By Jane Okafor, Abuja
President Bola Tinubu’s Senior Special Assistant on Media and Publicity, Temitope Ajayi, has said that the Federal Government could legitimately monitor or wiretap phone conversations of Nigerians in overriding interest of national security.
Ajayi stated this while reacting to a Facebook comment on his post which condemned former Governor of Kaduna State, Nasir El-Rufai, after he admitted that an unnamed person illegally broke into the phone line of the National Security Adviser (NSA), Nuhu Ribadu, and listened to his phone conversations /calls.
Ajayi had posted on his Facebook that:
“El-Rufai admitted on a national television that someone tapped the phone of the NSA for him to listen to his conversation. When Charles Aniagolu, the interviewer, interjected that that was an illegal action, El-Rufai agreed to the illegality. By the time he is picked up to produce the person who illegally tapped the NSA’s phone, he would say President Tinubu is a ‘tyrant’ and persecuting him.”
However, countered by a Facebook user, Asiwaju Bode Gbadebo, who commented on the post that “He (El-Rufai) accused government of doing same illegality,” apparently to justify the tapping by the unnamed hacker, Ajayi stated that government could legitimately listen to the phone conversations of Nigerians for security reason.
He said the “government can legitimately listen to your conversation for national security reasons. Only govt is allowed to do what is illegal for citizens to do to protect and preserve the collective. You can’t carry gun but govt can carry gun and the firearm arm that is allowed for citizens under the law must be licensed by govt.”
The Daily Crucible reports that the former governor of Kaduna State and a chieftain of the African Democratic Congress (ADC), the political platform Nigerian Coalition forces had adopted to wrest power from President Bola Ahmed Tinubu in 2027, had on Friday appeared on the Arise TV’s Prime Time programme where he recounted an attempt by the Department of State Security Services (DSS) to arrest him on alleged order of Ribadu.
During the Arise TV appearance, El – Rufai said someone listened to the NSA’s phone conversations which revealed that it was Ribadu that made the calls instructing that he (El – Rufai) should be arrested.
However, another Facebook user, Ibekwe Spinoza Nonyerem, responding to Ajayi’s post described El – Rufai’s confession as a “grave matter of national security.”
“This is no mere controversy—it is a grave matter of national security. El-Rufai and Arise TV must be held to account, compelled to explain how the private calls of the National Security Advisor were breached. Arise TV cannot wash its hands of responsibility; it gave a platform to El-Rufai, who brazenly boasted of tapping those calls. Such reckless intrusion demands immediate reckoning,” he stated.
