Lawyer: Kanu's conviction rests on a chain of "unauthorised acts"

From Godwin Tsa,, Abuja

A lawyer, Christopher Chidera, has argued that the conviction and life sentence of Indigenous People of Biafra (IPOB) leader Mazi Nnamdi Kanu cannot stand, saying the Court of Appeal, the Supreme Court and the Federal High Court each committed a separate illegality.

In a public briefing note, Chidera said Kanu was discharged and the charges against him quashed on 13 October 2022, and that every later step lacked a lawful foundation. “What followed was not a lawful trial continuing,” he said. “It was one unauthorised act stacked on another until conviction and life imprisonment.”

His argument rests on one distinction: proceedings can survive the repeal of a law, but the repealed penal law itself cannot. A savings clause, he said, may keep a pending case alive, but it does not revive the repealed statute or identify the written law that created the offence and penalty on the day of conviction. That question, he said, is settled by section 36(12) of the Constitution.

Chidera said the Court of Appeal, in a judgment by Justice Tsammani (now a Justice of the Supreme Court), became functus officio once it discharged Kanu and quashed the counts, and his right to liberty attached immediately. He said a “stay”, a device borrowed from civil cases, was then used to freeze a criminal discharge. He argued that no provision of the Constitution, the Court of Appeal Act or the Court of Appeal Rules authorises this, and that no settled precedent supports it.

He said the Supreme Court, in a judgment by Justice Lawal Garba, could set aside the Court of Appeal’s decision or order a fresh trial, but could not order that the trial “continue” on counts that had been quashed. Once quashed, he argued, the charge was no longer before the trial court. He also said the court lacked power to hand the trial court jurisdiction that statute does not give, and that framing charges is the prosecution’s job.

He further faulted the court for describing the repealed Terrorism (Prevention) Act as “extant” and “subsisting”. “A repealed penal law is not still in force,” he said, adding that a decision built on that description cannot lawfully restart a dead accusation.

Chidera said the 2022 Terrorism (Prevention and Prohibition) Act repealed the earlier law, and that its savings provisions can preserve a pending process but not the old statute as the law defining crime and punishment. He argued that sections 97 and 98 of the new Act do different work and should have carried the case onto the law in force.

He said the trial court, presided over by Justice Omotosho, stopped at the point that the proceeding survived repeal, and did not identify the written law supplying the offence and penalty. He also accused the court of failing to take judicial notice of the repeal, as section 122 of the Evidence Act requires, and said the conviction in 2025 collides with section 36(12). He said the defects “sit on the face of the record.”

Chidera said a lawful criminal judgment requires a living charge, a court with that charge before it, and a written law in force creating both offence and penalty. Without these, he said, a conviction has “no legal floor”. He challenged the authorities to show the law that revived the quashed counts, the law that kept a repealed statute in force, and the law that defined the offences and penalties on the day of conviction.

“Prestige is not a defence,” he said. “The record is the indictment.”