The All Progressives Congress (APC) has said it is being forced to put on hold its membership registration following the ransacking of its main data office in Lagos by officials of the Department of State Security (DSS) and OP-MESA.

DSS, in a statement Sunday, claimed it had invaded APC’s office on Saturday following a petition that it was being used to clone Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) permanent voters’ cards (PVCs) for the purpose of hacking into the commission’s data base in order to corrupt and manipulate it.

However, APC at a press conference held in Lagos by its National Publicity Secretary, Lai Mohammed, described as plainly implausible and a witless afterthought the reason given by the DSS for invading the data centre of the party in Lagos at the weekend, calling the security service a shameless apologist of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP).

But as the main opposition party denounced the charge against it, the Lagos Police Command announced yesterday that it recovered about 1,700 voters’ cards from a bush at the Seme border at the weekend.

Speaking on the invasion of APC’s office, Mohammed wondered why any self-respecting intelligence-gathering agency would rely on beer parlour gossip in carrying out its onerous responsibility, “especially in a politically-charged environment like what prevails in the country at present”.

He said: “The spokesperson for the DSS said the organisation had put the building housing the data centre under surveillance, and that it only acted after it was convinced that ‘unwholesome activities’ were taking place. What hogwash!

“If indeed they put the place under surveillance, would they not have been able to establish that it is an APC data centre? Even if they were not sure, what prevented them from obtaining a court order permitting them to enter and search the building instead of carrying out a Gestapo-like operation? Are security agencies above the law?

“To highlight their crudity and lack of professionalism, they had to go and arrest one of the staffers who was not on duty just to get the password to the servers they vandalised and took away. This speaks volumes about the limitation of the DSS’ intelligence-gathering ability.

“If they had broken into the Boko Haram computer, would they have gone to arrest Abubakar Shekau or any of his commanders to give them the password to it?

“Nigerians can now see why no progress has been made in using intelligence gathering to root out the evil Boko Haram.”
APC said far from the lies concocted by the DSS, which has now become one of the enforcement arms of the PDP, the real reason the service broke into the offices of the party was to deprive it of its membership data base so it could no longer contact its members, and also to aid and abet the rigging of the 2015 elections by the PDP.

“With the membership data base now in their possession, it has become easy for them to collude with INEC to know in which areas we are strong so they can scuttle the distribution of the permanent voters’ cards there and, during the elections, to also deprive such areas of voting materials,” the party alleged.

Owing to the invasion of its data centre, APC said it had been forced to suspend its membership registration following the damage done to the equipment in Lagos by the invading force of the DSS and Nigerian Navy.

“'The viciousness and barbarism of the attack on the data centre and the arrest of 26 innocent workers, which put a lie to the DSS claim, have disrupted and corrupted the continuous offline and online membership registration across the country.

'”The over 50 security men who invaded our offices not only vandalised the offices, they pulled out and carted away the server and computer systems. Their activities have therefore affected the process of online/offline registration and data capture of APC members across the country, hence we are left with no choice than to suspend the process,” the party said.

It reiterated its earlier call for an independent inquiry into the invasion, which it said had “taken the impunity of the Jonathan administration to its worst level yet”, with a view to determining the identity of those who sent the invading force and meting out the necessary punishment to them, irrespective of their political status.

“It is important to get to the bottom of this unprecedented action in the political history of our nation, especially because it may have compromised the 2015 general election,” APC said, calling on all Nigerians as well as the country’s international partners to condemn the primitive action.