August 13, (THEWILL) – The Inspector General of Police (IGP), Kayode Egbetokun, has said the recent raid on the headquarters of the Nigeria Labour Congress (NLC), in Abuja was not targeted at the leadership of the Congress but a man who was actively involved in the Sudan crisis and now attempting to mobilise efforts to destabilise Nigeria
Egbetokun spoke on Monday, in Abuja, at a Youth Summit organised by the police.
Rsponding to question on why the police were against the ‘EndBadGovernance’ protest, the IGP 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 protests. Two is that, based on the intelligence at the disposal of the police, anyone who knows what we know about this protest would not come out to protest.
“We had intelligence at our disposal that some agents of destabilisation are ready to use the hardship protest to destabilise 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 escaped.
“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 when the police raided 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 mobilising people to destabilise 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 on the Labour House.
“I always refer to the ‘ENDSARS’ protest, which turned violent. It started initially as peaceful, but any protest that is mobilised on social media has the potential to be violent because when you are mobilising on social media, you are mobilising the whole population, including criminals. So the idea of the protest being hijacked—I don’t believe that a protest that is mobilised on social media is hijacked.
“Hijacked by who? By the same people that were mobilised for the protest. So our experience in past protests would not make the police want to take part in any protest that we know is going to be violent.”
