Nigeria — IPOB and the Biafra Separatist Movement: Southeast Insecurity, ESN Armed Wing, and the Memory of Biafra

Nigeria’s southeast — home primarily to the Igbo ethnic nationality — has been experiencing a low-intensity security crisis since approximately 2017, driven by the Indigenous People of Biafra (IPOB) movement and its armed wing, the Eastern Security Network (ESN). IPOB’s core demand is a referendum on Biafran independence — the recreation of the short-lived Igbo state that fought for secession in the 1967–1970 Nigerian Civil War, a conflict in which approximately 1–3 million people died, the majority through famine. The movement draws on genuine historical grievances around the Biafra War’s unresolved legacy, post-conflict marginalisation, and perceived exclusion of the southeast from Nigeria’s political and economic power structures.

The conflict’s acute dimension is the ESN’s campaign of attacks on Nigerian security forces and state facilities in the southeast. Since December 2020, when ESN was formed ostensibly to combat Fulani herder-farmer conflicts in the southeast, it has conducted dozens of attacks on police stations, military checkpoints, and government facilities across Anambra, Imo, Enugu, and other southeastern states. ESN has also enforced the weekly ‘sit-at-home’ orders that IPOB issues — orders that began as peaceful civil disobedience but are now enforced through violent threats, burning of vehicles that ignore the orders, and intimidation of non-compliant businesses. The result is a severe disruption to economic activity in the southeast that imposes billions of naira in losses weekly.

The situation’s complexity is increased by: the division within Igbo communities between those who support IPOB’s goals and those who oppose its methods; the government’s designation of IPOB as a terrorist organisation (which some legal experts dispute as disproportionate); the detention of Nnamdi Kanu (a British-Nigerian citizen) through extraordinary rendition from Kenya without extradition procedures, which the Court of Appeal ruled was illegal; and the genuine political question of whether the Igbo southeast’s economic and political grievances within Nigeria’s federal structure have adequate political channels for expression without separatist violence.

As of mid-2026, the IPOB/ESN conflict in Nigeria’s southeast is in a prolonged low-intensity stalemate. ESN conducts enough violence to prevent normalisation but not enough to achieve any political objective; the government detains Kanu without resolving his legal status; and the sit-at-home economy continues to impose massive costs on southeastern communities. The political path forward — which would require a genuine federal restructuring dialogue, an honest reckoning with the Biafra War’s legacy, and a resolution of Kanu’s legal status — is not currently on any government’s agenda. The risk is that continued stalemate gradually militarises a conflict that has historically been primarily political and non-violent in its aspirations.

• Nigeria — Niger Delta Conflict: Oil Militancy, Environmental Catastrophe

• Nigeria — Northwest Banditry, Kidnapping, and the Expanding Insecurity Belt

• Nigeria — Farmer-Herder Conflict and Communal Violence in the Middle Belt (Batch 5 entry)

Ojukwu, C. O. (1969). Biafra: Selected speeches and random thoughts. Harper & Row.

HRW. (2022). Nigeria: Security forces abuses in southeast. https://www.hrw.org

Amnesty International. (2024). Nigeria: IPOB, ESN and the southeast security crisis. https://www.amnesty.org

Global R2P. (2026). Nigeria. https://www.globalr2p.org/countries/nigeria/