The presidential candidate of the Social Democratic Party (SDP) in the 2023 general election, Prince Adewole Adebayo, in an interview with journalists shared his views about the 2027 general election as well as other national issues
For political actors, there is frenzy in the atmosphere ahead of 2027 general election, what do you think about the current issues around the coming elections?
Like all human activities that require the involvement of a lot of people, two years is a short time. If you are trying to build a house to move in on May 29, 2027 and you have not bought the land by now, you can’t be sure that you will move into the house. That is just a small house for one person. And if you want to graduate from school to earn any degree and you have not gained admission by now, then you know you cannot graduate by that time. So, two years is not a long time when it comes to national planning and if you want to form a government, you need to persuade people to come and join you in the campaign. You need to tell them about your issues, you need to select those who agree with you and those who don’t agree with you. Then, the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) timetable is what people should follow and the INEC timetable says that a candidate must emerge at least a year or about a year before the elections. So, for the voter, he is only involved on the Election Day. That is why voters tend to think that 2027 is far away because by February 2027, voters will have to go to the polls to vote. But, prior to that, a politician has to emerge as a candidate of his party and that period is less than a year from now. So, you can understand why it looks like there is a lot of frenzy in the system.
Apart from the frenzy, there seems to be a lot of media appearances and a lot of sentiments and emotions in the system. How do we separate normal emotions and sentiments from the critical national discourse expected from issues leading to 2027?
Well, politics is a human activity and emotions are part of the human psyche and human make-up. But, if you want to govern, build roads, build hospitals, create employment, you are doing all those for human beings. So, you have to take their emotions along and there is a lot of diversity in the country in terms of age differences among the population, gender differences, religion and ethnicity, all of those put together. So, some of the sentiments have developmental implications, so you need to take care of them. Some are irrelevant to a particular issue. So, when it comes to the economy, we have been speaking quite clearly and lucidly about where we disagree with President Bola Tinubu and it is consistent with how we disagreed with him when we were campaigning. These policies that he and his team are now implementing, that people are crying blue murder, those are the things we predicted when we were campaigning pointing out the implications and it has dawned on President Tinubu now that he is in serious trouble because he is approaching half time and none of his policies has worked and he is running out of propaganda to use to explain it because a hungry man has no doubt that he is hungry. So, there is no amount of ‘food is coming’ that you can use to deceive a baby. It is only when the food comes that the baby knows it has come.
So, this is the situation. They are not improving in any index; they are not generating any employment; they are not bringing inflation down; they are not bringing prices of goods and services down; they are not doing better with getting people jobs; they are not doing better with security; they are not doing better in any area that is of importance to the people. So, whether it is food, clothing or shelter, education or health care, things that are measurable, they are nowhere and those are the things that we are discussing. All other sentimental issues, we have left those for those who are very good at the politics of emotion. But, we are for politics of development and measurement, and things that even when we say them; even if you are Tinubu’s best friend or a member of his political party, you know that these things we are saying are quite true. Those are the things that we are talking about now and the manner in which we talk about them is such that we proffer solutions, o, that should they have a second thought, they will look at the solution we are proposing and they will start to adopt our solutions. I hope that President Tinubu will steal some of my ideas just the way they stole my slogan during their campaign, and use them to better the lives of the people. I want President Tinubu’s government to succeed because I don’t need their government to be a colossal failure in order to be able to defeat them in the next election, because if you are waiting for them to fail even more spectacularly than they are failing now, the people are going to suffer irreparably. So, that is why we are talking to them. Some of the discussions we have are addressed towards the government to show them, to give them feedback and to analyse the feedback for them because when you are a president and you are staying in the State House, you can be in a cocoon, you can be in the bubble and you don’t get upper news, you don’t know what’s going on and you are releasing billions and trillions every day, you might be misled into assuming that because you are releasing all this money you think the money is doing something for the public. So when we get information from the public as we do, go round the country we speak because I know that if I speak President Tinubu will know, he will listen. So we try to speak to let them know that the people are complaining genuinely and they are suffering and don’t be deceived by any report you are getting in the contrary; that’s number one
Secondly, we are also communicating with the people, telling them that their suffering is not by accident. You know that we raised these issues in last election cycle and if you didn’t listen at that time, now you listen because you have an opportunity to get out of this quagmire by ensuring that in the next election, you just get rid of the All Progressives Congress (APC) and let President Tinubu go and enjoy his old age, and then we can sit down and put a proper government in place and then solve these problems that we shouldn’t be having. There are problems that we will be having whether we are developed or not but there are some problems we shouldn’t be having in this 2025 like food shortages, insecurity, lack of access to basic education, lack of access to healthcare and all of that. Those are not problems we should be having now; we should be having bigger problems.
Your party, the SDP, seems to be more or less like the beautiful bride now. I noticed that a lot of political bigwigs are meeting with your party leaders. Is there anything in the offing, should we be expecting a merger?
