Enyinaya Abaribe, Senator representing Abia South Senatorial District, has filed an application before a Federal High Court Abuja, asking the court to compel Tukur Buratai, Chief of Army Staff, to produce, Nnamdi Kanu, leader of the Indigenous People Of Biafra (IPOB), in court.
Abaribe wants the court to order that if Buratai fails to produce Kanu, he (Buratai) should be made to pay the N100 million bail bond attached to Kanu’s release.
He also wants Buratai to pay him the sum of N10 million as damages for the psychological trauma which he had been through as a result of Buratai’s actions.
Abaribe was one of the three persons that stood in as sureties for Kanu as in fulfillment of the latter’s bail conditions. Each of the sureties was required to deposit N100 million.
On October 17, Justice Binta Nyako had ordered that Abaribe and the other sureties must appear before her on the next adjourned date to show cause why a warrant of arrest should not be granted against them.
She however ruled that Abaribe can only be excused if he produced Kanu, or be ready to forfeit the N100 million bail bond.
In the application filed by Abaribe, he said that all his attempts and efforts by to contact Kanu by whatever means had failed completely and that nobody except the Army can give any account of him.
Acording to him, Kanu’s disappearance was caused by the “whimsical, capricious, subversive and extra-judicial self-help” embarked upon by the Nigerian Army on the orders of Buratai.
The “extra-judicial self-help conduct obviously frustrated the proceedings and course of administration of justice,” Chukwuma Machukwu-Ume, lawyer to Abaribe, stated.
Machukwu-Ume maintained that Buratai’s “actions have brought the honourable court to some ridicule and its power appear nugatory as well as placing in a fixed up position.”
He therefore wants the court to direct Buratai to explain to the court why the Attorney-General of the Federation should not “be compelled to initiate contempt charges/proceedings against him for his extra-judicial self-help conducts”.