African Action Congress (AAC) presidential candidate Omoyele Sowore has called on the Department of State Services (DSS) to apologise to him and withdraw the alleged cybercrime case filed against him.
Sowore made the demand where he accused the security agency of subjecting him to what he described as a wrongful trial.
“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,’” the human rights activist said on the show.
“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. And you must ensure that people who make these kinds of decisions are displaced from the system.”
The development follows a directive by the DSS over the weekend instructing its counsel, Akinlolu Kehinde (SAN), to request an adjournment of the case until after the 2027 presidential election.
Sources said the request was intended to allow Sowore, who is expected to participate in the presidential election, to engage fully in campaign activities without ongoing court proceedings affecting his political activities.
The DSS filed the case against Sowore over social media posts in which he described President Bola Tinubu as a “criminal”.
The posts were published on Sowore’s X account and Facebook page on August 25, 2025. The DSS subsequently issued him a seven-day ultimatum to remove the posts.
After Sowore declined to take them down, the agency approached the Federal High Court seeking a judicial determination on whether it was lawful for an individual to publicly describe the President or another person as a “criminal”.
The DSS initially included X, formerly Twitter, and Meta, Facebook’s parent company, as defendants in the case. However, the Federal High Court in Abuja later struck out both technology companies from the suit, leaving Sowore as the sole defendant.
Reacting to the latest development, Sowore criticised the decision to seek a lengthy adjournment and insisted that the DSS should withdraw the charges instead.
“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].
“You have no right to suspend the trial you have already started. You should go and withdraw your charges,” he said. “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 also accused security agencies of exerting undue influence over the judiciary, saying, “the judiciary; the judiciary is an appendage of the security.”
He further recounted his previous experiences with the Nigerian justice system, including an earlier treason case and a period of detention.
“Can you just wake up in the morning and say, ‘Oh, we’ve been trying Mr. Sowore for a year and a half now, seized his passport’? 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?
“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. I was charged with treason in 2019 and kept in Nigeria for five years. They did everything they could. Within that period, you know, my family was almost completely ruined,” he said.
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