TheCable

The All Progressives Congress (APC) has described the Department of States Service (DSS) and other security agents as “an enforcement arm” of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP).

The party also said that it would sue DSS spokesperson, Ms. Marilyn Ogar, for allegedly attempting to blame the party for the series of bomb blasts in the country.

It also urged the national assembly to investigate Ogar’s claims that “a certain political party” offered the DSS a combined bribe of N14m to tilt the Osun State governorship election in its favour.

APC is alleging that Ogar said on national television that “whenever the party wins an election there would be no bomb blasts, but whenever another party wins an election there would be bomb blasts”.

On Saturday, the party, through its national publicity secretary, Alhaji Lai Mohammed, called for the resignation of Ogar for linking the party with Boko Haram without providing a shred of evidence.

”That this incredulous accusation could be made by the spokesperson of a security agency, without providing a scintilla of evidence to support such claim, has confirmed our fears that the nation’s security agencies have now constituted themselves into the enforcement arm of the PDP,” it said.

”For the DSS spokesperson to echo the same capricious statement that has been made in the past by the spokesman of the PDP shows that the agency has dropped its toga of non-partisanship and has descended into the political fray. If the DSS has any professional ethics, if DSS is not an arm of the PDP, then the agency must publicly dissociate itself from the irresponsible and unfounded allegation by Ogar and disengage her from the service.

”Doing that will be the first step in restoring the credibility, or whatever is left of it, of the DSS. In the alternative, we challenge the DSS to present to Nigerians any evidence it may have linking our party to the spate of bomb blasts in the country. After all, it is trite that he who alleges must prove.”

The APC said that since it won the election in Osun, Ogar had been struggling hard to discredit the party and its victory, including making a “spurious allegation” that it offered the DSS N14m as a bribe and also trying to make a joke of the arrest of its spokesman, Alhaji Lai Mohammed, for no other reason but that he belonged to the opposition.

”Institutions of state like the DSS must know that their responsibility is to the nation, not to any political party that may be having a transient hold on power, that their loyalty is to the nation, not to any individual. This way, the institutions will keep their integrity intact and also serve the nation properly. Irrespective of the government in power, institutions of state must stay above the fray, in line with best practices,” the party said.

”This is a lesson that should not be hard for the fellows over there at the DSS to understand, going by the antecedents of their agency. However, where they choose to play politics with their professionalism and integrity, they will soon realise there are working in an agency that is not worth its salt, one that has lost the respect of the citizenry.”

It called on the National Assembly to invite the director-general of the DSS to explain if Ogar’s “partisan stance” represented the official position of the service on the spate of bomb blasts in the country, and if indeed N14m was offered as a bribe to the DSS and by whom, s well as why the DSS had chosen to “descend to the political fray at the expense of its professionalism and national loyalty”.