A legal analyst and counsel, Christopher Chidera Esq., has issued a detailed rebuttal to an assessment by ECULAW on the appeal filed in the case involving IPOB leader, Nnamdi Kanu, arguing that the review fundamentally misunderstood the structure and substance of the appeal brief before the court.
In a statement titled “Rebuttal: The ECULAW Assessment Misreads the Brief’s Actual Structure,” Chidera contended that ECULAW evaluated the appeal as though it consisted of separate and unrelated legal complaints, whereas the filed brief presents eight interconnected constitutional requirements that must all be satisfied before a conviction can stand.
According to him, the appeal adopts what he described as a “vertical” approach, asking a chain of linked constitutional questions relating to lawful seisin, the existence of an extant written law, personal jurisdiction, proof of allegations, fair hearing, and the survival of any legal dispute. He argued that failure of any one of these conditions would render the entire proceeding invalid.
The lawyer maintained that ECULAW instead employed a “horizontal” method by assessing each issue independently and assigning separate strength ratings, thereby overlooking what he described as the core structure of the appeal.
Addressing the first issue in the appeal, Chidera rejected suggestions that it was merely a general argument about the repeal of legislation. He stated that the brief was anchored on a question posed in the Supreme Court’s remittal judgment concerning whether the statutes cited in the charge sheet remained valid and subsisting laws in Nigeria.
He argued that the appeal treats this question as a threshold requirement and contends that the charge sheet relied on statutes that were no longer in force as of March 21, 2025. According to him, ECULAW failed to evaluate this “gateway argument” on its own terms and instead subsumed it under a broader debate on the legal consequences of repeal.
On the second issue, Chidera said the appeal focuses on whether an extant written law was consistently applied throughout the entire criminal process—from charge and plea to trial and conviction. He noted that the brief relies on the trial court’s own position that a conviction cannot exist without a valid written law and argues that neither the prosecution nor the court identified such a law operating throughout the process.
The rebuttal also defended the appeal’s fair hearing arguments, insisting that complaints about denial of final address and allocutus were not ordinary procedural grievances. Rather, he said, they were directly connected to unresolved jurisdictional and statutory objections which the appellant had expected to address in final written submissions before conviction was entered.
Chidera further challenged ECULAW’s criticism of Issue Seven, which concerns jurisdiction under the Terrorism (Prevention and Prohibition) Act, 2022. He argued that the appeal raises a statutory competence question regarding the requirement of double criminality in cases involving international elements.
According to him, the appeal contends that where Parliament places a requirement within the jurisdictional provisions of a statute, courts cannot treat it as optional. He maintained that the brief argues jurisdiction could not arise unless that requirement was first established.
On Issue Eight, Chidera rejected claims that the appeal seeks to invalidate or declare unconstitutional a Supreme Court judgment. Instead, he said the appeal raises questions about the legal consequences of the Court of Appeal’s October 13, 2022 judgment, whether constitutional protections against double jeopardy were triggered, and what legal authority permitted the continuation of proceedings thereafter.
He argued that the appeal relies on existing judicial authorities to contend that once proceedings have been finally terminated in an accused person's favour by a higher court, any subsequent prosecution must follow a recognised legal process rather than simply resume.
Responding to concerns that the appeal brief is overly lengthy and built on “cascading theories,” Chidera said the document openly explains its structure and that its extensive arguments were necessitated by what he described as the trial court’s refusal to provide normal opportunities for those issues to be fully ventilated at first instance.
In his concluding remarks, the lawyer acknowledged that the appellate court may ultimately choose a narrower legal route in determining the matter. However, he insisted that any fair evaluation must first engage with the arguments as presented in the filed brief rather than with what he described as simplified versions of those arguments.
“The filed text shows these issues are framed more narrowly, technically, and consistently than that,” he stated, adding that the ECULAW assessment failed to adequately confront several of the appeal’s central constitutional and jurisdictional arguments.
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