In three months from now, May, the Bola Tinubu administration will be two years in office. As the usual practice, politicians are already looking at the next elections in 2027.
And as such, political gatherings, alignment and permutations have since started.
In this interview, Prince Adewole Adebayo, leader and presidential candidate of the Social Democratic Party (SDP) in the 2023 general election, said the realignment and gatherings among politicians are necessary for emergence of new mentality that can properly position governance and Nigeria.
For him, for the sake children and grandchildren, Nigerians should not for vote for Tinubu and APC in 2027 if they want to get out of their present helpless situation.
This administration will be two years in May, but it appears politicians are already doing the permutations and strategizing for 2027. It is looking like they’re not even concerned about how this administration rules. Don’t you think it’s too early for us to start talking about the 2027 elections, when the administration still has over two years left?
No, it’s not too early. It depends on what activity people are engaging in. Nigeria is a very big country. I’ve been in Adamawa State and it is just one of the states in the North-east. We have North-west which is larger, and we have North-central. Then, we have the entire South comprising the South-east, South-west and South-south. So, it’s a very large country. Infrastructure is not as developed and there is diversity in the country. So, consultation is very important. Hearing people out is very important. And politics is not the same thing as elections. So, on many occasions, you want to engage with your party members. Sometimes, you engage with the communities outside your party. Sometimes, you need to win people over to your side, and this requires a lot of persuasion. So, every community you go to, you need to go to another one and another one; so, it’s part of the process. The government should be governing, meanwhile, what we are doing does not disturb the government. Sometimes, it gives feedback to the government about how people are thinking. For instance, I just came back to do this interview with you, I received a lot of information about Adamawa. And I think the government of the day needs to send people to Adamawa to come and hear what the people are saying. People are saying that this government is not doing well at all and we are learning lessons from that.
You said the SDP is not anti-Tinubu, but you are against his policies. How do you differentiate the man from the policy he makes?
The policies outdated Tinubu. We started this journey from the SAP, when we devalued our currency. We did so many other things, and when the PDP was in government, they did a lot of good things, but there are some things they did I didn’t agree with. For instance, I didn’t agree with them for failing to boost the industrial capacity of the country and even many of the enterprises that they privatized did not start to function well and we are leaving a lot of people behind. Our textile industry is gone. Our petroleum industry is just about to restart; a good thing now after two decades of doldrums. Our agriculture is not working. So, it doesn’t matter that President Tinubu is there now, whoever is there now, our criticism will be the same, but many people are disappointed that President Tinubu whom they thought would be able to do very good work has not managed to show that. But I’m not disappointed. That was why I oppose him. That is why I ran against him last time, and that is why I’m going to run against him now, if the opportunity comes my way. The issue is that speaking against traffic jam doesn’t mean you hate drivers. Speaking against hunger doesn’t mean you hate the Minister of Agriculture. Speaking against poor grades doesn’t mean you hate the Minister of Education. It is that these are things we shouldn’t have. I don’t like an epileptic power supply, but it doesn’t mean I hate the minister in charge of power. It’s just that these are not good things to have. So, the president is making a lot of Nigerians poor, he is leaving millions behind, and a lot of money is being spent in the budget and outside the budget, which are not reflecting on the welfare of the people. It doesn’t matter who is there. These are not good things. And these are things even the president himself, when he was in the opposition, campaigned against, and I believe that in his heart of heart, he should not be satisfied. I don’t think that his vision for himself is that two years after being in power, people will still be shouting hunger everywhere, underdevelopment will be everywhere, and unemployment will be everywhere. The currency will be so badly damaged to this point; the inflation will be going to almost the middle of the double digit. So, I don’t think he wants all of that. And I believe that he is probably struggling on his own, trying to figure out how to right some of these wrongs. And our job is to provide alternatives, because there are certain easy options, valuable options that President Tinubu is not considering, which shows to me that he has given serious thoughts to the method he is using now. And he genuinely believes, even though wrongly, that these methods are going to work. I hope they work, but I know that historically, they have never worked, and I’m trying to prepare Nigerians for an alternative that will be better than this. But I wish the president well, and I pray for him every day. I tell everybody, if you want to pray for anybody in this country, before you pray for me, pray for president Tinubu because anything he does has an effect on the security of Nigerians or the welfare of Nigerians and the progress of the country. However, when he is having wrong-headed policies, it is my duty to point them out. Not only that, it is my duty to proffer alternatives to Nigerians and demonstrate to Nigerians that these alternatives are better, and that when you have an opportunity, just walk away from Tinubu and APC and their policies for the sake of your children and grandchildren, seek alternatives. Consider the SDP and our platform. There is no enmity in that.
