SSS Arrests Chiwetalu Agu Over Symbolic Dress

A notable Nigerian actor, Chiwetalu Agu, has been arrested by the State Security Service, Nigeria’s harsh government security enforcer. The arrest came just hours after the Nigerian Army released Mr Agu after his arrest, torture, and overnight incarceration by soldiers.

Mr Agu claimed he was delivering bread to the destitute in Onitsha when he was detained and brutalized by troops for wearing a dress that depicted the rising sun, which is also the emblem of the destroyed Biafra nation.

Mr Agu was caught by the SSS shortly after being released by the army, according to his friends, amid allegations that the authoritarian secret police may torture him and imprison him in custody indefinitely. On Saturday morning, a spokeswoman for the SSS did not respond to a request for comment from Peoples Gazette.

“Chiwetalu Agu is still not free. He is with DSS now,” writer Chiagozie Nwonwu said on Facebook. “Colleagues say they are looking for a top lawyer to bail him,” Nwonwu wrote on his known Facebook page on Friday.” Reports have circulated on social media that Mr Agu was being tortured to admit ties to proscribed Indigenous People of Biafra (IPOB). The SSS has a history of repression, intimidation and targeted assassination of government critics.

Mr Agu, 65, was arrested when President Muhammadu Buhari began deploying security personnel across the Igbo-dominated South-East to quash separatist agitations. Since the authorities detained Nnamdi Kanu in 2015, the push for succession has increased across the region.

Mr Kanu was granted bail by a federal judge in Abuja in 2017, but he was kidnapped and deported to Nigeria by regime security officers in Kenya in June 2021. Since then, he has been held in jail.

Mr Agu has stated that his decision to wear a frock with a Biafran emblem was not made to stoke the flames of secession, despite earlier criticizing Mr Buhari as sectional and decrying the regime’s apparent marginalization of the Igbo ethnic community.