Labour House raid

Security operatives penultimate Wednesday, i.e. 7th August, raided Pascal Bafyau Labour House where the Nigeria Labour Congress (NLC) has its national headquarters and secretariat in Abuja. The 10-storey building in the vicinity of the Federal Ministry of Finance, in the federal capital’s Central Business District, houses NLC’s offices on its three topmost floors with tenants occupying other spaces.
It was the NLC itself that broke the news of the raid. In a late night statement on the said day, the congress made known that heavily armed security agents at about 8:30p.m. stormed its offices in a raid it suspected linked to its sympathetic disposition towards then roiling hardship protests that began across the country on 1st August. NLC spokesman, Benson Upah, said in the statement that the security squad – initially assumed to also involve Department of State Services (DSS) agents – “swooped on the 10th floor of the NLC (building) and arrested the security operative on duty and then commandeered him to the second floor where he was asked to produce the keys to the offices.” The statement further said when NLC’s security man told the invaders he had no such keys on him, they broke into the second floor and ransacked the bookstore located there, carting away hundreds of books and other publications. “The invading troops claimed they were looking for seditious materials used for the #EndBadGoveranance protests,” it added.
According to the congress’s spokesman, the raiding party produced no legal document enabling their invasion. He argued that the labour body’s national executive had only that afternoon held a meeting where it slammed the high-handedness with which security operatives tackled the hardship protesters and imputed treason to the motivation of some. The labour house raid was thus viewed as a reprisal for that stand, and the statement warned that it portended danger for “democratic rights, freedom of speech and association, and the unimpeachable right of citizens to protest peacefully on any issue they feel strongly about.”
The DSS was swift to deny that its agents partook of the operation. The police, however, confirmed that its personnel conducted a raid targeted at a foreigner who is a prime suspect of cross-border criminalities, and who happened to be tenanted at labour house  and was allegedly using the bookstore and publishing business being conducted there only as a façade. Force Public Relations Officer Muyiwa Adejobi, an Assistant Commissioner of Police (ACP), in a statement explained that the labour body was not the target of the raid. According to him, a prime suspect in an ongoing investigation was traced to a shop within the building that turned out to be labour house. The police spokesman argued that detectives armed with “appropriate legal authority” conducted the raid, adding: “This well-coordinated, lawful operation was solely aimed at apprehending the prime suspect – a foreign national implicated in numerous criminal activities across Nigeria and other African countries… The NLC secretariat was not the focus of the operation, which was targeted at a rented shop within the building used by the suspect as a front for his criminal activities in Nigeria.”
The statement by the police strained to explain the high-risk potential of the suspect and solicited NLC leadership’s cooperation in efforts to safeguard this country. “The high-profile nature of the suspect poses a significant security threat to Nigeria and other African nations, making this investigation crucial for the safety of all involved, including the NLC,” it said. “The Nigeria Police Force remains committed to upholding the rule of law, maintaining professionalism and respecting human rights in the discharge of our statutory duties,” the statemen added, as it urged civic vigilance such that property owners would conduct security profiling of persons seeking to rent spaces from them.

“There are germane questions thrown up by the police’s modus operandi in the labour house raid”

Labour leadership dismissed the police’s narrative as an afterthought aimed at covering up the real motive for the raid. NLC General Secretary Emmanuel Ugboaja was reported insisting that contrary to the claim that police detectives raided only the bookstore on the second floor and spared the congress’s offices on the upper floors of the building, they indeed forced their way into those offices during the raid. The labour body demanded public apology from the Federal Government and police authorities for the invasion. In a communique after an emergency meeting of its national execute council some days following the raid, the congress said it rejected the police’s explanation for the invasion and alleged “a pattern of intimidation, brutality and deceit against the Nigeria Labour Congress (NLC) and Nigerian people” under the present national leadership dispensation. The communique signed by NLC President Joe Ajaero, which also copiously dwelt on fallouts of the recent hardship protests, said the congress was indefinitely suspending operations at its national secretariat over safety concerns pending a forensic audit.
Inspector-General of Police (IGP) Kayode Egbetokun has since weighed in on the discourse and affirmed that the police were on the trail of a man who was actively involved in the Sudanese crisis and is currently in Nigeria. He did not disclose details of the suspect’s identity, but he said the fellow was mobilising to destabilise this country and was tracked to the shop located in labour house that he was using as a decoy. Responding to a question at a youth summit organised by the police early last week in Abuja to review the hardship protests, he stated inter alia: “We had intelligence at our disposal that some agents of destabilisation are ready to use the hardship protest to destabilise our country. I won’t be able to share the details yet because we are still on the trail of these individuals. Some of them are already out of the country, and they immediately escape. Some of them are even foreigners.” 
The police boss said one of the suspects was traced to labour house and wondered at the uproar over the raid. “We raided only a shop that the individual was using as a front and we have been monitoring his activities. He was very active in the Sudan crisis and he’s in Nigeria mobilising people to destabilize our country,” he said, adding: “We traced him to that shop and our detectives raided his shop. We recovered valuable documents, so there was no need for the noise about the raid on labour house.”
Journalists who visited the multi-storey labour house following the controversial raid corroborated the police’s account that detectives ransacked only the second floor where the bookstore said to be operated by a foreigner was located. That does not necessarily invalidate the claim by Labour, though, that the squad struck first at the 10th floor from where they commandeered its security man on duty to the second floor that was their target and demanded of him access keys. It is not unreasonable to expect that as the landlord’s representative on site at the time, the security man could be in possession of spare keys, and the detectives thought to get him to produce the one for where they aimed to access but drew a blank. That by no means constituted premeditated violation of NLC’s offices and shouldn’t be so regarded.
But there are germane questions thrown up by the police’s modus operandi in the labour house raid. The Force’s narrative was that the raid aimed at apprehending a prime suspect whose activities had been under its radar. The Force also didn’t deny that the operation was executed at very late hour (i. e. 8:30p.m.), and you would wonder whether purported surveillance of the suspect had suggested to the  detectives they could find him on location at such time of the day to be apprehended. Besides, courts of law are known to issue search warrants and not raid warrants, and search warrants are typically executed by first being shown to the subject whose facility is up for a search. It, therefore, stands to reason that when detectives invaded labour house at such ungodly hour, they hardly had the mind to properly execute a search warrant if indeed they had one. The operation was incorrigibly outside due process, and was one that typified the tendency of the police to muscle through its operations rather than be guided by fine constraints of law.
Still, there is room for remediation and reconciliation of interests. The police should produce to the NLC the “appropriate legal authority” by which it conducted the raid; and this should in turn obligate the labour body to facilitate police hunt for the suspect because it is an indictment that it tenanted a national security risk without due diligence profiling. In all, the interest of this country must be paramount.

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