Sunday 23 November 2025
Sir Ifeanyi Ejiofor’s statement of 22 November 2025, titled Nnamdi Kanu’s Avoidable Ordeal: How Amateur Legal Showmen Led a High-Profile Case into a Judicial Ambush, is less a sober reflection than a meticulously crafted attempt at personal exoneration. Having led Nnamdi Kanu’s defence from 2015 until his team’s departure in late 2023 or early 2024 (the timeline shifts according to convenience), Ejiofor casts himself as the near-miraculous saviour whose “strategic diplomacy” and “airtight legal manoeuvring” were on the cusp of yet another triumph—only to be sabotaged by “clueless clowns” and social-media opportunists. The piece is suffused with self-congratulation, selective amnesia, and a fundamental misreading of the trial as a legal contest that could have been won with better lawyering, rather than the overwhelmingly political show-trial it always was.
The Overwhelmingly Self-Serving Tone: Sanctimony as Shield
Ejiofor begins by cataloguing his own sacrifices—assassination attempts, threats, brushes with death—while assuring readers that divine “Grace” alone preserved him. This is not humility; it is hagiography deployed as armour. He claims his team stood “on the threshold of securing yet another major relief” after the Court of Appeal’s 2022 discharge and acquittal, only for progress to be derailed when Kanu innocently shared “sensitive details” with the wrong people. No evidence is offered for this alleged betrayal, nor any explanation as to why, after nearly a decade in charge, Ejiofor’s supposedly infallible strategy never quite crossed the finish line. Instead, he departs “gloriously, with our integrity intact,” leaving the reader to infer that everyone who followed lacked both competence and honour.
This is blame-shifting dressed as lamentation. By branding his successors “bloated, delusional entertainers-in-wigs” who prioritised Instagram poses over case law, Ejiofor deflects attention from the glaring question: if his own tenure was so triumphant, why was Nnamdi Kanu still in detention by the time he walked away?
Misreading a Political Execution as a Legal Failure
Ejiofor’s central flaw is to treat Kanu’s trial as a winnable legal battle that was lost through incompetence and theatrics. In reality, it was 90 per cent political theatre from the outset—a predetermined outcome orchestrated at the highest levels of the Nigerian state. Omoyele Sowore stated publicly as early as 5 November 2025 that the verdict had been “decided far in advance” through a “high-level political conspiracy” within the Tinubu administration. After the conviction, he described the judgment as “the execution of a political decision already taken long before the court sat,” likening it to the judicial murder of Ken Saro-Wiwa in 1995.
When judges can interpret a defendant’s exercise of the constitutional right to self-representation as an “admission of guilt,” when the Supreme Court reverses its own Court of Appeal’s finding of illegal rendition purely to keep the case alive, and when the defendant is whisked off to solitary confinement in Sokoto immediately after sentencing, no volume of “strategic diplomacy” or “mastery of case law” was ever going to alter the script. Ejiofor’s insistence that the conviction was “entirely avoidable” had the right team remained in charge betrays a breathtaking naïvety about the nature of political trials in authoritarian-leaning systems.
Aloy Ejimakor’s Damning Counter-Narrative: Even the Revered SANs Knew It Was a Slaughterhouse
Far from being mysteriously “disengaged” as Ejiofor suggests, the eminent Senior Advocates—Chief Kanu Agabi, SAN, and Chief Onyechi Ikpeazu, SAN—stepped away precisely because they recognised that proceeding under the prevailing political climate would amount to “leading Kanu to the slaughterhouse.” Aloy Ejimakor, Kanu’s Special Counsel, has been unequivocal: the SANs concluded that the government had already resolved to jail Kanu regardless of legal merit. Their withdrawal was therefore not a hijacking by “mediocre adventurers” but a principled recognition of futility. Ejiofor’s eulogising of these same lawyers as “world-class physicians” abandoned mid-surgery is thus revealed as disingenuous; they saw the rigged game and refused to lend it further legitimacy.
Where We Go From Here
Ejiofor closes with a call for “soberness,” “competence,” and an end to “social-media theatrics”—a plea that would carry more weight had it not been delivered via a lengthy, viral, insult-laden broadside of his own. Genuine progress now requires acknowledgement that Kanu’s conviction was never a legal failure but a political success for the Nigerian state. Appeals must be pursued, of course, but the primary arena is no longer the courtroom. It is international diplomatic pressure, sustained mass mobilisation, and relentless exposure of the sham proceedings that offer the only realistic path forward.
Sir Ifeanyi Ejiofor’s statement ultimately tells us far more about his own anxieties than about the forces that condemned Nnamdi Kanu. While he rails against “jesters” and “TikTok carnivals,” the real clowns have always sat in Aso Rock, pulling judicial strings with impunity.
