When the weight of words spoken is weightier than whatever response it may attract, my people say Oro p’esi je. The English say such wordless period is an ineffable moment. In its literal rendition, perhaps saying it better than the English and more graphically too, the Yoruba say “word has killed response.” Even at the height of his musical wizardry, the dictatorship of the Nigerian military government killed appropriate response from Fela Anikulapo-Kuti. So, in one of his songs, Fela turned the wordlessness into musical rhapsody. With the declaration by a Canadian court on June 17, 2025 that the two leading Nigerian political parties, the PDP and APC, are terrorist organisations, the court declaration provokes similar wordlessness. What immediately jumps up one’s lips is Fela’s “Oro p’esi je o… rere run.”
In Nigerians’ faintest imagination, no one expected such extreme labeling from Canada. Certainly not from a temple of justice. While delivering judgment in an asylum case involving a Nigerian national, Douglas Egharevba, Justice Phuong Ngo upheld an earlier decision of the Canadian Immigration Appeal Division (IAD) which denied asylum to him. It cited Egharevba’s decade-long affiliation with the PDP and APC. Justice Ngo then affirmed that, under paragraph 34(1)(f) of Canada’s Immigration and Refugee Protection Act (IRPA), “mere membership of an organization linked to terrorism or democratic subversion” could trigger inadmissibility of an applicant for asylum – even without proof of personal involvement.
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Earlier court filings by Canada’s Minister of Public Safety and Emergency Preparedness had submitted that the two Nigerian political parties were implicated in “political violence, democratic subversion, and electoral bloodshed” which were further buttressed, among other incidents, by the PDP’s alleged violent conducts in the 2003 state elections and 2004 local government polls. The minister cited widespread ballot stuffing, voter intimidation, and the killing of opposition supporters in those elections. The IAD said its findings indicated that the two parties’ leadership benefited from the violence, didn’t see a need to stop it and that, under paragraph 34(1)(b.1) of the Immigration and Refugee Protection Act (IRPA), such acts met Canada’s legal definition of subversion and terrorism.
Expectedly, both APC and PDP are blowing their tops. Fulminating, the PDP labeled the classification as “misinformed, biased, and lacking evidence,” and deserving outright dismissal by any right-thinking person. Its Deputy National Youth Leader, Timothy Osadolor, was quoted as saying, “There’s nothing on text to show that even the malfunctioning APC is a terrorist organisation or the PDP, which is a credible institution…If they wanted to say that some individuals in the government, particularly the APC government, have traces to terrorism… they will have a case. But to say an entire political party is a terrorist organization is wrong.”
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A former NNPC spokesperson, Olufemi Soneye, also called Justice Ngo’s pronouncement an overreach. He warned that, “If democratic nations don’t push back on this kind of overreach, they may one day find their own politics on trial in a foreign court.”
The APC, through its National Secretary, Ajibola Bashiru, in his characteristic gruff persona, chose to descend down a logical pitfall called ad hominem. Rather than the issue, persons accused of this argumentative pitfall attack persons. So, to Bashiru, the judge was “an ignoramus.” Thereafter, he queried the Canadian court’s jurisdiction to determine the status of a Nigerian recognised political party “not to talk of declaring it as a terrorist organization… The so-called judgment was obviously delivered from a jaundiced perspective and within the narrow confines of determining eligibility for asylum by an applicant.” Lastly, Bashiru queried “some desperate and unpatriotic Nigerians” who seek greener pastures elsewhere, who he said “allow the name of the country to be brought to unpalatable commentary by racist judges on account of self contrived application for asylum.”
The Federal Government, too in a statement issued by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs’ spokesperson, Kimiebi Ebienfa, described the judgment as “baseless, reckless and an unacceptable interference in Nigeria’s internal affairs.”
