The now former director general of the State Security Service, Ita Ekpeyong was sacked by President Muhammadu Buhari on Thursday.
According to information gathered by THE HERALD, Ita Ekpenyong was sacked because he was perceived by the president to be partisan and was forced to resign with immediate effect.
According to a source who declined to be mentioned, the order came directly from President Buhari and immediately appointed Lawal Musa Daura as the new head of the agency which serves as the country’s police.
It will be recalled that prior to the presidential elections early this year, there had been cases whereby the SSS picked up those considered as political enemies to the then ruling power.
On July 25, 2014, operatives of the SSS descended on the corporate headquarters of TNS-RMS, a Lagos-based research agency, holding its staff hostage, ransacking its offices and premises and whisking away three of its personnel.
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The company’s offence was that it was, at the time, conducting an opinion poll on the August 9, 2014 governorship election in Osun state. The SSS struck because it got intelligence that the poll would indicate that Rauf Aregbesola of the APC would win the election. Mr. Aregbesola later won that election.
On November 21, 2014, the agency raided the APC data centre in Lagos, arresting its staffs and accusing the party of “cloning INEC Permanent Voters Card with the intention of hacking into INEC data base, corrupting it and replacing them with their own data”. The SSS is yet to prove that allegation till date.
The SSS also consistently disparaged the APC in the media, accusing the party and its leaders of being behind the deadly Boko Haram insurgency.
And after the Osun election, the agency’s spokesperson, Marilyn Ogar, rushed to the media, claiming that some opposition APC politicians offered the Service’s personnel 14 million naira bribe.
The SSS is yet to substantiate that allegation and no one has been charged to court for bribery.
It will also be recalled that in the past few weeks, there have subtle moves by the Presidency to sideline the secret service from protecting the president.
Buhari ordered a reorganization of the security arrangement at the presidential villa, an exercise that saw the SSS sidelined, and its operatives removed from key beats and restricted to guarding only the “outer perimeter” of the State House.
Several top officers of the agency had repeatedly pleaded with Mr. Buhari to sack Mr. Ekpenyong rather than continue to humiliate the Service and all its personnel.
The newly-appointed Director-General of the State Security Service, Lawal Daura, had retired from the service before he was recalled Thursday by President Muhammadu Buhari to head the organization.
Mr. Daura, almost 62, who was born in Daura, Katsina State on August 5, 1953, retired from the SSS in 2013, having reached the statutory retirement age of 60.
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President Buhari is also from Daura in Katsina state.
The new DG SSS joined the service in 1982 and was a one-time deputy director, Presidential Communication, Command and Control Center at the Presidential Villa, Abuja.
He had also served as state director at various times in many states of the Federation including Kano, Sokoto, Edo, Lagos, Osun and Imo.
He attended various professional courses both home and abroad including the National Institute for Policy and Strategic Studies, (NIPSS) Kuru.
Mr. Daura is the sixth director general of the SSS, one of the three security agencies created out of the defunct National Security Organization in 1986.