This is the moral maze confronting the anti– Mazi Nnamdi Kanu camp, and it is one with no clean exit.
In this maze, words are treated as deadlier than weapons, and warnings are punished more harshly than mass murder. A man who spoke—who warned, provoked, irritated, unsettled—was caged as though he had spilled blood. Meanwhile, blood was actually spilled elsewhere, in industrial quantities, and the nation barely blinked.
That is the puzzle.
Hundreds can be killed in rural Nigeria—entire communities erased by armed groups whose methods and ideology are well known—and the response is silence, euphemism, or bureaucratic sleepwalking. No emergency moral outrage. No saturation coverage. No prosecutorial zeal. No ritual condemnation. The dead are absorbed into statistics and forgotten.
Take Kwara State, Yoruba territory, where just this week, Islamic terrorists slaughtered at least 170 people in the villages of Woro and Nuku just as Nnamdi Kanu predicted many years back. Gunmen stormed in, executing residents at close range—many bound and shot, others burned alive—for refusing to submit to extremist Sharia rule. Homes razed, shops looted, families shattered. The attackers, linked to genuine terrorist groups from Northern Nigeria and not proscribed- left a trail of mass graves and missing loved ones. President Tinubu deployed troops after the fact, blaming jihadists, but where was the same preemptive fury that accompanied Monday sit-at-home civil disobedience?
The Yoruba media? A few reports here and there, but no national uproar, no endless headlines, no collective grief broadcast on loop as they do with anything concerning Mazi Nnamdi Kanu, IPOB or Biafra. Just another statistic in Nigeria’s endless cycle of normalized slaughter.
But let one man (Nnamdi Kanu) speak inconvenient truths, invoke history, or challenge the emotional comfort of the state, and the system awakens with ferocity tagging him terrorist when he has not killed anyone.
This is where the maze tightens.
The same society that rationalises mass death suddenly discovers an uncompromising reverence for “law and order” when speech becomes uncomfortable. The same Yoruba and Fulani dominated media ecosystem that finds nuance and restraint when villages burn becomes breathless, absolutist, and punitive when the subject is Biafra. Violence is contextualised; dissent is demonised. Welcome to Nigeria, the land of shameless hypocrites.
And the contradiction grows sharper:
Those who kill are managed.
Those who speak are crushed.
Justice James Omotosho, a Yoruba man presiding over the Federal High Court in Abuja, sentenced Nnamdi Kanu to life imprisonment in November 2025 for terrorism charges—inciting violence through his broadcasts and calls for Biafran independence. Kanu, the very man who had long warned of this exact impending doom in Yorubaland: the spread of religious extremism, the unchecked jihadist incursions into southern territories, the failure to protect communities from the reach of these terrorists. He was convicted not for wielding weapons, but for wielding words that unsettled the status quo. Omotosho handed down concurrent life terms, ensuring Kanu rots in isolation at Sokoto Correctional Centre of all places, the seat of the caliphate itself. All while the real killers in Kwara—and countless other places—evade the same zealous pursuit.
In this maze, it is apparently safer to wield an AK-47 assault rifle than a microphone—provided the AK-47 aligns with the unspoken hierarchies of power.
What makes the maze even more disorienting is the participation of the injured themselves. Some of those most historically bruised by the Nigerian state have internalised its moral compass so deeply that they now help police it. They defend the punishment of speech while explaining away the indulgence of slaughter. They argue process where conscience should scream, and preach unity where justice is absent. Even in Yoruba heartlands like Kwara, where the blood of their own kin soaks the soil from jihadist blades, the focus remains on silencing Nnamdi Kanu, IPOB and Biafra agitation rather than heeding the warnings.
At the centre of the maze sits a disturbing moral inversion:
That the stability of the murderous state matters more than the sanctity of life.
That preventing uncomfortable ideas is more urgent than preventing funerals.
That silence in the face of killing is preferable to noise in the face of injustice.
This is not law. It is not justice. It is not even politics in any noble sense.
It is fear—fear of ideas, fear of history, fear of a reckoning.
And that is why the maze exists at all.
Because a society confident in its moral foundations does not jail prophets and tolerate killers. It does not obsess over speech while normalising graves. It does not amplify narratives selectively unless it is trying—desperately—to avoid confronting something it knows, deep down, to be true.
That is the maze.
And those who built it are now trapped inside it.
The writer is the President of Concerned Igbo Ministers’ Commission
