Six Words on National Television and Their Day in Court: The El-Rufai Wiretapping Trial, Deji Adeyanju's Subpoenaed Testimony, and What "We Listened to the Conversations of the NSA" Actually Means

2026-06-23

On Monday, June 22, 2026, the Federal High Court in Abuja sat for a session that placed at its centre a video recording of a television interview, the testimony of a man who said he was watching television on the same day and would rather not have been in the witness box, and a six-word phrase whose precise legal meaning is now the subject of a criminal prosecution under two of Nigeria's most significant digital and communications statutes. The phrase is this: "We listened to the conversations of the NSA." The man who said it is Nasir Ahmad El-Rufai, former governor of Kaduna State and former minister of the Federal Capital Territory, speaking on February 13, 2026, on the Prime Time programme on Arise Television, in a live interview that the Department of State Services subsequently decided was not political commentary but criminal admission.

The trial of El-Rufai — charge number FHC/ABJ/CR/99/2026 before Justice Joyce Abdulmalik — is one of the most politically charged criminal prosecutions in the current Tinubu administration's brief institutional history, and Monday's session advanced it in ways that simultaneously strengthened the prosecution's evidentiary record and introduced a cross-examination challenge that El-Rufai's lawyers will use when his defence is eventually heard. Understanding what happened in court requires understanding both what happened on that February day and what the law the DSS is invoking actually says.

The events of February 12 and 13, 2026 are the factual foundation on which the entire prosecution rests, and they involve an airport, a passport confiscation, a claim about a phone call, and a decision to go on television and say what had been heard.

On February 12, El-Rufai returned to Nigeria from Cairo, Egypt. At Nnamdi Azikiwe International Airport, security operatives — described by El-Rufai's supporters as acting on instructions from the National Security Adviser, Nuhu Ribadu — confiscated his passport and placed him on a watch list. He was not arrested. He was not detained. But the confiscation of his travel document was a public act whose significance he was not willing to let pass without comment. Reports circulated through Nigerian political and media spaces on February 12 that El-Rufai was either going to be arrested or invited by security agencies. The atmosphere around the former governor was one of political confrontation whose stakes were understood by everyone in the Nigerian political arena.

The following day, February 13, El-Rufai appeared on Arise Television's Prime Time programme, hosted by Charles Aniagolu, and made the statements that became the subject of the prosecution. His account was specific and remarkable: someone had wiretapped the phone of NSA Nuhu Ribadu, he said, and through that wiretap he and others had been able to hear Ribadu giving instructions to security operatives to effect El-Rufai's arrest. "Someone tapped his phone," El-Rufai said in the interview, as the video played in court on Monday confirmed. "The government listens to our calls all the time without a court order. Someone tapped his phone and told us that he gave the order." And later, in the formulation that has become the prosecution's central exhibit: "We listened to the conversations of the NSA."

Deji Adeyanju, the human rights lawyer and political activist who appeared in court on Monday as the second prosecution witness, was on Arise Television on the same day. He was invited by the same network, for the same Prime Time programme, to appear on the same broadcast platform on which El-Rufai gave his interview. He and El-Rufai were separately interviewed, both by Aniagolu, both on the same day, their appearances captured on the same channel within the same news cycle. When Adeyanju arrived in court on Monday, it was not because he wanted to be there. He told the court, with a directness that was noted across all reporting from the hearing, that he had no choice — he was there because he had been subpoenaed. His subpoena was the first exhibit marked: Exhibit G, admitted without objection from El-Rufai's counsel.

The prosecution's decision to call Adeyanju as a witness requires brief explanation for those who might otherwise find his role puzzling. Adeyanju is not a state security official. He is a political activist whose positions on Nigerian governance have historically been consistent and vocal — he told the court that before El-Rufai's February 13 interview, he had publicly urged the former governor to present himself for investigation by security agencies, and that he believed at the time that the matter was not politically motivated. He appeared on Arise Television on February 13 and gave his own assessment of the situation: when Aniagolu asked him whether he believed the government truly intended to arrest El-Rufai, Adeyanju responded that the DSS would have arrested him at the airport if arrest was truly the intention, and that the passport confiscation indicated he was on a watch list — "once your name is there, the first thing is to confiscate the passport" — rather than that a formal arrest operation had been launched. His reference to the ICPC as already investigating El-Rufai at the time added context to the political atmosphere he was describing.

The prosecution's purpose in calling Adeyanju was to use his eyewitness presence on the same broadcast date, the same network, and effectively the same editorial context as El-Rufai's interview to corroborate that the interview happened, that it contained the statements the prosecution alleges, and that those statements were understood by a knowledgeable observer in the terms the prosecution has charged. Adeyanju served, in evidence terms, as an authenticating witness for what the video recording itself shows. He was also a person who, in the DSS's subsequent investigation, had been summoned to their offices and asked to confirm what El-Rufai had said on air. Adeyanju confirmed to the court that he had done so — that he had appeared at the DSS office and confirmed that El-Rufai made the phone-tapping statement during the interview.

