The rise and fall of Nigerian fugitive leader Nnamdi Kanu

Nigerian fugitive Nnamdi Kanu

Nigeria’s Nnamdi Kanu, the fugitive secessionist leader of the proscribed Indigenous People of Biafra. PHOTO | COURTESY

When Nnamdi Okwu Kanu was born in September 1967 in Afia State, Nigeria was a young nation bracing for its bloodiest civil war yet. The Biafran war, as it is now known, would go on to claim the lives of three million people, mostly from starvation.

More than five decades later, Kanu would go on to carry the torch of the failed separatist dream to create a Biafra State, an entity separate from present-day Nigeria.