Finally, Simon Ekpa has been arrested. The man who has styled himself the Prime Minister of the Biafran Government in Exile is cooling his heels in detention in Finland. To say that the man has blood on his hands would be an understatement, having overtly instigated the violence and mayhem that has continued to claim lives in Southeast Nigeria.
Through his social media and some innocuous Radio Biafra broadcasts, Mr Ekpa has continued to impose “sit-at-home” orders that were meant to function as political activism to pressure Nigeria into letting the Southeast region secede. The only thing it realistically achieved was to terrorise the people Mr Ekpa claimed to be fighting for, resulting in the cold-blooded killing of dozens of people in the region and crippling the region’s economy. Considering that this economy is private-sector driven, championed by the industrious people of the region, the policy became counterproductive.
Ekpa orchestrated this violence while living with his family in Finland, where he also served as a local politician. On Thursday last week, authorities in Finland finally decided they had had enough and nabbed Ekpa and four of his accomplices for terrorism and terrorism financing. These arrests are coming at least a year too late.
Eight months ago, Nigeria declared Ekpa wanted, and three months later, appealed to a visiting EU delegation to extradite him. At the time, Finland’s approach was rather tepid, and they made noises about Ekpa being a citizen. But the fact that a citizen and politician of your country is actively and openly calling for insurrection in another country, openly calling for the killing of innocent people, is enough for you to take serious action. But Finland played hardball.
It was not a good look for the country. Anyone who could access the messages Mr Ekpa was disseminating would see outright that it was preaching hate and inciting violence. Two weeks of data combing and analysis would have brought this up.
Yet Ekpa went about his task because he was allowed to, with verve and a confidence that could only come from naivete. Whatever gave him the confidence that he could continue his criminal actions without consequence because he was in Finland is something that I have yet to understand. Ekpa, it seems, fancies himself a 1960s revolutionary in the mold of Patrice Lumumba and other founding fathers—what with the 1960s haircut and parting? The truth though is that Lumumba Ekpa is not. Founding a nation or trying to get one to secede should not come at the price of having your prospective citizens massacred in cold blood.
With his arrest, different narratives are emerging. Apparently, Ekpa, who has fashioned himself the Prime Minister of Biafra, has denied being a leader of IPOB, which has since come out with a statement denouncing him and clarifying that he is not a member of the proscribed organisation. However, if Senator Abaribe is to be believed, Ekpa told the Finnish authorities that he was only a content creator. Imagine a Prime Minister of content creation! Except his content has led to the deaths of numerous people and the social and economic stagnation of an entire region.
There are two things that made the catastrophe that is Ekpa possible. The first was his “appointment” by Nnamdi Kanu, following his arrest in 2021, to churn out bile-filled broadcasts on Radio Biafra. Prior to that, Ekpa had led a regular life trying to embed himself in Finland while advocating for the secession of Biafra from Nigeria.
The second is the most disturbing. There is an army of gullible Nigerians, so frustrated with Nigeria as a country that they are willing to follow the words of a psychotic terrorist on the radio or on social media to murder their tribesmen and pillage their hometowns.
Of course, they are not the first. Before them, there had been the Boko Haram adherents. Some of them had been regular Nigerians who shredded their school certificates and followed a madman into the forest to wage war against their country, their kin and their home.
Only a few weeks ago, I observed in this space the rise of the Lakurawa terror group, which the Nigerian military was keen to dismiss as a small army, not to be worried about. The failure to realise that the social injustices that have pervaded the land have made Nigeria a fertile recruitment ground for terror organisations like Boko Haram, bandits, Lakurawa, and IPOB needs to be addressed immediately. Just as the threat these organisations present needs to be taken with all seriousness and immediacy.
Could Ekpa have been taken down sooner? Could Nigeria have put more diplomatic pressure on Finland to arrest Ekpa earlier than they did? I think so. We simply cannot condone eminent threats until they manifest. The death of one single life as a result should not be entertained.
It is this lackadaisical approach to handling things and addressing them when they happen that creates the social injustices that give rise to an army of disgruntled Nigerians ripe for the plucking of the next depraved terrorist who will sell them a cause and put guns in their hands.
Nigeria needs to understand that the exploitation of Nigerians by men like Shekau and Ekpa is a symptom of the failure of our social system. We must not wait for the next terror group to emerge or the next terror leader to hound us, but we can try to address the concerns that allow Nigerians to throw themselves at such manipulative characters. If we don’t, then the arrest of Ekpa would not matter in the grand scheme of things because another Ekpa, Shekau, or Turji is waiting in the wings to rise, and thousands of Nigerians would be sold on their ideologies, depraved as they may be.
Nnamdi Kanu, Ekpa, and IPOB are a product of a society—one that, at first, cheered them on as social justice warriors. In the early days, there were debates in support of these organisations and individuals. There were visceral verbal attacks against anyone who called them out. Today, we have all witnessed the consequences of entrusting our hopes to the hands of psychopathic persons with raging bloodlust. We saw that with Shekau and his ilk. We did not need an Ekpa to drive home the lessons.
But the pertinent question here is: have we learned anything from this? If you ask me, I would say not really. Because we are Nigeria. We don’t seem to learn from our history.
In the end, one can only hope that Ekpa gets the justice that he deserves for the crimes that he has caused to be committed in the name of his cause.
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