The Inspector General of Police, Kayode Egbetokun, has alleged that one of the organizers of the recent nationwide #EndBadGovernance protests was a Sudanese who was also the mastermind of the crisis that rocked his native land. Egbetokun said this foreigner had planned to help destabilize Nigeria through the protests and the police was a hunt for him in a raid, he said, that has now been mischaracterized as an invasion into the offices of the Nigeria Labour Congress (NLC), in Abuja.
The police chief, who stated this in Abuja during a Youth Summit organized by the force, specifically said the raid was not targeted at the labour leaders but the foreigner hiding in one of the offices at the popular Labour House in Abuja.
He said, “My response to this will be in three parts. Number one is that, of course, our responsibility is not to protest but to manage protest. Two is that the intelligence at the disposal of the police, anyone who knows what we know about this protest, will not come out to protest.
“We had intelligence at our disposal that some agents of destabilization are ready to use the hardship protest to destabilize our country. I won’t be able to share the details yet because we are still on the trail of these individuals.
“Some of them are already out of the country, and they immediately escape. Some of them are even foreigners. One of them was traced to the Labour House the other day, and I was just wondering why the noise about the raid on the Labour House.
“We raided only a shop that the individual was using as a front and we have been monitoring his activities. He was very active in the Sudan crisis and he’s in Nigeria mobilizing people to destabilize our country.
“We traced him to that shop and our detectives raided his shop. We recovered valuable documents, so there was no need for the noise about the raid of the Labour House.”
Egbetokun said the police would always be against any protest in the country because of the experience police had during #EndSARS riots in 2020, arguing that any protest that started on social media has tendencies of being violent.
He stated, “I always refer to the #EndSARS protest which turned violent. It started initially as peaceful, but any protest that is mobilized on social media has the potential to be violent because when you are mobilizing on social media, you are mobilizing the whole population, including the criminals.
“So, the idea of the protest being hijacked, I don’t believe that a protest that is mobilized on social media is hijacked. Hijacked by who? By the same people that were mobilized for the protest.
“So, our experience in the past in previous protests would not make the police want to take part in any protest that we know is going to be violent.”
