It is no longer news that Deputy Governorship candidate of the All Progressives Congress in Kogi State, Hon. James Faleke, and Mohammed Audu, the son of deceased gubernatorial candidate of the party, were on Saturday invited, detained and released by the Department of State Services (DSS) for an undisclosed reason.
What is news however is that the Governor-elect of the state, Alhaji Yahaya Bello, has denied masterminding the detention of the duo.
Bello, in a statement through his media aide, Jude Salau, described as “absolute falsehood” the allegation that he wrote a petition letter to the DSS which led to Faleke and Audu’s detention.
“The allegation that I sent a petition to the DSS is an absolute falsehood and nothing can be farther from the truth,” he said. “I did not send any petition to the security department to invite Hon Faleke. The insinuations that I might have written a petition to push for their invitation is absolute falsehood.”
Bello described the DSS as a professional organisation that was capable of doing its job without any undue influence and appealed to Nigerians to support the DSS under President Muhammadu Buhari.
“We should all strive to support the independence of our security agencies from politicization,” he stressed, noting that: “agencies of government related to law enforcement and judiciary must be seen as impartial in our collective desire to build a strong democracy”.
In the same vein, he called on the APC to douse the tension and internal wrangling within its fold and lauded the contribution of Faleke towards the party’s success in the state.
“Hon Faleke is a respected member of APC, who has made his own contribution to the success of our party, instigating his arrest can not be a part of the reconciliatory moves and peace building efforts that we have initiated ahead of our January 27th inauguration.”
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