The leader of the proscribed Indigenous People of Biafra (IPOB), Nnamdi Kanu on Sunday made his first public broadcast since he went into self-exile some 13 months ago.
Kanu in the broadcast insisted he was returning fully and is “coming back with hell.”
“I have returned full-time and I am coming home and I will bring hell with me,” Nnamdi Kanu said on a live broadcast on Radio Biafra which commenced 6 p.m. on Sunday.
The live broadcast, monitored on the ‘Radio Biafra’ Facebook page, comes two days after social media went agog over a video showing Kanu praying in Israel 13 months after he disappeared with whereabouts unknown.
His lawyer, Ifeanyi Ejiofor, who had repeatedly accused the Nigerian Army for his client’s disappearance, confirmed the video, saying he had received a direct statement from Kanu saying the video was not doctored.
One of Mr Kanu’s associates, Femi Fani-Kayode, a former aviation minister, also said on Saturday that he received a call from “my brother” (Kanu) and that they are working together to remove President Muhammadu Buhari come 2019.
“We have agreed to work together to VOTE Buhari out”, he tweeted on his handle @realFFK on Saturday.
Kanu in Sunday’s broadcast, however, said his group is not interested in anything else other than for the government to set a date for a referendum.
“We will not relent till referendum is conducted. We stand for the truth. It’s referendum or nothing else,” he noted.
Recall that the embattled IPOB leader has been at the vanguard of the call for an independent Biafra Republic from the Nigerian state through referendum.
The IPOB leader, who is facing charges of treasonable felony at the Federal High Court in Abuja, had called for a boycott of elections in Anambra last November if government failed to set a date for referendum.
The call for boycott failed as clashes occurred last September – two months before the Anambra election, between IPOB members and soldiers when the military commenced an operation in South-east states.
Since then, his whereabouts has remained unknown until his reappearance in Friday’s footage and Sunday’s broadcast.
While thanking the governments of the U.S. and Germany for not accepting that IPOB is a terror group, Kanu criticised the Nigerian military and government for invading his country home in Abia State and proscribing the group.
“They are doing all they can to hold us down but we are still here. They fabricate falsehood.
“IPOB is very special. The largest black movement in the world,” he claimed.
