibeh, a development advocate and social critic whose work interrogates power, public policy, and the political economy, wrote from Lagos.
