The Department of State Services (DSS) said the agency has never denied the suspended Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) Governor, Godwin Emefiele access to his family and lawyers.
The spokesman of the agency, Dr Peter Afunanya, disclosed this in an article titled: “The DSS operates within its mandate,” released on Tuesday.
According to Afunanya, the celebration of the news of a court order to allow Emefiele’s lawyers and family access to him was quite unnecessary.
He said, “He was never denied access. Ever since he was taken into custody, his family has continually accessed him. Same with medical officials. The impression that the Service is going to act on the prompting of the Court is not correct.”
Afunanya, who alleged a media ambush against the Service, called out some newspaper houses for their editorials pertaining to the Service recently, which he referred to as “hatchet job.”
The DSS spokesperson stated, “It did not seem that the editorials which sought the reforms of the DSS or to criticise it for its public statements or actions on various subject matters of national security concern were, by any means, an accident or a coincidence.
“It looked every inch planted or organised. It is a hatchet job or so it seemed. The judgement that the Service is excessively public or ubiquitous missed the point. The papers manifested predictable bias and patterns,” he said.
According to him, considering the warped mentality that triggered writeups in the media against the Service it will be unsurprising to witness “an upsurge in malicious articles, criticisms and baseless attacks in the public space following the investigations of Messrs Godwin Emefiele and Abdulrasheed Bawa among other flimsy matters.”
He said certain groups and people would come up with frivolous allegations against the Service and its leadership.
“These entities may also exploit unpatriotic members of the Service to spread falsehoods, propaganda and hate in order to project the Organisation in a bad light.
