The United States-based counsel to the detained leader of the Indigenous People of Biafra (IPOB) Nnamdi Kanu, Bruce Fein, has called on President Bola Ahmed Tinubu to release the pro-Biafra activist immediately.

In an open letter to President Tinubu entitled, “Continued Criminal Detention of Mazi Nnamdi Kanu,” dated September 23, 2023, Fein stated that Kanu’s continued detention is illegal and criminal.

While describing the IPOB leader’s arrest as kidnapping, he demanded the release of Kanu from detention in compliance with the order of the United Nations Human Rights Council Working Group.

In the letter, the American lawyer told Tinubu: “You confront a choice between becoming a firefight or being the fire. The former would crown you with a possible Nobel Prize. The latter could consign you to Dante’s Seve Circles of Hell as portrayed in his Divine Comedy. You would become a firefighter by immediately ending the criminal, illegal detention of Nnamdi Kanu as ordered by the United Nations Working Group on Arbitrary Detention and Nigeria’s Court of Appeal over a year ago.”

He said the Nigerian government, earlier headed by President Muhammadu Buhari, exemplified lawlessness.

According to him: “On multiple occasions, the Nigerian government denied me the right to meet with my client or to be present in the courtroom to observe Nnamdi Kanu’s proceedings and to consult (but not to act as a licensed Nigerian practitioner).

“Nnamdi Kanu is every bit as much the leader of Biafrans as Nelson Mandela was for South Africa’s blacks.”

Fein told President Tinubu to emulate the government of South Africa under President F. W. de Klerk, which “released Nelson Mandela from Robben Island and negotiated an end to black subjugation.”

According to him, “for his political courage, vision, and magnanimity, President de Klerk was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1993 jointly with Mandela,” adding: “Persisting in the wrong thing will bring you no respite. In the matter of Nnamdi Kanu’s release from criminal detention, the cause endures, the hope still lives, and the dream will never die until fulfilled.”

Recall that despite an Appeal Court judgment setting Kanu free, the Federal Government has continued holding him at the detention facility of the Directorate of State Security Service (DSS) while appealing the case with the Supreme Court.