By Abiola Olawale
Human rights activist and African Action Congress (AAC) presidential candidate, Omoyele Sowore, has fired back at the Department of State Services (DSS), demanding an unreserved public apology and the immediate, unconditional withdrawal of the cybercrime charges pressed against him.
The controversy erupted on August 25, 2025, when Sowore took to his official handles on X (formerly Twitter) and Facebook to react to statements made by President Bola Tinubu during an official visit to Brazil.
In his posts, Sowore heavily criticized the administration’s stance on corruption, using strong language to question the government’s claims.
In response, the DSS asserted that the remarks crossed the line from political criticism into cyberbullying and psychological attacks against the President. After a seven-day ultimatum given to Sowore to delete the posts and issue a retraction expired without compliance, the secret police instituted criminal proceedings at the Federal High Court in Abuja, citing violations of the Cybercrimes Act.
The legal proceedings have experienced several twists, including a recent move by the DSS leadership under Director-General Tosin Ajayi to seek an adjournment and suspend the prosecution until after the 2027 presidential elections.
The security agency stated that pausing the legal battle would ensure a level playing field and allow Sowore to campaign without distractions.
However, rather than welcoming the proposed court suspension, Sowore has doubled down, maintaining that the initial filing of the charge was a politically motivated abuse of state power.
“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.”
“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.”
He accused security agencies of controlling “the judiciary; the judiciary is an appendage of the security.”
“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.
