DSS officers should act within the law

In recent years, complaints regarding the conduct of operatives of Nigeria’s Department of State Security Services (DSS) have followed similar trajectory.  Their role in the raid of an uncompleted building in Abuja, in which artisans were taking shelter, killing several of them on false allegation they were members of the Boko Haram sect, and on […]

In recent years, complaints regarding the conduct of operatives of Nigeria’s Department of State Security Services (DSS) have followed similar trajectory.  Their role in the raid of an uncompleted building in Abuja, in which artisans were taking shelter, killing several of them on false allegation they were members of the Boko Haram sect, and on which the National Human Rights Commission returned a damning indictment of the DSS, is still fresh in the mind.
Its armed and masked officers were also accused of being behind several tactics of intimidation of members of opposition political parties during the last gubernatorial election in Ekiti State.
Within the span of a week, DSS officials twice raided an office which the main opposition All Progressives Congress (APC) described as its data centre, located in Lagos. During the first raid, dozens of armed operatives in the cover of darkness descended on the building, smashing the fence to gain entrance. They ransacked the office, damaging or destroying computer equipment and carting away sacks filled with documents, and detained some persons they found in the vicinity.
The DSS spokesperson, Mrs Marylyn Ogar said the action was informed by ‘petitions’ from sources she did not name alleging that the building was being used by the APC to hack into the database of the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC). According to her, the office was being used by the APC to clone INEC’s Permanent Voter’s Cards (PVCs) the purpose of which, she farther alleged, was to rig the forthcoming general elections in the party’s favour. The DSS sought to buttress its claim by saying that the office was not marked by any signpost to identify it with any organization.
The APC responded by obtaining a court order directing the DSS to release the detainees and stop interfering with the operations of its office. Ignoring the court’s order, the DSS launched a second raid on the APC office that same day.
Nothing should be spared in ensuring that the promise of free and fair elections is realised.  Therefore any attempt to compromise the process, like cloning that the DSS has alleged on the Lagos APC office, would be an intolerable development.  But the DSS weakens its case by sending its operatives like a gang of lawless housebreakers acting on a script.
The claim that it acted on the basis of a petition implies that its attention was drawn to a matter of public security, which members of the public have a right to be informed on. If its claim that the APC’s office was involved in a crime as serious as the cloning of PVCs is based on solid evidence, it is in the greater interest of Nigerians they be informed and appropriate follow-up action taken, not only by it but also by other complementary agencies.
It is a disturbing breach of procedure that the DSS would embark on a major official action as the raid of suspected crime scene without recourse to the law.  The DSS is supposed to be an embodiment of the law, and is duty bound to operate strictly within its provisions.
If the initial raid can be justified by the demands of exigency, whereby the DSS needed to act with uncommon dispatch, the second one cannot, by any stretch of the imagination, be seen in the same light. More offensive is the fact the raid was carried out in spite of a court order that forbade it. If the DSS would wilfully ignore a restraining legal order, what moral justification can it cite to expect any other actor to obey the law?
If there should be any complaint, it should have come from INEC to the police.  By its conduct, the DSS has once again overreached itself by taking upon itself a duty that does not belong to it.  
 The DSS said it would make its findings public; that would be something, given that what would be important input into any reasonable conclusion to a proper investigation are the computer bits and pieces its operatives destroyed during their raids.