by Mohammed Bello Doka
4 May, 2026.
For nearly a decade, the soil of southeastern Nigeria has run red with blood—not just the blood of security agents, but of Fulani herders, northern traders, and innocent civilians caught in the crossfire of a war many dared not name. That war, meticulously orchestrated by the Indigenous People of Biafra (IPOB) and its armed militia, the Eastern Security Network (ESN), was built on one foundational pillar: the elimination of Fulani presence from Igbo land.
The sheer scale of the violence is staggering. According to testimony before the Federal High Court in Abuja, between 170 and 200 security operatives lost their lives in the South-East due to IPOB and ESN violence. Figures for Fulani civilians are harder to verify, but the pattern is unmistakable—massacres of herders, mutilation of cattle, and systematic ultimatums demanding the expulsion of all Fulani from the region. Senator Orji Uzor Kalu shocked the nation when he alleged in 2025 that fewer than 30,000 Igbos had also lost their lives to IPOB/ESN attacks, a staggering admission that the beast Nnamdi Kanu unleashed consumed its own as much as its enemies.
The machinery of hate was built for one purpose.
IPOB leader Nnamdi Kanu never hid his agenda. In countless broadcasts from Radio Biafra, he named the enemy explicitly. Before the Federal High Court, prosecution witnesses played recordings where Kanu thundered against “Fulani domination,” declaring: “No Fulani parading as herdsman shall be allowed in our land”. He branded Fulani herders “Janjaweed” and framed the conflict not as ethnic strife but as a religious war—a jihad to Islamize Nigeria. In an April 2026 statement, IPOB claimed that Kanu “prophesied” a coordinated Islamic expansionist agenda, insisting that “he named it, he dated it, he mapped it, he called out the Fulani Janjaweed militias as the vanguard of this jihad”.
Armed with this apocalyptic worldview, IPOB constructed the Eastern Security Network—an armed wing created explicitly to enforce Kanu’s ultimatums. By 2024, IPOB had declared the entire South-East a “no-go area” for Fulani herders. When President Bola Tinubu proposed ranching settlements as a solution, IPOB’s spokesman Emma Powerful responded with defiance: “Biafra territory is a no-go area”. In 2025, IPOB accused Enugu State Governor Peter Mbah of accepting N30 billion to release land for Fulani settlement, vowing that “ESN operatives will continue to make Alaigbo (South-East) uncomfortable for the Fulani terrorists until they leave”.
The body count tells the truth.
Between 2020 and 2024, herder-farmer conflicts across Nigeria claimed no fewer than 2,349 lives, according to Nextier’s database, with hundreds more dying in 2025 alone. In the South-East, the violence took a particularly one-sided character. In February 2025, a single attack in Ebonyi State killed 18 people and led to the destruction of approximately 140 cows. In 2021, suspected IPOB militants slaughtered 19 Fulani herders—including women and children—in Anambra’s Igbariam community, mutilating their calves in a display of ritualistic brutality that shocked even hardened security officials.
Even critics within Igbo leadership have admitted the ugly truth. Joe Igbokwe, a prominent Igbo voice, wrote in July 2025: “It is Igbo killing Igbo, it is Igbo destroying Igboland and putting the blame on Hausa/Fulani herdsmen”. The narrative of Fulani aggression, he suggested, had become a convenient mask for internecine Igbo violence.
Then came 2026, and everything changed.
On May 4, 2026—barely days ago—former Anambra governor Peter Obi and former Kano governor Rabiu Musa Kwankwaso formally joined the Nigeria Democratic Congress (NDC), setting the stage for a joint presidential ticket in 2027. The “OK Movement” (Obi-Kwankwaso) was born: a strategic marriage between Obi’s Obidients in the South-East and Kwankwaso’s Kwankwasiyya movement in the North-West.
But let us not mince words. Rabiu Musa Kwankwaso is not just a northern politician. He is a former governor of Kano State who governed under a strict Sharia legal code—a man whose political base is rooted in northern conservative and Islamic values. For nearly a decade, Nnamdi Kanu and IPOB have railed against the “Fulani Caliphate” and warned of “Islamic domination”. And now, the man their Obidient followers have embraced as their presidential torchbearer is in political alliance with a Fulani northern governor who once upheld Sharia law.
The hypocrisy is breathtaking. The same people who cheered when IPOB issued ultimatums for Fulani to leave the South-East; the same people who nodded when Kanu called Fulani herders “Janjaweed”; the same people who watched as ESN operatives killed Fulani families and destroyed their cattle—these same people are now asked to vote for a ticket that includes a northern Fulani ally.
So the question burns: Will IPOB stop killing our people?
The answer, tragically, is almost certainly no. IPOB’s structure is not a political organization that takes orders from Peter Obi. It is a decentralized militant network with its own command hierarchy, its own funding streams, and its own messianic devotion to Nnamdi Kanu—who remains in detention serving a life sentence after his conviction. IPOB has already rejected any suggestion of compromise. In March 2024, when Tinubu proposed land donations for ranching, IPOB spokesperson Emma Powerful warned: “Biafrans have no land for Fulanis for whatever purpose”. In 2026, IPOB continues to issue statements about the “Fulani Janjaweed militias” being the vanguard of an Islamic jihad.
An alliance between politicians in Abuja does not reach the forest camps where ESN militants train. It does not reach the young men who have been radicalized by years of Kanu’s broadcasts, who believe they are fighting a holy war to reclaim Biafran land from “Fulani invaders.” And it certainly does not undo the deep, generational hatred that has been nurtured and weaponized for political ends.
The marriage of convenience between Obi and Kwankwaso may help them challenge President Tinubu in 2027. It may give northern Muslims a reason to support a southern candidate. But will it stop the killing in the South-East? Will Fulani traders feel safe walking through Onitsha market? Will herders graze their cattle in Enugu without fear of ESN death squads?
The silence from the Obidient camp is deafening.
Not a single Obidient leader has publicly condemned IPOB’s violence against Fulani civilians. Not one has called for the disarmament of the Eastern Security Network. Not one has questioned how it is morally consistent to seek political alliance with the very people their grassroots supporters have been taught to hate. The Obidients wanted political power, and they got it—by shaking hands with the “Fulani Caliphate” they once swore to oppose.
In the end, the killing will stop only when the machinery of hate is dismantled. That will require political courage—the kind that tells IPOB that Fulani lives matter, that violence is never justified, and that no political ambition is worth the blood of innocents. Until that day arrives, the question will remain unanswered. And the bodies will keep falling.
Mohammed Bello Doka can be reached via [email protected]
Abuja Network News
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Opinion