DSS in overdrive

On the day the 10th National Assembly (NASS) was inaugurated last week, there was a fluke report on some online sites that the Department of State Services (DSS) had arrested Clerk of the National Assembly Sani Tambawal and some other parliamentary staff. The inauguration held on Tuesday, 13th June, and it was reported that agents of the secret police on Monday night picked up Tambawal alongside other senior officials in NASS bureaucracy in a bid to coerce them into manipulating the assembly’s standing rules to favour certain candidates in the leadership contests. It was an unsubstantiated report that didn’t gain traction beyond the few sites which posted it, and many of those sites pulled it down soon after flying the headline. Fluke as it was though, the report illustrated the crass image the DSS has acquired.

Few days earlier, pandemonium was reported at the Anambra State House of Assembly as operatives believed to be from the DSS attempted to arrest then lawmaker-elect for Nnewi North constituency, Mr. Onyekachukwu Ike. The eighth Anambra assembly has since been inaugurated and Ike has become a substantive lawmaker. But it was at the valedictory thanksgiving mass for the seventh assembly, penultimate Thursday, that heavily-armed men  rode into the legislative complex in three vehicles and grabbed the politician, who was attending the ceremony. Reports said the armed operatives bundled Ike into one of their vehicles and assayed to whisk him out of the complex when assembly security personnel moved swiftly to block the exit gate. No one knew why the operatives came for the lawmaker, and neither did they offer advance notice; Acting Clerk Mrs. Esther Aneto and other senior assembly staff were reported saying the agents informed neither members of the legislative house nor police personnel on security duty at the assembly complex before trying to nab the lawmaker. One of the operatives was, however, overheard explaining in the ensuing pandemonium that they had a court order.

It reportedly took the intervention of House Speaker Uche Okafor and Anambra Deputy Governor Onyeka Ibezim, who was at the valedictory event to represent Governor Chukwuma Soludo, to dissuade the armed agents from taking Ike away. When contacted on the incident, spokesman for the Anambra State police command, Tochukwu Ikenga, indicated the DSS was involved. “No cause for alarm, it has been resolved. I think it was DSS operatives that were on that mission, but I think everything has been resolved,” he said, adding: “I was told that the Deputy Governor and the Speaker of the House intervened. So, everything was resolved but I don’t know the circumstances surrounding serving him (Ike) an invitation.”

The secret police department has been assertive and up front in tackling down top officials of government who lately fell from grace. No sooner had word gotten out that former Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) Governor Godwin Emefiele had been suspended from office by the Bola Tinubu presidency, penultimate Friday, than speculations ran wild that he had been picked up by the DSS. The agency initially had to deny that was the case, but it came round shortly after to confirm the disgraced banker had been taken into custody for investigative reasons. Details of Emefiele’s arrest indicated he was arrested by DSS operatives at his home in Lagos and flown to Abuja on Saturday in a private jet. A visual clip of the conveyance that  emerged showed the former apex banker being hauled to the stairway of the aircraft waiting on the tarmac in a Hilux van, and then herded into the aircraft by DSS agents – one of whom ominously brandished a pair of handcuffs.

“There is some stealth, self-effacement and peculiar gravity that ideally should characterise secret policing, but which the DSS seems to lack.” 

The alleged sins of Emefiele are horrendous and are for the courts to prove. But whether the manner of his arrest couldn’t have been more civil, considering the libertarian dispensation we are in, is arguable. We could ask what difference it would have made if he was simply invited by the DSS and given a timeline to report; with personnel at all the country’s gateways posted on a watch-out just in case he entertains the idea of fleeing, or indeed his movements surveillanced if it comes to that. Besides, human rights lawyer Femi Falana (SAN) has contended that the DSS lacks constitutional power to probe and prosecute the suspended apex banker. Emefiele, according to him, should rather be handed to the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC), which he said was better placed by law to deal with charges stacked against the banker. Citing a legal precedent, the senior lawyer in a statement said DSS “lacks the power to investigate and prosecute Mr. Emefiele  in respect of allegations of money laundering and other economic crimes. Therefore, after investigating the alleged involvement of Emefiele in terrorism financing, the DSS should transfer him to the EFCC for the purpose of investigating the allegations of money laundering and allied offences.”

Only that EFCC now has challenges of its own, and it is the DSS interrogating. President Tinubu, last Wednesday, suspended erstwhile EFCC Chairman Abdulrasheed Bawa from office to allow for a probe of weighty allegations of abuse of office levelled against him, according to a statement by the office of the Secretary of the Federation. And no sooner was that suspension announced than the secret police called Bawa in for questioning, with DSS spokesman, Dr. Peter Afunanya, saying the invitation “relates to some investigative activities concerning him.” Here again, we could argue that the charges of graft Bawa faces fall ordinarily outside the mandate of the DSS. But the agency pulled him in anyway and detained him for grilling last week. He was luckier than Emefiele though, because he on his own reported to DSS in response to an invite, not arrested and bundled into detention.

It was an ironic twist for Bawa whose agency, two weeks earlier, was at loggerheads with the DSS over property rights at No. 15A Awolowo Road in Ikoyi, Lagos, where both organisations share offices. DSS operatives had on 30th May blockaded the property and prevented EFCC personnel from accessing their workstations, in a tussle over ownership that the DSS tried to play down but the EFCC acknowledged. “It is not correct that the DSS barricaded EFCC from entering its office. No. It is not true. The service is only occupying its own facility where it is carrying out its official and statutory responsibility,” Afunanya equivocated in a statement, as he insisted  the EFCC couldn’t be contesting ownership because the building was the base of predecessor-organisations of the DSS. In its reaction, however, the EFCC decried the blockade since both agencies had amicably cohabited at the property for two decades. “By denying operatives access to their offices, the commission’s operations at its largest hub with over 500 personnel, hundreds of exhibits and many suspects in detention have been disrupted,” EFCC spokesperson Wilson Uwujaren said in a statement. Eventually, the EFCC got the upper hand in that tussle, because the Tinubu presidency ordered the DSS to lift its blockade on the property and continue cohabiting with the anti-graft agency as before. Notwithstanding, if you asked me, the siege marked an unsightly show of brawn and aggression by the secret police in a security ecosystem that should be characterised by civility and mutual sobriety.

There is some stealth, self-effacement and peculiar gravity that ideally should characterise secret policing, but which the DSS seems to lack. When agents of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) happen upon a scene in the United States, you know the matter at stake goes beyond mere criminality to hazarding state security in a manner that overreaches the remit of the conventional police. Even then, operatives of that agency are held to strict codes of avoidance of rights abuses. Only last week, senior officials of the Joe Biden administration in Washington announced new disciplinary measures to prevent further FBI abuses under a controversial surveillance program that will expire at year end (2023) unless Congress renews it. Deputy FBI Director Paul Abbate intimated the Senate Judiciary Committee about a new “three strike” policy by which FBI analysts would be disciplined, or even fired, for three incidents of misuse of the intelligence program.

In our clime, DSS operatives are everywhere for every cause, including those you would think fall within the purview of other conventional agencies. But worse is that they sometimes resort to Gestapo tactics, in a dispensation where we should be careful to safeguard our nascent freedom. We shouldn’t be at ease with such. Eternal vigilance, as they say, is the price of liberty.