Kabiru Umar, also known as Kabiru Sokoto, who was convicted over the 2011 Christmas Day bombing linked to Boko Haram, has earned a Biology degree while serving his prison sentence, his lawyers said in one of the documents shared with PREMIUM TIMES.

In a press statement announcing Mr Sokoto’s appeal against his 2013 conviction, his legal team said he remained committed to “personal growth and rehabilitation” during incarceration, noting that he successfully obtained a Biology degree from the National Open University of Nigeria.

The statement, dated 14 May and signed by Lagos-based law firm Don Akaegbu & Company, described the achievement as evidence of Mr Sokoto’s “continued effort toward self-improvement despite the circumstances.”

Kabiru Sokoto was convicted by the Federal High Court in Abuja on 20 December 2013.

However, his lawyers argued that the charges against him did not specifically accuse him of carrying out or masterminding the bombing of St. Theresa’s Catholic Church in Madalla, Niger State, which killed about 35 worshippers and injured several others on Christmas Day in 2011.

According to the lawyers, the relevant charge alleged that Mr Sokoto had prior information about the attack and failed to disclose it to security agencies. They said the distinction between direct participation and alleged prior knowledge forms a key issue in the appeal now before the Court of Appeal.

The appeal, filed after what the lawyers described as delays caused by circumstances beyond Mr Sokoto’s control, challenges the admissibility and credibility of the evidence used to secure his conviction. Among these challenges, they said, include deaths of his two previous lawyers, repeated custodial transfers and his family’s severe “financial constraints.”

The legal team also questioned whether the trial court properly evaluated the defence presented during the proceedings.

The lawyers urged the public to allow the judicial process to run its course, insisting that criminal responsibility should be determined strictly on the basis of evidence presented in court rather than public perception.

READ ALSO: Boko Haram convict Kabiru Sokoto appeals 2013 life sentence for Catholic church bombing near Abuja

Kabiru Sokoto was initially arrested on 14 January 2012 at the Borno State Governor’s Lodge in Asokoro, Abuja, alongside a serving military officer. He was then taken to Abaji (also in Abuja) by police officers investigating the case to search a house believed to be owned by him.

He escaped from police custody, leading to the suspension and house arrest of Zakari Biu, then-head of the Zone 7 Police Command in Abuja, overseeing Boko Haram investigations at the Criminal Investigation Department. Before the incident, Mr Biu supervised the team that lost Mr Sokoto and was detained at an undisclosed location, alongside other junior police officers involved in the case.

The escape also prompted then-President Goodluck Jonathan to issue a 24-hour ultimatum to the then-Inspector General of Police (IGP) Hafiz Ringim, to produce the Boko Haram suspect. Mr Ringim failed to do so and was later retired.

The State Security Services (SSS) said Kabiru Sokoto was re-arrested in February 2012, following what it described as a gunfight between its operatives and members of his gang in Taraba Satet.

He was subsequently sentenced by the Federal High Court in Abuja on 20 December 2013. The suspected terror kingpin was sentenced on two terrorism charges, including one punishable with life imprisonment under Section 15(2) of the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission Act 2004. The second charge attracted 10 years’ imprisonment under Section 7(1) under Terrorism Act, 2011.

Commencement season has come around again — and this year, a couple speakers have discovered that it’s tough to get graduating students excited about a future shaped by artificial intelligence.

Last week, Gloria Caulfield, an executive at real estate firm Tavistock Development Company, gave a speech at the University of Central Florida acknowledging that we’re living in a time of “profound change,” which can be both “exciting” and “daunting.”

“The rise of artificial intelligence is the next industrial revolution,” Caulfield declared — prompting the students in the audience to begin booing, getting louder and louder until Caulfield chuckled, turned to the other speakers, and asked, “What happened?”

“Okay, I struck a chord,” she said. Caulfield then tried to resume her speech, saying, “Only a few years ago, AI was not a factor in our lives” — only to be interrupted again by the audience, this time by their loud cheers and applause.

Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt faced a similar response when he brought up AI at a University of Arizona speech on Friday.

In Schmidt’s case, the criticism actually began before the speech itself, with some student groups calling for him to be removed as commencement speaker due to a lawsuit in which a former girlfriend and business partner accused Schmidt of sexual assault. (He has denied the allegations.) According to a local news report, the booing began even before Schmidt took the stage.

But Schmidt also got loud boos when he told students, “You will help shape artificial intelligence.” The booing was persistent enough that Schmidt tried to speak over it, insisting, “You can now assemble a team of AI agents to help you with the parts that you could never accomplish on your own. When someone offers you a seat on the rocket ship, you do not ask which seat, you just get on.”

To be fair, AI isn’t becoming a third rail at every graduation ceremony. Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang recently spoke at Carnegie Mellon’s commencement, and he didn’t seem to get any audible pushback when he said that AI has “reinvented computing.”

Still, it’s not exactly surprising to find some students in a booing mood. In a recent Gallup poll, only 43% of Americans aged 15 to 34 said it’s a good time to find a job locally, a steep drop from 75% in 2022. 

That pessimism isn’t solely a response to the rise of AI (a shift that even tech industry workers are worried about), but journalist and tech industry critic Brian Merchant suggested that for many students, AI has become “the cruel new face of hyper-scaling capitalism.”

“I too would loudly boo at the prospect of this next industrial revolution if I was in my early twenties, unemployed, and had aspirations for my future greater than entering prompts into an LLM,” Merchant wrote.

Even when graduation speeches didn’t mention AI explicitly, “resilience” was a recurring theme this year. Schmidt himself acknowledged that there is “a fear in your generation that the future has already been written, that the machines are coming, that the jobs are evaporating, that the climate is breaking, that politics are fractured, and that you are inheriting a mess that you did not create.”

Caulfield, meanwhile, might also have misread her audience of arts and humanities graduates. One student said that before mentioning AI, Caulfield already started to lose them with her “generic” praise of corporate executives like Jeff Bezos.

Another graduate, Alexander Rose Tyson, told The New York Times, “It wasn’t one person that really started the booing. It was just sort of like a collective, ‘This sucks.’”