The Department of State Security (DSS) has said its operatives invaded the data office of the All Progressives Congress (APC) in Lagos on Saturday following a petition it received about some activities of the company.
A text message by the spokesperson of the DSS, Ms. Marilyn Ogar on Sunday, said the petition alleged that the Independent National Electoral Commission’s permanent voter’s cards were being cloned at the outfit.
According to Ogar, the petition alleged that the “cloning” of the cards was with the intention of hacking into INEC’s data base, corrupting it and replacing them with the “cloned” data.
The statement said: “A petition was received by this Service about some activities at No. 10, Bola Ajibola Street, Allen Avenue, Ikeja, Lagos.Based on this information, the Service placed the building under surveillance; and having been convinced that some unwholesome activities were going on in the building, it undertook a raid of the premises.
“In the process, some persons were arrested while a server, three hard drives, and 31 Ghana must go bags of hard copy documents were recovered and taken away for further investigation. It must be noted that the said location had no sign post indicating whether it was a private or government office”, it added.
The All Progressives Congress (APC) condemned the invasion of its offices in Lagos by security agents, calling it the worst political scandal in Nigeria’s history.
In a statement, Saturday, in Ijebu -Ode, by its National Publicity Secretary, Alhaji Lai Mohammed, the party said the invasion can only be likened to the Watergate Scandal that led to the resignation of US President Richard Nixon in 1974, as a result of the June 17, 1972, break-in at the Democratic National Committee (DNC) headquarters at the Watergate office complex in Washington, D.C., and the attempted cover-up of its involvement by the Republican Nixon Administration.
It therefore called for an independent inquiry to fish out those who ordered the needless and unprovoked attack on the offices of the APC and ensure that they face very serious consequences, irrespective of their status.
”Saturday’s attack is another one in the string of attacks and illegal actions of the PDP-led administration. The attack was unwarranted and unjustifiable. To attack one of the offices of the opposition party, APC, where legitimate operations of the party were being undertaken is an act of fascism and totalitarianism. To the point of brigandage, the invasion of the APC centre is an assault on the APC and its entire membership across the country. It must not go unpunished,” APC said.
The party said though it had been tipped off about an impending attack on the ‘secret warehouse’ of our leader Bola Ahmed Tinubu, ”we dismissed such plan because there was no ‘secret warehouse’ anywhere and also because we never imagined that the government will attack the offices of an opposition party in a constitutional democracy. Obviously we under-estimated the desperation of the Jonathan Administration and its worsening proclivity to impunity.”
Giving details of the invasion, the APC said in the early hours of Saturday morning, a combined team of men of the DSS and OP-MESA stormed the Bola Ajibola Data centre belonging to the APC in the Ikeja area of Lagos and arrested 25 APC data agents and 3 security guards.
”In what was a gestapo-like operation, the APC membership data centre located at Number 10, Bola Ajibola street, off Allen Avenue in Ikeja, came under siege between the hours of 5:30 am and 7:30 am on Saturday. An operation of terror and brigandage was unleashed on a legitimate operation of a leading national party. They came without a search warrant for the premises. Over 50 security operatives drafted from Abuja operations blocked the two major street entrances to the APC data entry centre, pulled down the gates and spent over 2 hours ransacking and vandalizing the centre.
”More than a dozen computers were destroyed. The server was also vandalized along with other equipment in the building. Just like the Watergate scandal in the USA, the state-sponsored security operatives apparently acting at the behest of the ruling PDP government turned the office upside down, and pulled out and vandalized everything in sight.
”If the PDP-led government and the security agents had done due diligence and acted professionally, they would have known that the APC data centre is a legitimate operation and the staff are Nigerian youths who were left jobless by the Jonathan government. Apart from the Lagos centre, the operation is decentralized and similar centres are functional in about six different locations around the country.
”They chose to believe the lie that it was a warehouse belonging to one of the national leaders of the party where dangerous weapons were being kept, when in fact it is a centre for entering the data provided by the millions of Nigerians who registered as members of the party during its membership registration exercise,” the party said.