Sponsors of the protests across the country are on the watch lists of the Nigeria Immigration Service (NIS), the Department of State Services(DSS), and the police.
LNIS vowed that the sponsors who are foreign-based Nigerians would be arrested if they ventured to enter the country, the Police and DSS revealed that the bank accounts of most of them had been blocked.
Comptroller-General Nigeria Immigration Service (CG NIS), Kemi Nandap and Inspector-General of Police Kayode Egbetokun made these known at a joint news conference of service chiefs and heads of security agencies at the Defence Headquarters, Abuja yesterday.
Chief of Defence Staff, Gen. Christopher Musa convened the meeting a day after President Bola Ahmed Tinubu met with the security chiefs over the violence that broke out during the protests.
Gen. Musa also told reporters that the military and other security agencies were only after persons behind the call for undemocratic change of government.
Nandap also said that NIS, supported by the military, had stepped up surveillance of the nation’s borders to prevent foreign intervention.
She said: “We have diaspora sponsors, they are on our watch list. They are watch-listed and any attempt they make to come into the country, we’ll be notified and they will be picked up and handed to the appropriate authority.
‘’What we’ve done is to deploy a lot of our officers to the borders to make sure that our borders are well protected.
“In terms of profiling people coming in and going out of the country, we have stepped that up to make sure that people are properly screened before they can come into the country. And those that are of interest, of course, will not be allowed in.
“Right now, both the airports, the land borders, and our sea borders are well manned and protected. And we do this also in collaboration with the military and other security agencies.
IGP Egbetokun, who neither provided the number nor names of the uncovered sponsors of the protests, said even though “many of them reside abroad,” their bank accounts in Nigeria had been blocked.
DSS boss Bichi, who was represented by the agency’s spokesman Dr. Peter Afunnaya, also confirmed that the sponsors would not have access to their accounts in the country.