DSS counsel Oluwole Aladedoye applied to have El-Rufai's interview recording played in open court. The court granted the application. The video was played, and the court watched a former governor of Kaduna State, a man who had served in multiple senior federal government positions under multiple presidents, tell a national television audience that he had listened to the phone conversations of the sitting National Security Adviser. After the video was played, Adeyanju confirmed to the court that the recording accurately reflected what he had witnessed on February 13.

The prosecution then applied to tender Adeyanju's own interview from the same broadcast day — the conversation between Adeyanju and Aniagolu on Arise Television's Prime Time on February 13 — alongside a certificate of compliance from the broadcasting organisation. El-Rufai's counsel raised no objection. The flash drive containing Adeyanju's interview and the certificate of compliance were admitted as Exhibits H and H1. Both videos were played in court, making Monday's session an unusually public confrontation with recorded evidence of the kind that rarely features in Nigerian criminal proceedings with such clarity.

It was the cross-examination by El-Rufai's senior advocate Paul Erokoro that introduced the most substantively interesting legal question of the day. Erokoro, a senior advocate of considerable standing, focused his questioning on the precise distinction between two different things that the phrase "we listened to the conversations of the NSA" might mean. His first question put the distinction with admirable directness: did Adeyanju hear El-Rufai say in the video that he tapped a phone call? Adeyanju's response was equally precise: "We listened to their calls." What Adeyanju heard El-Rufai say, and what he confirmed he heard, was the phrase about listening to calls — not a specific assertion of personally operating the technical equipment of interception.

Erokoro pressed further, asking whether it would amount to tapping if a person speaks on a telephone's speaker setting and others present simply hear the conversation as it plays out. It is a question that has genuine legal weight. The Cybercrimes Amendment Act of 2024, under which El-Rufai is charged under Section 12(1), addresses the unlawful interception of communications. The Nigerian Communications Act 2003, under which the third count is framed, addresses similar conduct at the level of the broader telecommunications framework. Both statutes are concerned with the technical act of interception — the deployment of equipment or systems to capture communications not intended for the listener. Whether "we listened to the conversations of the NSA" describes that technical act of interception, or whether it describes something as simple as being in a room when someone played a phone call on speaker and hearing what played, is a distinction whose legal significance the court will eventually need to resolve.

DSS counsel Aladedoye objected to Erokoro's line of questioning. Erokoro argued its relevance. The exchange illuminated the central contested question in the trial: what, precisely, did El-Rufai do? The prosecution's case is that he admitted to the unlawful interception of the NSA's phone communications on live television. El-Rufai's defence will argue, when it is heard, that the words he used do not amount to the admission the prosecution says they are, and that the legal elements of the offences charged are not established by the evidence the prosecution has adduced.

Adeyanju's response to Erokoro's speaker-phone hypothetical was crafted with the care of someone who understood the legal stakes of what he was being asked. He said that if he was present when a phone conversation was played on speaker, he would not have lied about it — a response that is careful in what it does not say as much as in what it does. He did not confirm the speaker-phone scenario. He did not deny it. He said that if it had happened that way, he would not have misrepresented it. The response is the answer of a witness managing a cross-examination with appropriate professional caution.

Erokoro also asked Adeyanju whether he knew the means through which the NSA makes calls, and whether he would be surprised to learn that DSS investigators had not asked the NSA which specific device was allegedly compromised during their investigation. Adeyanju said those matters were not his concern. The line of questioning was designed to plant seeds of evidentiary doubt: if the DSS investigated this matter and did not even identify which device on the NSA's end was the subject of the alleged interception, how complete is the investigation? How solid is the evidence of the specific technical conduct the statute requires? These are questions that Erokoro will return to in the defence phase.

The court also admitted an official gazette tendered by the prosecution — admitted as Exhibit I without objection from the defence. The nature of the gazette was not specified in the most recent reporting, but in Nigerian criminal proceedings, official gazettes are typically tendered to establish the legal standing of persons, institutions, or statutes relevant to the charge.

Justice Abdulmalik adjourned the matter to June 23, 2026 — tomorrow — for the continuation of trial. The case is proceeding at a pace that Nigerian political observers describe as unusually swift for the Federal High Court in Abuja, which normally manages backlogs that stretch proceedings across months or years between hearing dates. The speed of the trial's advancement has itself been read by different sides of the political debate as either evidence of the judicial system's commitment to efficient justice or evidence of institutional pressure on the court from the prosecution side.

