A former Abuja branch Chairman of the Nigerian Bar Association (NBA), Afam Osigwe, says there are more questions the Department of State Security Service (DSS) must provide answers to, regarding its raid of the residence of the Yoruba Activist, Chief Sunday Adeyemo, popularly addressed as Sunday Igboho.
The house of the self-styled activist in Ibadan, Oyo state, was raided on Thursday.
Osigwe who spoke on a ChannelsTV programme monitored by POLITICS NIGERIA, says the account of the security agents leaves more gaps. The Senior Advocate of Nigeria (SAN) said the DSS should answer whether it did not use excessive force.
“If they really got intelligence. How did they introduce themselves upon arrival?” Osigwe further probed.
“Look at the rules of engagement and approach by the DSS and the way we talk about two persons gunned down… It is beginning to look as if life means nothing and it’s continually has become a pattern that whenever security operatives go on such operations, many more persons are killed.”
He said it is time Nigerians started advocating that security operatives wear body cameras for accountability purposes.
“If we are able to have the recordings of these body cams, to actually know whether some of the stories they tell actually correlate with the facts or the reality.”
The lawyer noted that, in an ideal situation, there was need for the DSS to provide a search warrant, before such raid.
“They need to apply to magistrates or to some Superior police officers just to have an affidavit stating the grounds for the raid.”
“In all the releases have heard or read about, there has not been any mention made of any such warrant been obtained before the raid of the premises.”
According to Osigwe, the Nigeria security agencies have continued to adopt a sledgehammer approach to agitations by separatist groups, saying the government has not learnt anything from its killing of the Boko-Haram leader, Mohammed Yusuf.
“We don’t seem to have learned much from history. We do not seem to have learned that Boko Haram situation and made in the North East started because the security agencies thought that a very good way of stopping the Boko-Haram was by killing Mohammed Yusuf, the leader. And now we seem to be headed in the same direction in the southwest. And I think the earlier the government retains his strategy and try to find out the root causes where they are so many agitations, by different groups of persons for a separate entity, the better.”
He, however, called for the review of the DSS’s rules of engagement.
Recall that the Nigeria’s secret police confirmed that its operatives stormed the home of Sunday Igboho, in Ibadan in a bid to effect his arrest.
Addressing journalists at its headquarters on Thursday, Peter Afunanya, the service spokesperson, said 13 suspects, including a female and 12 males, were arrested. The attack, which has continued to generate furore, came 72 hours to the planned rally in Lagos, agitating for Yoruba nation.
