TheCable

The federal government is planning to use security agencies, especially the Department State Services (DSS) and the police to harass and intimidate the opposition with a view to decapitating it ahead of the 2015 elections, the All Progressives Congress (APC) has alleged.

Speaking on Wednesday through Lai Mohammed, its national publicity secretary, the party further alleged that the threats being issued by Jelili Adesiyan, minister of police affairs, and the DSS over inflammatory statements by opposition leaders were nothing but a thinly-veiled attempt at cowing the opposition and destabilising its ranks.

It listed the strategy to include the invitation of key opposition figures for questioning by the DSS, starting with Lai Mohammed and to be followed by arrests and detention of such figures.

APC boasted that the impending clampdown was the government’s answer to the soaring profile of the opposition party ahead of the polls, and called on local and international observers of the elections to keep a close eye on the developments, which it said constituted a clear and present danger to the success of the elections.

“The minister of police affairs said publicly that he has already directed the inspector-general of police as well as the DSS to arrest anyone who makes inflammatory statements ahead of the 2015 elections, and then went ahead to castigate the APC, thus exposing the real reason for his directive,” the party said.

“The minister had barely issued his orders when the DSS, which has unabashedly become a megaphone of the ruling PDP, fired its own warning, directed pointedly at ‘a serving governor calling on men of the armed forces to rise up in protest against constituted authority,’ when nothing of such happened.

“If the minister and indeed the security agencies were carrying out their duties as agents of the state rather than partisans, they would have realised that no one is guiltier of making inflammatory and even treasonable statements than the supporters of the president and members of the PDP.

“Yet, not once has the minister, and the security agencies under his control, called these people to order. There is no better indication of the mindset of these threats-issuing minister and the security agencies under his control than their glaring double-standard and vexatious partisanship. This is not how to run the affairs of state.”

It recalled that a series of inflammatory and treasonable comments by supporters of President Goodluck Jonathan and officials of the PDP all went without censure from those who were now howling at the opposition for statements that were neither inflammatory nor treasonable.

“A a die-hard supporter of President Goodluck Jonathan once threatened that there will be blood in the streets if the president is not re-elected, without anyone calling him to order. He recently said the president has already won the yet-to-be conducted February 14 presidential election, suggesting that the election will be a mere formality. No one called him to order,” the APC pointed out.

”Another supporter of the president, Edwin Clark, said if the opposition had its way, it would poison President Jonathan just to take power. The minister of police affairs and the security agencies under his control snored the comment away.

“PDP national secretary Wale Oladipo called the presidential candidate of the APC, Muhammadu Buhari, a ‘semi-literate jackboot’; PDP national publicity secretary, Olisa Metuh heaped abuses on APC leaders in an ill-tempered statement arising from a disoriented PDP in the aftermath of the hugely-successful APC national convention while a spokesman for the president called Buhari names for being a ‘poor’ man, yet this minister and his agencies did not see anything inflammatory in all these statements, all because they came from members and supporters of the ruling party.

“We know that Nigerians as well as the international community are watching closely and documenting these developments. It is important to do so if they are to make informed comments on the outcome of the forthcoming polls.

“On our part, we will continue to document the developments while maintaining a responsible and purposeful public discourse, highlighted by issues and devoid of the kind of inflammatory and treasonable comments that PDP and Presidency officials have been spewing out.”