It looks like politicians are just going where they tend to get something. Almost every politician wants to be on the side of the ruling party and this may not give room for viable opposition. Does that not give you a cause for concern?
Well, we are on course; at least, it’s very hard for you to hear that there are people from the SDP crossing over anywhere. Those who are crossing around have been crossing for some time. They are known for that. In politics, different people have their own mission, and we are not in the business of criticizing other people about their personal choices. The only person I’m qualified to criticize is a person who is in government, making decisions on behalf of the public, spending government money in public buildings and using public facilities. But for other persons who are doing their own politics, I leave it to them, but we will never be one of those who will cross to join the ruling party. We will remain those who are galvanizing Nigerians for better governance. We, as SDP, if you listen to our national chairman, Shehu Musa Gabam, our national secretary, Dr. Olu Agunleye, and many people in our party, our mission is to get a consensus across the country. It is to say that we need better governance in this country, and we need governance around chapter two of the Constitution and around the manifesto of the SDP; we are a little to the left. That is how we have been since our creation in the Third Republic. And what we are trying to do is to maintain a minimum contract with the people, and we are recruiting politicians who are not with us to say, you cannot have a period of every four years to oppose somebody. In 2015, we opposed Jonathan. We opposed Buhari. We now oppose Tinubu. No, you must have a governance consensus about good governance, security, welfare, investment in social investment for the people, balance the economy, create a strong naira and have low inflation and a high employment. So, you want to do all of that, and that is what we’re going about doing. So, we are not limited to those who have grievances against the government of the day or those who are defecting from party to party. We welcome everyone provided that you understand that the platform we’re building now is a platform that wants to talk about consensus around governance, so that when the election is over, the people can be sure of the minimum dividends of democracy.
You feel that what the government has on paper is different from what is on the streets because you talked about the issue of tax reform, the subsidy and the floating of naira that it shouldn’t have gone hand in hand. What do you think Nigerians expected of this government that they are not seeing?
It’s my prayer on behalf of the Nigerian people and for the sake of Nigeria as a republic that President Tinubu turns a new leaf. I hope that some benefits of the painful measures he has taken would go to the people, and I hope that he would hear more. He should not be in a cocoon or in a bubble, thinking that by juggling numbers and statistics, he is going to feel that he is helping the economy, or that he will actually start to think in terms of how the people are faring, because welfare of the people is the essence of the economy. But we are also hoping that Nigerians will have hope that if the government of President Tinubu doesn’t get it right, that that is not the end of hope for Nigeria, and that they can invest their hope and trust in an alternative platform like ours and on alternative programmes that we propose. So, I wish President Tinubu every success in life and every success in his administration. I hope that he would occasionally go out and hear directly from the people. It might be a big mistake to think that Nigerians can wait for as long as it takes for all their slow motion programmes to trickle down, but I’m not in his party. I’m not his supporter and I’m not in his government. I only wish him well because he is the leader of Nigeria, but if he doesn’t take the advice, and persist the way he is going, and not understanding that people are suffering and dying, people are being left behind, and that there are measures he can take which may not align with his Bretton Woods neoliberal approach to governance in the last two years, then may be people will be happy to embrace SDP as a better alternative to implement those measures that will better their lives.
After the 2023 general election, so many parties went to court. You have the likes of Labour Party, APGA, Accord Party and PDP. There has been a crisis in the political space of every political party in Nigeria. Has that made it very difficult for opposition parties to be able to checkmate the ruling party in the country?
