By Vanguard Editorial, August 13, 2025
In a few days, the administration of Oluwatosin Ajayi in the Directorate of State Security Services, DSS, will clock one year. The Director General was appointed on Monday, August 26, 2024. He took over from Yusuf Bichi, whom President Bola Tinubu inherited from the regime of the late President Muhammadu Buhari.
Its core mandates include counter-intelligence to safeguard the country’s secrets from rival foreign secret agencies, medical intelligence, economic intelligence, internal security, counter-terrorism and surveillance. The secret police in every nation seeks to protect the state, the government of the day and the citizenry.
During military rule, the Directorate tended to place emphasis on protecting the leadership of incumbent regimes and going out of their way to hound, harass and intimidate their perceived enemies.
From 1999, the Directorate, which was simply known as State Security Service, SSS, has experienced its own share of ups and downs in its effort to adjust to our renascent democratic dispensation away from its ugly military past. From the President Olusegun Obasanjo years up to 2015, the secret police minded its business and core constitutional mandates.
However, the DSS reverted to its ugly past under Buhari’s elected regime. It was used to conduct “sting operations” aimed at cowing and purging the judiciary of certain judges to make way for Buhari’s preferred candidates in that arm of government. Hooded, armed personnel of the DSS frequently invaded the National Assembly to intimidate its leaders who stood firm against the Buhari government’s efforts to force leadership changes.
The Bichi-led DSS administration under Tinubu engaged in unnecessary verbal sabre-rattling against the opposition forces, civil society and government’s perceived enemies. It was implicated in many cases of harassment, abduction and arbitrary detentions of media and legal practitioners perceived as anti-Tinubu.
The arrival of Ajayi as DSS DG has seen the restoration of professionalism and deliberate efforts to forge synergies with the public. The noise from its Public Affairs Department has died down. Indeed, Ajayi has gone so far in building bridges with media that he was invited to deliver the keynote address at the Nigerian Guild of Editors, NGE, Biennial National Convention in Enugu in June this year.
Ajayi is a strong believer that the security architecture of the country should be recalibrated to enable the people within communities to act as first responders to insecurity but in close synergy with the security agencies, Police and Armed Forces. This is the only way we can collectively sweep the vermin of bandits, Boko Harm, Fulani herdsmen attackers and kidnappers from our forests and restore national security.
We join the Human Rights Writers Association of Nigeria, HURIWA, and other well-meaning Nigerians to commend Ajayi and his team at the DSS. We urge them not to relent until insecurity becomes a thing of the past in Nigeria.