Now, the issues are not as straightforward as the persons above saw them. At least three issues are implicated in the Canadian judge’s ruling and its subsequent analyses. One, as Bashiru alleged, is racism; second, the state of Nigeria’s electoral/party system and third, the social status of Nigerian citizenship. There is the need to decouple them. First, we should be clear about one fact and it is that, electoral violence is as old as Nigerian electoral system. Violence as icing on the cake of elections gained notoriety during independence and since then, elections in Nigeria have been characterised by high scale electoral malpractices, violence, money politics, and deployment of ethno-religious divide as weapon of influencing votes. Since 20 September, 1923 when the first election in Nigeria was held, Nigerian politicians have scaled up, from one election to the other, the patterns of electoral violence that have today resulted in an epidemic of political violence. Yesterday marked the 42nd bloodied anniversary of Second Republic’s political violence in the old Oyo and Ondo states. On Tuesday, 16 August, 1983, all hell was let loose with multiple political killings in tow in Akure, Ilesa and other parts of the states.
In the April and May 2003 elections that Justice Ngo referenced, according to Human Rights Watch in its report entitled, “The Unacknowledged Violence,” “more than 100 people were killed in election-related violence with many more injured.” The EU Election Observation Mission, (EUEOM) in its “Final Report on the National Assembly, Presidential, Gubernatorial and State Houses of Assembly Elections,” also claimed to have recorded a total of 105 killings in pre-election violence in Nigeria. Continuing, the report claimed that, from publications in the Nigerian press, at least 70 incidents of election-related violence were reported between November 2006 and the middle of March 2007 in 20 of Nigeria’s 36 states. It claimed that the press report “may greatly underestimate the true scale of the problem” judging by a report of another international organisation with a comprehensive conflict monitoring programme in Nigeria, which also claimed it recorded 280 reports of election-related deaths and more than 500 injuries over an eight-week period ending in mid-March of the year. Other Nigerian elections are no less better.
In terms of political assassinations, the Human Rights Watch report said that between 1 November, 2006 and 10 March, 2007, quoting the Nigerian press and other sources, “at least four assassinations and seven attempted assassinations of Nigerian politicians, party officials and other individuals who were directly linked to various electoral campaigns” occurred. It further reported that two most notorious murders involving PDP primaries occurred in mid-2006, and were in respect of PDP gubernatorial aspirants – Funsho Williams in Lagos State and Ayo Daramola in Ekiti State, both of whom were murdered in July and August 2006 respectively. It claimed that though arrests were made in the Daramola murder case, Williams’ murder remained unresolved, with the police claiming it had 244 different “suspects” in custody.
In an interview it conducted with the then Inspector General of Police, Sunday Ehindero on February 20, 2007, Human Rights Watch said the Nigerian police never identified anyone as sponsor of any of the attacks and “have only carried out one investigation into the notorious intra-PDP violence at Akure on February 3, 2007”.
But, was Justice Ngo wrong to have described what happened in the 2003 electoral contest in Nigeria as terrorism? Many scholars have attempted to define what exactly is terrorism. Charles Ruby, in his book, The Definition of Terrorism, (2003) citing Title 22 of the US Code, defined terrorism as a “politically motivated violence perpetrated in a clandestine manner against noncombatants.” He also included in the book another aspect of terrorism defined by experts, which is that, “the act is committed in order to create a fearful state of mind in an audience different from the victims.” So also did Walter Laqueur tow same path. His simple, broad definition of terrorism is that, it “is the illegitimate use of force to achieve a political objective by targeting innocent people”. For Tore Bjorgo, “terrorism involves premeditated use of violence against (primarily) non-combatants in order to achieve a psychological effect of fear on others than the immediate targets.”
If you critically assess the above definitions, viz a viz the level of atrocious political killings and violence that have happened in the last 26 years of democratic practice in Nigeria, it may be difficult to fault Justice Ngo’s labeling of Nigeria’s two topmost political parties as terrorists. The judge quoted paragraphs of the Canadian Immigration and Refugee Protection Act copiously, especially 34(1)(f), upon which he based his judgment. He also alluded to Egharevba’s failure to prove that there were no “political violence, democratic subversion, and electoral bloodshed” in the Nigerian two political parties which the asylum seeker claimed to have been a member of. With this, it is my considered opinion that, faulting the labelling of the political parties by the Canadian judge may sound very impassioned and derisive of prevailing facts.
