APC dismisses SSS’ hacking allegations as “hogwash”

The All Progressives Congress has dismissed as hogwash the position of the Directorate of State Security after its raid on the party’s offices in Lagos, describing the DSS “findings”, presented to the media by the agency on Wednesday, as “a great disservice to Nigeria and an embarrassment to all intelligence-gathering organisations around the world.”

In a statement in Abuja on Wednesday by its National Publicity Secretary, Alhaji Lai Mohammed, the party also alleged that the timing of the release of the findings was a plot orchestrated in collusion with the ruling Peoples Democratic Party to distract the APC from its ongoing campaigns for next month’s elections.



It described as “disingenuous, flimsy, premeditated, partisan and an irritant” the DSS premise that the APC had an ”articulated plan to inflate the party’s membership data as well as hack into INEC’s voter registration database through the creation of party membership forms and cards to match INEC’s voters register across the country.”

The APC said, ”First, the DSS and the PDP said the APC was cloning Permanent Voter Cards at the raided office, without a shred of evidence. Now, after a ‘painstaking’ investigation, the DSS has found out that the APC was only planning to inflate its membership data and then hack into INEC’s database. And this is the outcome of its massive, months-long investigations?

”This would have been funny if it were not from a primary domestic intelligence agency saddled with a great responsibility. Can this wish-washy report stand any serious scrutiny? Can any serious intelligence gathering agency anywhere else in the world take this report seriously?

“With these kind of findings, one can now understand why Boko Haram has continued to strike at times and places of its own choosing without any prior knowledge by our all-powerful DSS.

”Even the presentation of the report by a poorly-trained and highly-politicised spokesperson of the DSS worsened the so-called findings. Why would the spokesperson for a national agency sound like a megaphone for the ruling party, freely castigating the opposition spokesman and ”a number of uninformed members of the public”? Why does she have to go personal in presenting a report that supposedly is in the national interest?

”We have always warned that our democracy is in clear and present danger, not just from desperate politicians, but also from institutions of state that have compromised in their roles and resorted to crass lawlessness. The DSS’ findings today have given us another reason to repeat this warning.

”While we are willing to meet the DSS in court, we can confidently say that the ‘confessions’ extracted from the arrested persons, after they were subjected to incredible acts of torture, cannot even stand in any court of law.”