The presidential candidate of the African Action Congress (AAC), Omoyele Sowore, has called on the Department of State Services (DSS) to apologise and withdraw the alleged cybercrime case instituted against him.
Sowore made the demand during an appearance on The Morning Brief on Monday, where he accused the secret police of subjecting him to what he described as a wrongful trial.
According to the human rights activist, the case had already been before the court when the DSS repeatedly sought to proceed with the trial despite the approaching 2027 presidential election.
“We were already in court, and when we were in court, we made the same application several times. This is election season—presidential time—they said, ‘We recognise that, but we must try to finish the trial before the elections or during elections; we don’t care,’” Sowore said.
He said the DSS had now changed its position by asking for a lengthy adjournment of the proceedings until after the election.
“Now they have come back and said, ‘We want a long adjournment.’ We are not seeking an adjournment. We want you [DSS] to apologise for doing this to us and to show that you compensate people who are wrongfully tried for committing no crime at all,” he said.
Sowore also called for disciplinary action against officials responsible for decisions he described as unjust.
“You must ensure that people who make these kinds of decisions are displaced from the system,” he added.
Over the weekend, the DSS directed its counsel, Akinlolu Kehinde, SAN, to seek an adjournment of the case until after the 2027 presidential election.
Sources said the decision was intended to enable Sowore, who is the AAC presidential candidate, to participate fully in the electioneering process without the court proceedings interfering with his political activities.
The DSS instituted the case following social media posts by Sowore in which he referred to President Bola Tinubu as a “criminal.”
The posts, published on Sowore’s X account and Facebook page on August 25, 2025, prompted the DSS to issue him a seven-day ultimatum to remove them.
After Sowore declined to take down the posts following the expiration of the ultimatum, the DSS approached the Federal High Court seeking a judicial determination of whether it was lawful for an individual to publicly describe the President or any other person as a “criminal.”
The agency initially joined X, formerly known as Twitter, and Meta, the parent company of Facebook, as defendants in the suit. However, the Federal High Court in Abuja subsequently struck out the two technology companies from the case, leaving Sowore as the sole defendant.
Reacting to the DSS decision to seek an adjournment until after the election, Sowore questioned the agency’s authority to suspend proceedings it had initiated.
“This is not the country that we fought for democracy for—a country where somebody can just wake up because he’s the DG of DSS, go arrest somebody, detain them permanently or disrupt their lives, and then realise that you want to suspend [the case],” he said.
“You have no right to suspend the trial you have already started. You should go and withdraw your charges. That’s the only way out, and that is the only provision left within our law books, their law books, to correct their anomaly.”
Sowore further accused security agencies of exerting undue influence over the judiciary, alleging that “the judiciary is an appendage of the security.”
He also recalled his previous legal battles with the Nigerian authorities, including an incident in which he said his passport was seized and he was detained for 11 days after missing a court appearance.
“They even took me to prison for missing one court trial—detained me for 11 days, where I was kept with over 47 persons. I had to experience prison in this country, and then they say, ‘We want to suspend it.’ What right have you to determine things for the court?” he asked.
The AAC candidate said his opposition to the DSS’s handling of the case was based not only on his personal experience but also on what he described as a broader concern about alleged injustice.
He recalled that he was previously charged with treason in 2019 and said the legal battle kept him in Nigeria for five years, during which, according to him, his family suffered significant hardship.
“Well, you know, when an injustice of that scale is done to anybody, what you look at and react immediately to is, ‘Why in the first place did you have to do this to anyone, not even me?’ Because we’ve been here before,” Sowore said.
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