The Movement for the Actualisation of the Sovereign State of Biafra has condemned the life sentence handed to the leader of the Indigenous People of Biafra, Mazi Nnamdi Kanu, describing the ruling as politically motivated and an attack on the Igbo people.

In a statement released on Friday by its leader, Comrade Uchenna Madu, the group said the judgment delivered by Justice James Omotosho reflected “open anger and tribalism,” accusing the judge of “sentencing Mazi Nnamdi Kanu to his master’s prison.”

“This is not justice but vengeance from a man playing a script loaded with pathological hatred and jealousy against Ndigbo. “Ndigbo have been sentenced to life imprisonment in Nigeria,” MASSOB said.

Madu added that President Bola Tinubu had “set Nigeria on irredeemable fire,” claiming the ruling had “shot the Nigerian state on her deteriorated foundation.”

The statement added, “Nigeria sentenced Mazi Nnamdi Kanu to life in prison for words spoken from foreign soil after illegally kidnapping him from Kenya, ignoring a United Nations ruling demanding his release, and prosecuting him under a law that no longer exists.”

The group also accused the government of applying double standards in terrorism-related cases. It contrasted Kanu’s punishment with that of Boko Haram co-founder Mamman Nur, who was recently sentenced to five years in prison. Nur, long accused of masterminding attacks that killed thousands, was described by MASSOB as “a chief Islamic terrorist commander responsible for over 2,000 deaths.”

“In Nigeria today, words from London carry a heavier penalty than mass murder,” the group said. “Mazi’s real crime was his bold exposure of the radical Islamic jihad consuming Nigeria and the government’s symbiotic relationship with the jihadists,” MASSOB stated.

MASSOB reiterated that Kanu was not legally extradited but “illegally rendered” to Nigeria from Kenya in 2021. It referenced a June 2025 ruling by Kenyan High Court Justice Anthony Mrima, who reportedly found the rendition to be “a blatant violation” of Kanu’s rights.

The organisation also cited opinions issued by the United Nations Working Group on Arbitrary Detention in 2022 and 2025, which described Kanu’s detention as arbitrary and called for his immediate release.

“The appropriate remedy, they maintained, is his immediate release,” the statement said.

MASSOB further noted that the United States government has publicly stated, since 2017, that it does not consider IPOB a terrorist organisation.

The group criticised the use of what it claimed was “a repealed anti-terror law” to prosecute Kanu, saying the absence of a savings clause further undermines the legality of the charges.

“This injustice is not against Mazi Nnamdi Kanu,” MASSOB said. “It is against Ndigbo.”

The organisation insisted the ruling underscored what it described as the “brutal, lawless, totalitarian nature of a genocidal regime.”

Madu concluded: “Ndigbo have been sentenced to life imprisonment in Nigeria.”

PUNCH Online reports that after nearly four years of jumping bail, Kanu was arrested and extradited to Nigeria through the combined efforts of the Nigerian intelligence operatives and the International Police, commonly known as Interpol.

For years in his sojourn in London, the United Kingdom, where he is also a citizen, Kanu – through social media and Radio Biafra – dished out alleged provocative utterances against the Nigerian state, security agents, South-East governors and other leaders, and the President, Major General Muhammadu Buhari (retd).

As the director of Radio Biafra, a registered radio station in the UK, Kanu propagated Biafran separatism, a movement aiming to restore a separatist state that once existed in the then Eastern Region of Nigeria during the civil war of 1967-70. (PUNCH)