Cloning of PVC: APC Says DSS Lied

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.”