Yet, the allegation of racism against Justice Ngo may be sustainable. Of a truth, Canada wears on its lapel the myth of a “peaceable kingdom”. This is generally as a result of its genial political culture when compared to Nigeria’s. While the country today has had a limited political terrorism experience when compared to other forms of political conflicts or even other countries of the world, its pedigree does not totally acquit it of violence, nor does it give it a total sainthood. All considered, it could be racist for the judge to abandon his country’s violent past while criminalising Nigeria’s present. Though there is no recency to the reports of Canada’s involvement in violence, Micheal J Kelly and Thomas H Mitchell, in their “The Study of Internal Conflict in Canada: Problems and Prospects,” Conflict Quarterly, Vol. II no. 1 (1981) examined publications of the Canadian newspaper called Globe and Mail from 1965 to 1975 which identified 129 incidents of collective violence in Ontario. Also, Julian Sher, in her White Hoods: Canada’s Ku Klux Klan (1983) examined case studies of terrorist groups or groups using terrorist tactics which operated in Canada. The scholar used the activities of the FLQ, the Sons of Freedom Doukhobors and the Ku Klux Klan (KKK) to peel Canada of any claim to a sainthood pedigree where terrorism is concerned. Whilst numerous terrorist events have occurred in Canada since 1981, the period between 1968 and 1974 is actually the point a glut of such incidents can be located.
When Bashiru now accused “some desperate and unpatriotic Nigerians” seeking greener pastures elsewhere of allowing “the name of the country to be brought to unpalatable commentary” through “self contrived application for asylum,” he must have deliberately played the ostrich, apparently for political reasons. This must have blinded him from seeing the peculiar nature of Nigeria’s social crisis. Over the decades, at least in the last 26 years of the Fourth Republic, both APC and PDP have literally socially and economically grounded this country. Many of the politicians in the ADC today are also complicit in this. Comfortable existence has become a mirage in Nigeria, yet politicians flaunt ill-gotten wealth. It is so bad that Nigerians desperately seek the citizenship of saner countries. Blaming Nigerians who seek bailouts from this socio-economic Gulag inflicted on them by Nigerian politicians will thus sound misplaced and self-centred.
The story of Egharevba in the hands of the Canadian judge is a replica of the aphorism of the “son” of an orange tree which invites multiple stoning and wood-beating from those who want to pluck it. If Nigeria had met his dreams of a place to live, I doubt if Egharevba would have openly disdained his country as this in the hands of a perceived racial judge and system. But come to think of it, this same “racist” Canada opens its arms wide to embrace thousands of Nigerians who possess legitimate papers!
In looking at the Canadian judge’s ruling, Nigeria should look inwards rather than outwards. First lesson to be learned is that, being a global village, not only is the rest of the world watching Nigeria with its binoculars, information about dissonances in our country are at the tip of the world’s fingers. Because they seek the consistent sanity of their countries, it is natural that countries of the world would want to guard against importation of social frictions into their territories. It was the lesson that same Canada was trying to pass across when it denied our Chief of Defence Staff visa last year.
Are Nigerian elections truly devoid of violence of the terrorism hue? The answer is No. As lawyers say, res ipsa loquitur; the facts speak for themselves. Our political parties have the notoriety of gangster violence pre, during and after elections. We shouldn’t be surprised if, very soon, a citizen is penalised, in a manner similar to Egharevba’s, over our country being where there are no consequences for negative actions. A country that reverses punishments and rules within few hours intervals, just because a street ally of the president is trapped in a criminal loop, cannot but receive the excoriation of a sane world.
Today, Nigeria is on the radar as a country where rule-breakers are garlanded. Rather than gripe and wail ceaselessly like a witch accused of killing her husband, we should rather embark on self introspection because, in the words of Socrates, an unexamined life is not worth living. Another election season is coming. Will Canada and the world see a different Nigeria? If Fela were alive, he probably would inflect his previous track and sing, “You be terrorist, I no be terrorist/Argument, argument, argue…” to explain this cacophony of denials between the APC, PDP and a Nigerian government which willingly leave the footpath and walk blindly in a maze of shrubs.
Festus Adedayo is an Ibadan-based journalist.