The charges, read in their statutory language in the charge sheet marked FHC/ABJ/CR/99/2026, are worth quoting for the precision they bring to what is otherwise a case that has generated more political heat than legal clarity in public discourse. Count one accuses El-Rufai of admitting during the February 13 Arise TV interview that he and his cohorts unlawfully intercepted the phone communications of NSA Nuhu Ribadu, contrary to Section 12(1) of the Cybercrimes Amendment Act 2024. Count two accuses him of stating during the same interview that he knew and related with an individual who unlawfully intercepted the NSA's phone communications without reporting that individual to relevant security agencies, contrary to Section 27(b) of the same Act. Count three accuses him and others still at large of using technical equipment or systems to compromise public safety, national security, and instil reasonable apprehension of insecurity among Nigerians by unlawfully intercepting the NSA's phone communications, contrary to Section 131(2) of the Nigerian Communications Act 2003.

The three counts together address three distinct theories of criminal liability: personal commission of the interception, aiding and abetting a known interceptor without reporting them, and conspiracy to use technical means to compromise national security. The prosecution does not need to prove all three. Conviction on any single count would constitute a criminal verdict against a former governor for conduct directly related to his monitoring of the sitting National Security Adviser.

El-Rufai has not been silent about the political character of what he regards as a persecution. His supporters in the political opposition and in civil society have framed the prosecution as the Tinubu administration's use of security and prosecutorial machinery against a prominent critic — exactly the kind of weaponisation of state power that the anti-weaponisation fund debate in the United States, discussed in an earlier article in this series, sought in its own way to address. Whether that political framing influences or should influence the court's assessment of the evidence is a question Justice Abdulmalik's eventual verdict will implicitly answer.

What is not disputed in the courtroom — and this is the most important fact to hold onto as the trial continues — is that Nasir El-Rufai sat in a television studio on February 13, 2026, and told a national audience that he and those around him had listened to the phone conversations of the National Security Adviser of the Federal Republic of Nigeria. The video has been played in court. The witness who was on the same network on the same day has confirmed what the video shows. The legal argument is about what those words mean, what they establish, and what the law requires. Tomorrow's hearing will add another chapter to that argument.

Sources

TheCable — El-Rufai's 'Wiretapping' Interview Played in Court as Deji Adeyanju Testifies for DSS — https://www.thecable.ng/el-rufais-wiretapping-interview-played-in-court-as-deji-adeyanju-testifies-for-dss/
The Sun Nigeria — El-Rufai Admits Wiretapping NSA's Phone on TV, DSS Witness Testifies — https://thesun.ng/el-rufai-admits-wiretapping-nsas-phone-on-tv-dss-witness-testifies/
The Sun Nigeria — DSS Witness Testifies Against El-Rufai — https://thesun.ng/dss-witness-testifies-against-el-rufai/
PM News Nigeria — Deji Adeyanju Testifies for DSS in El-Rufai's Phone-Tapping Trial — https://pmnewsnigeria.com/2026/06/22/deji-adeyanju-testifies-for-dss-in-el-rufais-phone-tapping-trial/
Daily Post Nigeria — DSS Witness Adeyanju Admits El-Rufai's Confession of Wiretapping NSA's Phone — https://dailypost.ng/2026/06/22/dss-witness-adeyanju-admits-el-rufais-confession-of-wiretapping-nsas-phone/
Information Nigeria — El-Rufai's 'Wiretapping' Interview Played in Court as Deji Adeyanju Testifies for DSS — https://www.informationng.com/2026/06/el-rufais-wiretapping-interview-played-in-court-as-deji-adeyanju-testifies-for-dss.html
Blueprint Newspapers — Wire Tapping: DSS Witness Admits El-Rufai's Confession on TV Interview — https://blueprint.ng/wire-tapping-dss-witness-admits-el-rufais-confession-on-tv-interview/
National Accord Newspaper — Court Admits DSS Evidence as Witness Deji Adeyanju Corroborates El-Rufai's Wiretapping Claims — https://www.nationalaccordnewspaper.com/court-admits-dss-evidence-as-witness-deji-adeyanju-corroborates-el-rufais-wiretapping-claims/
Pointblank News — Court Admits DSS Evidence as Witness Deji Adeyanju Corroborates El-Rufai's Wiretapping Claims — https://pointblanknews.com/pbn/news/court-admits-dss-evidence-as-witness-deji-adeyanju-corroborates-el-rufais-wiretapping-claims/
The Authority Newspaper — Court Admits DSS Evidence as Witness Deji Adeyanju Corroborates El-Rufai's Wiretapping Claims — https://authorityngr.com/2026/06/22/court-admits-dss-evidence-as-witness-deji-adeyanju-corroborates-el-rufais-wiretapping-claims/