By Cynthia Alo
The presidential candidate of the African Action Congress, AAC, Omoyele Sowore, has rejected the move by the Department of State Services, DSS, to suspend his cyberbullying trial until after the 2027 general elections.
Sowore is instead demanding that the DSS completely withdraw the charges, end the trial, and offer a public apology.
Speaking during an interview on Channels Television’s The Morning Brief on Monday, the AAC candidate said the DSS’s request to pause the case shows the agency is trying to hide its failures after realizing the trial would not succeed.
He accused the security agencies of trying to control the courts, adding that the DSS lacks the legal right to simply pause a trial it started.
He said: “We are not seeking an adjournment. We want you to apologize for doing this to us, and ensure that you compensate people who are wrongfully tried for committing no crime at all.
“You have no right to suspend the trial you have already started. You should go and withdraw your charges. That is the only way out, and the only provision left in our law books. This shows clearly what we have always stated about all the security agencies: that they have complete control over the judiciary.”
Sowore stated that the trial was a misuse of state power meant to criminalize free speech.
He further alleged that a foreign tracking device was recently discovered on his car, which he claimed the DSS planted to monitor his movements.
Speaking on the state of the economy, Sowore strongly condemned the current administration’s removal of the fuel subsidy.
He noted that removing the subsidy has caused severe hardship, hunger, and inflation for ordinary Nigerians, while politicians continue to live in luxury at the country’s expense.
According to him, the actual problem with the fuel subsidy was corruption, not the subsidy itself.
“They have all agreed that the problem with subsidy is not that it is inappropriate; it is the fact that somebody is stealing it. Take the hands of the thieves away and let the people who deserve subsidy enjoy it,” he noted.
“You have to make the well-being of the people a priority. This is sustainable, and let me explain how that works: for every 1,000 Naira you put in the pocket of the poor, you have democratized wealth; it gets down to everybody.
“Under the system you have in place now, you remove subsidy from the poor and over-centralize wealth in the hands of a few. Who are these few people? Governors.”
“The inflation you’re talking about is tied directly to their corruption and the fact that they’re getting so much money,” he said.
If elected president, Sowore promised to return the subsidy to help poor Nigerians.
He stated that his administration would focus on fixing government refineries, catching the people stealing public funds, and gradually shifting the country toward green energy, such as solar power and trains running on Compressed Natural Gas, CNG.
He also defended his campaign promise to pay a minimum wage of N500,000, explaining that putting money directly into the hands of ordinary citizens is the only way to genuinely grow wealth from the bottom up.
On his preparations for the 2027 elections, Sowore dismissed concerns about the massive cost of deploying polling agents to all 176,000 polling units.
He said the party is introducing a mobile app that will allow everyday citizens to volunteer as agents and upload results directly on election day, avoiding the corrupt practice of buying votes.
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