A member of Nnamdi Kanu’s legal team, Aloy Ejimakor, has argued that the prosecution’s failure to specify the exact foreign countries from which the IPOB leader made his broadcasts constitutes a fundamental legal flaw that strips the Federal High Court of jurisdiction over his terrorism conviction.
Kanu’s terrorism-related charges were based on broadcasts he made between 2018 and 2021 from outside Nigeria, presumed to be Britain and Kenya. Ejimakor contends that because the charge sheet did not name the specific countries involved, the case fails to satisfy a “double criminality” requirement under Nigerian law, which he says obliges prosecutors to show that the alleged conduct would also constitute an offense under the laws of the country where it occurred.
He further argued that political speech advocating self-determination and self-defense against attacks in southeastern Nigeria would be unlikely to qualify as terrorism under the domestic laws of the UK or Kenya, reinforcing his view that the charges were defective from the outset.
Ejimakor, who led Kanu’s defense team between February 2024 and February 2025, said these same jurisdictional arguments had previously succeeded in delaying Kanu’s trial and now form the basis of an appeal against his conviction and life sentence handed down by Justice James Omotosho in November. He has separately maintained that prosecutors never established a direct link between Kanu’s broadcasts and specific acts of violence in the South-East, arguing his client was convicted for words rather than proven criminal conduct.
Kanu’s legal team has said it will pursue the case through the Court of Appeal and, if necessary, the Supreme Court.
