A Nigerian lawyer has argued that the life sentence imposed on Indigenous People of Biafra (IPOB) leader Nnamdi Kanu cannot stand because the Federal High Court convicted him under a terrorism law that had already been repealed.
Justice James Omotosho of the Federal High Court in Abuja found Kanu guilty on seven terrorism-related counts on 20 November 2025 and sentenced him to life imprisonment. The judge said the prosecution had proved the charges. Kanu, who later represented himself, maintained throughout that the court had no jurisdiction and that no valid penal law supported the case. He did not open a defence.
In a legal commentary, Christopher Chidera said the central issue is which written statute defined the offences and fixed the penalty on the day of conviction. He pointed to Section 36(12) of the 1999 Constitution, which bars a criminal conviction unless the offence and its punishment are set out in a written law.
Chidera said Kanu was convicted under the Terrorism Prevention (Amendment) Act 2013, which was repealed when the Terrorism (Prevention and Prohibition) Act 2022 came into force. He argued that Section 98(3) of the 2022 Act, which the judgment invoked, does not create an offence or prescribe a penalty. In his view, that clause can preserve a pending proceeding, accrued liability, or an earlier sentence; it cannot revive a repealed penal statute or supply the missing written law required by the Constitution.
He also said the court did not identify corresponding offence-creating provisions of the 2022 Act as the basis of the conviction, and that Kanu was given no chance to contest any such mapping.
According to Chidera, Kanu raised the repeal on 4 November 2025 and asked the court to take judicial notice of it under Section 122 of the Evidence Act. He alleged that the judge declined and instead pointed to an earlier no-case ruling that, Chidera said, never decided whether the 2013 Act still applied.
Chidera further alleged that Section 98(3) was not in the charge, was not argued in open court, and first appeared on page 78 of the judgment. Kanu, he said, therefore never had an opportunity to respond that a savings clause preserves a proceeding, not the repealed Act itself.
He also criticised the judge’s use of the phrase “assuming without conceding” on the repeal point, arguing that a court cannot treat as undecided an issue it must determine before entering a conviction.
Chidera cited Supreme Court authority, including what he described as the holding in State v. Egigia (2024), that a repealed law is dead and cannot be applied as if it remains in force. He said Justice Omotosho referred to that principle but then treated the 2013 Act as still operational.
Kanu leads IPOB, which seeks an independent Biafra in Nigeria’s south-east. He was first arrested in 2015, later fled while on bail, and was returned from Kenya in 2021. The government charged him with terrorism-related offences tied to broadcasts, sit-at-home orders, and alleged incitement of attacks on security forces. IPOB was proscribed under the earlier terrorism framework. Prosecutors sought the death penalty; the judge imposed life terms on several counts, with concurrent lesser terms on others, saying capital punishment is now widely disfavoured.
The 2022 terrorism statute expressly repealed the prior Terrorism (Prevention) Act 2011, as amended in 2013. Defence lawyers have argued since before judgment that a later de novo stage of the case could not lawfully proceed on the old Act. The Federal Government and the trial court proceeded on the basis that the prosecution and the savings provisions of the 2022 law kept the case alive.
Chidera said the Court of Appeal should treat the trial as vitiated: the repeal issue was not resolved, Section 98(3) was introduced only at judgment, and the conviction rested on a statute no longer in force. He concluded that, without a written law in force on 20 November 2025, the conviction is a nullity.
Kanu’s lawyers have pursued that argument on appeal. The state maintains that the charges were properly tried and that the conviction should stand. An appellate court will have to decide whether the 2013 Act could still ground a 2025 conviction, what the 2022 savings and transitional clauses actually preserve, and whether Section 36(12) was satisfied.
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