The presidential candidate of the African Action Congress, Omoyele Sowore, has asked the Department of State Services to apologise and withdraw the alleged cybercrime case against him.
Sowore made the demand during an appearance on Channels Television’s The Morning Brief on Monday, accusing the DSS of subjecting him to a wrongful trial.
He said the agency had previously insisted that the case must be concluded before or during the 2027 elections, but had now directed its counsel to seek a long adjournment.
Sowore said, “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.”
He added, “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 DSS had instructed its counsel, Akinlolu Kehinde, SAN, over the weekend to seek an adjournment of the case until after the 2027 presidential election.
Sources said the move was intended to allow Sowore to fully participate in the electioneering process without court proceedings hindering his political activities.
The DSS instituted the case against Sowore over social media posts in which he described President Bola Tinubu as a “criminal.”
The posts, published on Sowore’s X account and Facebook page on August 25, 2025, prompted the DSS to issue him a seven-day ultimatum to remove them.
After Sowore refused to take down the posts, the DSS approached the Federal High Court, seeking a judicial determination of whether it was lawful for an individual to publicly describe the President or any other person as a “criminal.”
The agency initially joined X, formerly known as Twitter, and Meta, the parent company of Facebook, in the suit. However, the Federal High Court in Abuja subsequently struck out the two technology companies from the case, leaving Sowore as the sole defendant.
Reacting to the proposed adjournment, Sowore said the DSS had no right to suspend a trial it had already initiated.
He said, “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].”
He added, “You have no right to suspend the trial you have already started. You should go and withdraw your charges. 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.
He said, “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 people. 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?”
The AAC candidate further recalled his previous legal battles, saying he was charged with treason in 2019 and kept in Nigeria for five years.
He said, “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.”
