The jailed leader of the Indigenous People of Biafra (IPOB), Mazi Nnamdi Kanu, has teamed up with an American ally, Mike Arnold, to issue a sweeping revolutionary manifesto demanding the immediate dismantling of Nigeria’s current political structure.
Titled “The Sokoto Declaration: A Call to Rise Up and Free the Land Known as Nigeria,” the heavily worded document was jointly released on Saturday, May 30, 2026.
The manifesto, authenticated by Kanu’s special counsel of record, Aloy Ejimakor, Esq., was smuggled out of Kanu’s current place of detention in Sokoto. It is co-signed by Mike Arnold, an American legal actor and founder of ‘Africa Arise International’, who was recently conferred with the Igbo traditional title of ‘Eze Okechukwunenye’.
The declaration directly accuses the Nigerian state of executing a long-standing “conquest” and ethnic cleansing campaign under the guise of “climate change” and “farmer-herder clashes,” while calling on all tribes across the country to unite under a single moral force to topple the ruling elite.
The declaration begins by highlighting the starkly different backgrounds of its two authors, noting that while Kanu remains caged in a prison cell built to silence him, Arnold has crossed the Atlantic Ocean 16 times to document what they describe as a state-sponsored slaughterhouse.
The manifesto pulls no punches, labeling the current political administration in Abuja an “evil regime” that thrives on mass graves, corruption, and the systematic suppression of truth-tellers.
“Today we speak as one to every person of conscience on this land — every tribe, every region, every faith. We share one enemy and one future,” the manifesto reads.
“When darkness covers a people, when truth-tellers are jailed, when a government’s full-time work is hiding mass graves — that is the hour when boldly speaking truth can topple tyrants and set the people free. The hour demands it.”
The declaration breaks down centuries of systemic violence across Nigeria, drawing lines from the 1900 Sokoto Caliphate —which it defines as “among the largest slave societies in modern history” — to the genocidal Biafra-Nigeria War that claimed between 3.6 to 5 million lives.
Crucially, the manifesto integrates the current security crisis ripping through Nigeria’s Middle Belt and Southern regions, where it claims over 180,000 deaths have been documented alongside 19,000 destroyed churches since 2009.
“This is not farmer-herder conflict. Not climate change. Not a misunderstanding. This is conquest — one of the longest patterns of targeted violence and displacement in modern history. It ends now.
“Every barrel [of oil] taken under cover of massacre is theft. Every kilogram of ore dug from under the homes of the displaced is soaked in innocent blood. Every dollar that flows to foreign accounts while children starve is theft.”
In a brilliant legal twist, Kanu and Arnold invoked Nigeria’s own ‘Terrorism Prevention and Prohibition Act 2022’ to argue that the federal government is technically a terrorist entity under its own domestic statutes.
The manifesto references Section 2, subsection (3)(f) of the Act, which explicitly states that any act constituting a breach of the African Charter on Human and Peoples’ Rights is an act of terrorism under Nigerian law.
“Let the world hear this clearly: Article 20 of the African Charter guarantees the right to self-determination, and the continued, systematic violation of this right against Biafrans and other all Nigerians — including the persecution and imprisonment of Mazi Nnamdi Okwu Kanu — places the Nigerian state in direct, self-inflicted violation of its own anti-terrorism legislation,” the document brilliantly argues.
While the authors explicitly state that they are not calling for chaos, vengeance, or unjust violence, they made it clear that they are not pacifists. The declaration boldly asserts the right of local communities across Nigeria to defend themselves with “overwhelming lethal force” against armed invaders.
“Every people has the God-given right to defend its life, protect its families, and secure its communities — with overwhelming lethal force if the moment demands it. We affirm that right without apology and without condition. Peace is not passivity.”
To achieve a permanent solution, the declaration calls for international bodies, foreign governments, and human rights institutions to bypass the Federal Government and support an internationally supervised process to create a brand-new constitutional framework rooted in genuine self-determination.
MJConceptTV News reports that the release of “The Sokoto Declaration” on May 30 carries immense political and historical weight, coinciding exactly with the 59th anniversary of the historical declaration of Biafra.
Kanu’s referencing of his status as a “Prisoner of Conscience, Sokoto” confirms behind-the-scenes movements by federal authorities who secretly transferred the IPOB leader away from the Department of State Services (DSS) headquarters in Abuja to a remote confinement facility in the far north, in a bid to isolate him from his core support base.
The partnership with Mike Arnold—an American legal figure capable of pulling diplomatic strings in Washington—signals a massive shift in IPOB’s strategy. Rather than fighting a localized battle, the movement is now framing Nigeria’s crisis as a unified struggle for all oppressed ethnic nationalities.