TheCable

Uchechi Kanu, wife of Nnamdi Kanu, leader of the Indigenous People of Biafra (IPOB), says her husband is ready to trade her and his children for Biafra.

In an interview with THISDAY, Uchechi said her husband is obsessed with Biafra to the point of “insanity”.

“He is a man that is obsessed with Biafra to the point of insanity and many times he has said publicly that he would gladly sacrifice me, the children and the wider family, if that is what it would take for Biafra to be free,” she said.

“That is the type of man Nigeria is facing, and that is the kind of man my husband is.”

Kanu’s wife said she would not advise her husband to jettison his struggle for Biafra.

She explained that to him, “freedom from oppression is the holy grail”.

“Anybody advising him to jettison the struggle, he will despise. That is his personality,” she said.

“All he thinks about is Biafra and he would always say that he can only be regarded as a complete man when he’s able to rise up in the morning as a free man with Biafran flag flying on top of our house. That is what he always told me.”

Asked to speak about how she met him, and if he came across as a freedom fighter when their paths first crossed, she said: “I met my husband in my hometown but that will be a story for another time.”

Pressed further, she responded, “It won’t be now. I can only tell you that being married to my husband has been ethereal even though as with every marriage it has its ups and downs. This period especially, encapsulates this feeling more than any other period. I feel down because he is not here with us but at the time I feel elated because he is fighting a noble cause – the contradictions of life.

“He probably didn’t want to frighten me with it. As it turned out he kept it very close to his chest. You wouldn’t think he is because he is a softly-spoken gentleman and sometimes very reserved. The one thing that stood out from day one was that he abhors injustice against all peoples and was always complaining about how poor people were treated anytime he visited home from the UK.

“He would complain about everything that is wrong with the society from poor electricity supply to inadequate housing, bad roads, check points, general poverty and every other social problem plaguing the people. It never occurred to me at the time that he would regard the liberation of Biafra as that all-encompassing solution to effect those improvements in our lives that he talked endlessly about.”