Well, I think the political parties should learn from the SDP, because after we had our primaries in 2022, no one went to court. All those who lost the primary election to me, worked on my campaign for the presidential election. We had many grievances with the result of the election, with the process, but we did not go to court against Tinubu or APC or INEC. We decided to learn our lessons. And those areas where INEC didn’t do well, we have made advocacy about them. Those areas where we as a party feel short, we have expanded our base and we will work better to strengthen our structure. We are working on that. There is no challenge to the leadership of Shehu Gabam as our party’s national chairman. The SDP has no case, either at national, zonal, state or local government level, and we have participated in every governorship election since then. When we were not treated fairly in Kogi where we won and they robbed us, the candidate at the party’s branch in Kogi went all the way to the Supreme Court. We did not blackmail or blacklist anyone, and we have been engaging since then. And nobody in the leadership of our party has submitted his CV or résumé to President Tinubu that we are looking for anything that the government can offer; we are not interested. What we are interested in is to build our party and to go across the country and unite the people of Nigeria and to see that the problems of the human development indices, where we are lagging behind become part of why we do politics. And we are trying to build our politics around the issues, so that we can resolve the issues, and people can live well. So, we are not part of those political parties that are in crisis or trying to join the big government or trying to destabilize anyone. What we are doing is building large tents, calming our system down, and almost everybody who has come across the SDP is a nationalist. They want to do what is right, starting from national chairman to the least person in the party. And that is the spirit. So, if other political parties decide to come and join us, or at least resemble us in many ways, including in how they carry out their affairs, I think the opposition will be more viable. They will be stronger, and they will be based on issues, not based on sentiment or negativity, ethnicity or religion. It will be based on the promises contained in our constitution, the fundamental objectives on the direct principle of state policy, that we are going to keep security, welfare and a robust economy to the Nigerian people, and that is the promise of SDP. So we are not involved in any crisis, and we don’t have any factions.
There were rumours that your party chairman met with the former Governor of Kaduna State and some other political figures, and called themselves ‘The Alternatives.’ Some felt you should have been there as the SDP presidential candidate. Yet, you said you don’t have a political party crisis, but your chairman is meeting with some other political figures in the country, are you not worried about that?
He is doing what we elected him to do; win to make the party stronger. You know, he is a young man with a lot of political experience, and in many of the crises you find in politics today, he predicted them many years before he came to the SDP. So, whatever he is doing, he is reporting back to the party. He is the number one functionary of the party. He is playing his own role. I am playing my own role. The person he went to meet, former Governor Nasir El-Rufai of Kaduna, is a senior brother to me, a national asset, one of the few people in political circles that you cannot say is there for himself and there are other people. So, sometimes you go and meet people who are well known to the media, and the media will want to make speculation about them. I just came back from the north now, and I went to meet political leaders. Some of them are 80 years old. Many of them have been in politics since the First Republic. I went to meet with them. We kept the media outside. So, we are talking to people. So, he is not the only one who is talking at a lower level. Many people are joining the party and I welcome El-Rufai to the SDP. If he doesn’t want to come early, I will go and make sure he comes. I will need many more people like that to join our party, because what we want is a large party. You cannot doubt the capacity of El-Rufai. You cannot doubt his ability to work very hard. When he wants to work very hard, you may have disagreements with him on many issues, but you cannot say you don’t understand him. He is a man who can get a lot of things done, and we need to talk to people like that. So we are talking to other people whom the media may not be interested in. So it’s not a personal agenda of the national chairman; it is a mission he reports back regularly to the party. We are also consulting with other people who wouldn’t want to be in the media. We are consulting with ordinary Nigerians, because it’s not El-Rufai that is going to save the SDP or save the country. It is the people of Nigeria. I have been in the north for a few days; people are listening to El- Rufai. People are listening to other people, and there are so many people who are even in the ruling party, who say, why are you neglecting us? We want to talk to you as well because if anybody loves Nigeria, he needs to know that coming together to get our politics right is the right thing for us to do now. So the SDP is not anti-Tinubu. The SDP is anti-underdevelopment, anti-poverty, anti-insecurity, anti-devaluation of currency, anti-lack of transparency and wastefulness. We are anti-unemployment and Tinubu just happens to produce a lot of those things now. So sometimes, when we talk about it, it will look like, oh, we are against the president, but we’ve been talking about this thing for a long time even under Goodluck Jonathan. We are consistent about that.
Credit: ThisDay
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