The presidential candidate of the African Action Congress (AAC), Omoyele Sowore, has asked the Department of State Services (DSS) to apologise and withdraw the alleged cybercrime case against him.
Sowore spoke during an appearance on Channels Television’s The Morning Brief on Monday, accusing the DSS of 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.”
Over the weekend, the DSS instructed its counsel, Akinlolu Kehinde (SAN), to seek an adjournment of the case against Sowore until after the 2027 presidential election.
Sources said the move is aimed at allowing the AAC presidential candidate to fully take part in the electioneering process without the court proceedings constituting a hindrance to his political activities.
The DSS instituted the case against the publisher over posts he made on social media in which he called President Bola Tinubu a “criminal”.
The posts – published on Sowore’s X account and Facebook page on August 25, 2025 – led the secret police to issue him a seven-day ultimatum to remove them.
After the expiration of the ultimatum and Sowore’s refusal to take them down, the DSS approached the Federal High Court, asking for 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 had also 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.
Following DSS’s directive for the case to be adjourned until after the elections, Sowore faulted the move, saying, “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.
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