Watering Soft Ground: How Elochukwu Ohagi Prepares the Way for Accepting Simon Ekpa

 Watering Soft Ground: How Elochukwu Ohagi Prepares the Way for Accepting Simon Ekpa Elochukwu Ohagi’s recent Facebook post is not the strai...

 Watering Soft Ground: How Elochukwu Ohagi Prepares the Way for Accepting Simon Ekpa

Elochukwu Ohagi’s recent Facebook post is not the straightforward defence of Mazi Nnamdi Kanu that it pretends to be. It is a carefully worded attempt to water soft ground in preparation for a shift he has spent years publicly rejecting.

For a long time Elochukwu has criticised Simon Ekpa’s activities as criminal and violent. He has drawn a clear distinction between the struggle associated with Mazi Nnamdi Kanu and the pattern of actions he attributes to Ekpa. That record is on the public record. Yet in this latest post he suddenly declares that even if Kanu were working with Ekpa or with “dead Buhari and Tinubu”  “we truly don’t care.” He frames any objection as mere “gossip” and insists that loyalty to Kanu overrides everything else.

This is not neutral loyalty. It is deliberate positioning. By placing Simon Ekpa in the same rhetorical category as Tinubu and Buhari, figures widely regarded in Biafra discourse as enemies of the cause.  Elochukwu is signaling that the previous red lines no longer apply. The logic is clear: if Nnamdi Kanu were to accept Ekpa, then Biafrans and IPOB must accept him too, irrespective of the criminalities, the violence against innocent people, and the other accusations that Elochukwu himself has repeatedly highlighted in the past. Using Buhari and Tinubu as the comparison is no accident; it is an intentional framing that places Ekpa in the same “acceptable if the leader says so” category.

The anticipated support is therefore dubious. It appears designed less out of sudden conviction and more to attract followers from Ekpa’s camp while easing pressure that flows from the direction of Nnamdi Kanu’s name. In other words, it is an attempt to please competing pressures without the honesty of an open change of position. The same man who once condemned certain methods now prepares the ground to accommodate them under the cover of “we love him so much.”

This attitude is deeply inconsistent and, frankly, dubious. True consistency would have required restating the same objections Elochukwu has voiced for years rather than dissolving them into “we don’t care.” Softening the ground while still claiming private rejection of Ekpa only fuels the perception of calculation over principle.

The struggle does not need more men who bend under pressure while pretending they have not moved. It needs clarity. Elochukwu’s post supplies the opposite: a public opening that invites the very association he has long criticised, packaged as unbreakable loyalty. That is not defence of Mazi Nnamdi Kanu. It is the early stage of a calculated pivot, and it deserves to be recognised as such.

Family Writers Press International.