Nnamdi Kanu’s appeal began at the Court of Appeal, Abuja Division, on Friday after his brief of argument was filed, and IPOB quickly seized on the government’s response to say the conviction it is defending is already undercut from within.
The move matters because Kanu is serving a life sentence in Sokoto prison after Justice James Omotosho convicted him on terrorism charges on 20 November 2025. His appeal now puts that judgment back before judges in Abuja, with the dispute centering on whether the trial court had the power to convict and sentence him at all.
Emma Powerful, speaking for IPOB, said the Federal Government’s own cross-appeal brief amounted to an admission that Omotosho acted without jurisdiction when he imposed life imprisonment instead of the death penalty. He said the government had, in effect, shot itself in the foot by filing a response that appeared to attack the legal footing of the same judgment it wants upheld.
That is the friction at the center of the case. IPOB says the conviction and sentence cannot be separated, and Kanu and his lawyers have argued that the ruling rested on a repealed law. If the Court of Appeal accepts the jurisdiction argument in the way IPOB describes it, the challenge goes beyond punishment and reaches the validity of the conviction itself.
Powerful said the judgment had created a crisis far bigger than Kanu’s fate, and that any attempt to affirm the conviction while accepting the government’s jurisdiction argument would require a legal theory unknown to Nigeria and beyond. That is why the next stage of the appeal will matter so much: the court must decide whether the government’s cross-appeal weakens the case it is trying to preserve, or whether the conviction can survive despite the jurisdiction fight now at the center of the record.
