By Ikechukwu Amaechi
When President Muhammadu Buhari pulled out his kinsman, Lawal Daura, from retirement to head the Department of State Services (DSS), it did not come as a surprise to many.
The DSS with Ita Ekpenyong as Director General had become overtly partisan in the run up to the 2015 general election and the moment former President Goodluck Jonathan and the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) lost the vote, it was apparent that Ekpenyong’s days were numbered.
It didn’t also come as a surprise to many discerning observers of the country’s security and power architecture when about 40 DSS top ranking personnel, including its rambunctious and noisy spokesperson, Marilyn Ogar, were sacked or compulsorily retired on August 31.
What many Nigerians did not foresee, however, was what happened two weeks later.
On September 11, the appointments of 60 trainee officers out of 452 that belonged to Basic Course 28 of 2014 codenamed COBC28/2014 were whimsically terminated and the trainees thrown out of the State Services Academy (SSA) in Lagos.
Those dismissed had only one month of training to undergo before their commissioning as senior intelligence officers on October 26, 2015.