Well, I will leave that to the party management. I am the leader of the party but I am not the national chairman, national secretariat or organizing secretary. The only thing I do is to give guidance and for us to know that a political party is a public institution; it is not owned by me personally and anyone who wants to join. Even if President Tinubu decides to resign from the APC and says he wants to join the SDP, we can’t stop him because there is freedom of association under Section 40 of the Nigerian constitution. You can see that people want to join us, but they will need to understand that these politicians that are coming, we are having discussions with them and we have three criteria in dealing with them. Number one is that ours is a party of ideas, so if you don’t agree with our ideas it will be counterproductive for you to come because we have this set of ideas that we believe in. Many of these things that they are doing in APC and PDP like privatising public institutions, commoditizing social services, making money from education and healthcare, instead of investing in the outcome for the people; all these things, we don’t agree with. Removing subsidies from things that impact the poverty level are things that we don’t agree with, so we want the government to be more active in social investment so that we can lift our people out of poverty and they will pay us back with productivity in return for overtime. When you turn down the child who is a child of a beggar on the street and you take one to become a doctor, the other one becomes a journalist, the other one becomes an engineer, the money you spent to raise three children of the beggar will be paid over to you for generations to come because those three children are never going to be beggars and their children and grandchildren are going to be productive forever. So, that is the kind of dialogue within our party and that’s why we are different. It is not just in the alphabet that we are different from them; we are different from them in content. So, they need to study us from our manifesto, and Chapter 2 of the Nigerian Constitution and fundamental objective and directive principle of state policy which PDP and APC have been in violation of, and that’s why we are poor, insecure, and terribly desperate now.
Second reason we talk to them is the criteria for talking to the politician who wants to come to the SDP. There’s a kind of behaviour that makes you ruin your own parties where you are coming from. PDP used to be the largest party in Africa; it took over from the ANC in South Africa as the largest party in Africa. And now they are in tatters due to indiscipline, due to lack of party supremacy, due to lack of respect for the rules and regulations of their own party and APC is following the same route.
This discipline is what has kept our party in order and because of this discipline these people are coming in to join our party. We enjoin them to learn for the first time from any of them to be law abiding to do politics according to good conscience and the rule of law. And the third thing is that if you come to our party with an ambition you’re welcome. I even want people who I know are trying to run to be president to come and contest against men. I welcome the party. However, you must know that in our party we use democratic methods so we do not use any desperate method, we don’t give bribes to delegates; we don’t falsify delegates’ list; we don’t do fractional primaries and all of that. If all of these things are agreed, if we agree on the ideology, we agree on the party discipline, we agree on ethical politics. Everyone is welcome to SDP and I encourage everyone to come and join the party so that we can give Nigerians a solid platform for alternative politics so that we can let the people know that if you are not satisfied with what you are getting from the APC there’s a viable alternative for you and to put a government of your choice, that the whole idea.
A lot of these individuals that are coming to your party for meetings are largely people who symbolize the political party they represent. They are individualistic and their parties are not group-based, how are you going to manage the ego of these men and their financial deep pockets?
Well, I think deep pockets should be used for their families and the members of their community. We don’t put our hands in anybody’s pockets so we don’t know if it’s deep or shallow. The only thing you owe the party is your membership fee and if the party is doing any activity and you want to make a contribution, you can make contributions but I can believe that the treasurer is going to report to the INEC immediately that you made this contribution. So, whether you are rich or poor is irrelevant. Remember that when I won my primaries last year, the first person to buy my form was a multi-billionaire who owns two banks who is well known in the country and other people there but I still, out of 1807, I only lost 87 votes. So, people didn’t care whether the other people were billionaires or whatever. So, the party is based on ideas. When a party is based on money, the richest person has influence, but when a party is based on ideas, it’s just like a university, if you are trying to teach political science or nuclear engineering, the person who understands the principles will be the teachers; he is not going be the person who is the richest. So, SDP wants to give the governors; so if you come to us and you are a rich person, we will welcome you. Maybe, we can learn one or two things about entrepreneurship from you. If you make your money legitimately, we will want to learn how you make your money so that we can replicate it in millions of Nigerians, but beyond that, we are not interested. Second point is that in our party, people are highly experienced. Our national chairman, even though he is a young person, he started politics very long ago with Abubakar Rimi and if you do politics with Rimi you will know that you are highly experienced. Our national secretary used to be our national chairman and when I came in to reorganize the party, we found out that he is from the same place as I am and we said you have to step down or you resign and he stepped down and became national secretary. He used to be Minister of Defence in Nigeria and was the Minister of Power as well but he is now an obedient secretary. So, we have many people in our party who have the same level of pedigree as those who are making noise in other parties but when they are with us, they are highly disciplined. The director general of my campaign used to be a Minister of Youths and Sports in the country but he knows himself as the director general of the campaign and he limits himself to that. You can see the senators that we have now in the National Assembly from the SDP; you don’t hear of any scandal or anything that has to do with scandal. They don’t make any silly comments. Any policy they want to speak about in the National Assembly, they come to the party, we review them and we tell them what to do.
When they wanted to vote for the leadership of the National Assembly, they asked the candidate to come and make a presentation. So, Godswill Akpabio came to the SDP and made his claim. Kyari came and when we listened to all of them, then we said go and vote according to your conscience because the two of them look terrible to us. So they don’t do things without the permission of the party, so we have that discipline. So, I believe that if you are a former head of state, former vice-president, former minister, billionaire or whatever, once you come to the SDP, we will discipline you. We will make sure you follow the rules, so that is how we do it and I believe that is why many are thinking before coming because they know that in the SDP, we will discipline you. I believe you know Governor Donald Duke and you know Jerry Gana, a seven-time minister and all of that, the two of them were expelled from the SDP because they sued each other to court over a primary and we asked them to withdraw the case and they refused. And we expelled both of them. I still respect them personally and they are very good national leaders but we didn’t care that Duke was a two-term governor of Cross River State and Professor Gana is a well known statesman, when they didn’t listen to us, we expelled them. So that is the attitude of the SDP and you know that our founding chairman, Chief Olu Falae, actually won the 1999 presidential election, you can go and read the report, but they said Olusegun Obasanjo won. No problems. He has been Secretary to the Government of the Federation and Minister of Finance; but even now in the party, do you hear him say anything? No, we have serious discipline and that’s what matters.
