The release of NLC President, Joe Ajaero, was expected. According to reports, he was released by the DSS on administrative bail at about 11.10 last night, a whole 50 minutes before the 12 midnight deadline given by the NLC for the government to release him or face labour’s wrath.
For the government, the 12 midnight deadline given by Labour for the release of Ajaero was more than enough.
In fact, NLC was even generous. The government, according to sources, didn’t actually need Ajaero in detention, at least not just yet and in the manner of his arrest. But there was an objective to be achieved in the chaotic, illegal, irresponsible and humiliating arrest and detention of the leader of organised labour in Nigeria: to prevent him from travelling to London to participate in the TUC conference. Simple.
And by 11 last night, that objective had been more than achieved: It was obvious it had become practically impossible for Ajaero to travel out, something for the government to smirk about but no doubt a development the Labour movement felt humiliated by.
It is not clear why Ajaero, who had no court warrant against him, would not be allowed to travel out of the country by the government for such a seemingly simple thing as a work-related conference. As they say about national intelligence, there is always something the government knows that the rest of society won’t, or is not even permitted to, know. So, it’s just possible that the government had its ‘good’ reasons for not allowing Ajaero to travel out of the country, yesterday.
The Igbo say that the new broom sweeps the cleanest. What is clear is that if you peel off the deliberate opacity that often surrounds government’s actions in Nigeria on the basis of ‘available intelligence’, you are very likely to come to see that this whole drama was an unnecessary distraction, but, for the government, very much needed if only for the newly appointed Director General of the DSS, Mr. Adeola Ajayi, to demonstrate to the leader of the impunity pack that the dictates of professionalism, law and legalities aren’t for his loyal servants: obviously, it didn’t matter to the DSS boss that his first official outing in the exercise of his mandate as the lead-custodian of national intelligence and protector of the president and the Governors, was a show of shame!
In other words, Tosin Ajayi hasn’t obviously come as the new-broom DSS boss but as the Service’s most theatrical yet.
And you wonder what the matter really is with members of the Lagos clique around the president. Till tomorrow, Kayode Egbetokun, the Inspector General of the Police (IGP), would not accept that any #EndBadGovernance protester died from a security agent’s fire during the protest. Meaning that the reported 40 odd deaths from the protests were either results of suicides by the protesters or that, to demonstrate their own stupidity (which is what government agents believe drove Nigerians to protest against Tinubu in the name of hunger protest), they simply fell upon and neutralised themselves. The IGP remained unconvinced, more like unfazed, even after the army admitted that one of its soldiers had killed a teenager in Kaduna in the course of the 1-10 August protest.
A brief official introduction of the DSS says it is primarily responsible for intelligence gathering within the country and for the protection of senior government officials, particularly the President and state governors. Now pray, how does the president of the Nigeria Labour Congress travelling to London for a conference on the invitation of the UK Trade Union Congress cohere with a plot to assassinate the president of the Federal Republic or Hope Uzodinma, his home State Governor, as to warrant its being crudely, not to say theatrically, aborted by the Department of State Services? Exactly what point did Ajayi set out to prove to the Nigerian public?
At his swearing-in on August 30, the director of DSS information, Mr. Peter Afunanya quoted Ajayi as harping on the need “for unity of purpose among staff” while enjoining them to remain DISCIPLINED and PROFESSIONAL in the discharge of their duties.
He also quoted the newly sworn-in DSS boss as pledging to refocus the Service towards “covertness and likelihood of studious silence over certain matters.”
Many who have interrogated DSS’s rough-handling of Ajaero, who has not been found guilty of any offence, have charged that the DSS acted unprofessionally in the arrest and detention of the NLC president.
Ok, so, where is the “covertness and likelihood of studious silence over certain matters” in the way Ajayi’s boys and girls displayed raw and arrogant power and disdain for the public in the manner they arrested Ajaero at the international airport in Abuja and detained him? Couldn’t Ajayi have applied the principle of “covertness and likelihood of studious silence over certain matters” by simply inviting Ajaero to the DSS office for interrogation, as the police had done?
When as presidential candidate, the Jagaban Borgu (JB) and now President of the Federal Republic, campaigned on the ‘philosophy’, his own self-hewed political philosophy, that power, and by extension leadership, is not served a la carte but grabbed and run, he was wittingly serving notice that his would be a regime of impunity clear-eyed lawlessness. To be sure, Ajayi, Egbetokun and all the other insufferable, off-putting members of the Lagos clique around the president, are only taking a cue from the president’s body language to act so dishourably.
Who will tell the president that neither his personal or group’s interest nor that of the entire country is served by this let-the heavens-fall style by which his legitimacy-challenged government has come to be defined?
