Nnamdi Kanu’s Current Lawyers Blame Former Counsel for Failure to Challenge Stay of Execution
Nnamdi Kanu’s defence team has attributed the IPOB leader’s prolonged detention and subsequent conviction to the failure of his former lawyers, Mike Ozekhome, SAN, and Ifeanyi Ejiofor, to file a preliminary objection against the Federal Government’s application for a stay of execution of a 2022 Court of Appeal judgment that had freed him.
In a statement issued on Saturday by Christopher Chidera, Esq., on behalf of the defence team, the lawyers said Kanu was a free man after the Court of Appeal on October 13, 2022, unanimously discharged and acquitted him. The appellate court had declared his extraordinary rendition from Kenya illegal, stripped the Federal High Court of jurisdiction, and quashed the charges against him.
“The case was over. Freedom was minutes away,” Chidera said.
According to the statement, the Federal Government then filed what the defence described as an irregular “civil stay of execution” application. Chidera argued that the defence team’s responsibility at that point was to file a preliminary objection challenging the court’s jurisdiction to entertain the application.
He maintained that the Court of Appeal had already become functus officio after fully determining the criminal appeal, that the Federal Government was in contempt of an existing court order refusing to release Kanu, and that the law was clear. Instead of raising the jurisdictional challenge, the former counsel responded with counter-affidavits and argued the merits of the stay application, the statement said.
The result, Chidera claimed, was that the stay was granted. A different panel of the Court of Appeal later used civil procedure rules to nullify the criminal discharge, leaving Kanu in DSS custody for 14 months without fresh charges.
The unchallenged stay application, the defence team said, paved the way for the Supreme Court to reverse Kanu’s discharge on December 15, 2023. Kanu was later convicted and sentenced to life imprisonment on charges that a superior court had previously quashed.
Chidera noted that Kanu had recently announced that Ejiofor no longer represents him or IPOB. Ozekhome and Ejiofor had served as his defence counsel in the terrorism trial before he opted to represent himself.
The statement further alleged that when Kanu’s family sought accountability, Ejiofor declined to accept responsibility and instead launched a smear campaign against Kanu’s brothers, damaged relationships, and allegedly fed falsehoods to Kanu’s wife. It accused him of continuing to attack his former client publicly while “concealing his fundamental procedural failure.”
The defence team insisted that the episode amounted to professional negligence that cost Kanu his freedom rather than a loss to a superior legal argument. It called for transparency, stating that the Kanu family, the legal profession and the Nigerian public deserve answers.
Now what is the way forward. ???
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