Nigeria’s Department of State Services has summoned a Kwara State political aide for the offense of calling Vice President Kashim Shettima and Governor AbdulRahman Abdulrazaq a “disgrace.” Not for inciting violence. Not for funding terrorism. Not for treason. For words.
The aide’s remarks were made in the aftermath of the Kaima massacre of February 2026, in which terrorists descended on a community in Kwara State and murdered over 170 people. It was among the deadliest single attacks in Nigeria’s recent history. And as bodies were being counted and families were burying their dead, Vice President Shettima and Governor Abdulrazaq did not visit. They did not send a delegation of any meaningful consequence. They sat back in Ilorin while the community burned.
For pointing this out – for saying aloud what most Nigerians were already thinking – the DSS came knocking.
A Pattern, Not an Anomaly
This is not an isolated case. The DSS has developed what can only be described as a refined instinct for tracking down Nigerians who say uncomfortable things about powerful people. Earlier this year, the agency summoned Datti Baba-Ahmed, the Labour Party’s vice-presidential candidate in the 2023 election, over what it termed “inciting remarks.” Baba-Ahmed’s offense was criticizing government policy. In Kano State, the DSS detained and later released government officials after a “cyberbullying” petition was filed against them – a case that collapsed under the weight of its own absurdity.
Meanwhile, a Kwara State court recently dismissed an attempt by the governor’s aide to have a journalist and two activists remanded in custody. The presiding judge reportedly blasted the aide for misleading the court, calling the application baseless. The pattern is consistent: those who speak are pursued with vigor, while those who kill enjoy a curious kind of invisibility.
Where Are the Killers?
Consider the arithmetic. Over 170 people were slaughtered in Kaima. The attackers came, killed, and left. Months later, not a single arrest has been announced. No DSS operation has been publicized. No one has been summoned, detained, or paraded before cameras. But a man who called the vice president a disgrace? Him, the DSS found.
One might ask what kind of security architecture prioritizes the bruised ego of a politician over the blood of 170 citizens. What intelligence apparatus expends its resources tracking social media posts and political commentary while armed groups operate freely across the Middle Belt and the Northwest?
The World’s Best at Arresting Critics
Nigeria’s secret police have always existed in this strange duality – formidable when facing unarmed critics, remarkably ineffective when confronting armed militants. The DSS can locate a political aide in Kwara within days of a public statement. It can summon a former vice-presidential candidate for remarks made at a rally. It can process cyberbullying petitions with the efficiency of a Silicon Valley startup.
But ask the same agency to locate the men who killed 170 people in a community that is not hidden, not in a remote forest, not across an international border – and the trail goes cold.
There is something deeply instructive about a state that moves faster to silence dissent than to avenge its dead. It reveals where the real threat is perceived to lie – not in the gunmen who burn villages, but in the voices that ask why the gunmen are never caught.
What Does This Tell Nigerians?
The message is not subtle. Nigerians are watching a government that treats criticism as a greater security threat than mass murder. A government whose intelligence services operate as a reputation management firm for the political class rather than a shield for ordinary citizens.
If the DSS applied even a fraction of the zeal it reserves for critics toward tracking down the perpetrators of the Kaima massacre, would those killers still be free? If the same surveillance tools deployed against journalists and activists were turned toward terrorist networks, would communities in Kwara, Niger, Benue, and Zamfara sleep safer at night?
These are not rhetorical questions. They are the questions that Nigerians deserve answers to – assuming, of course, that asking them does not earn its own summons.
