The presidential candidate of the Social Democratic Party (SDP) in the 2023 general election, Prince Adewole Adebayo, in this interview with select journalists, says Nigeria needs a new set of politicians, as recycling old politicians cannot bode well for the country. According to him, Nigerians need to listen to new ideas, adding that new politicians come with new ideas

There have been reports of factions within the SDP. Can you clarify the current state of your party?  

Well, there are no factions in the SDP, but there are tendencies. And for a political party like us, we had one common tendency. Ideological convergence was already set up for us. We’re a different party. We’re lucky, because when originally the party came into existence in 1989, before even members came to the party, we already had a path to go. Remember the NRC-SDP? Little to the left, little to the right. And the politicians who wanted to go to the left side of the ideological divide decided to go to the SDP. And that’s how we came up with Yar’Adua, the senior Yar’Adua, and so many other people like that. Eventually, we ended up with Abiola and the Farewell to Poverty and Insecurity. So then when the party came back after the military interregnum, and we came back, we followed that ideology. But, you know, as you look for electoral success, new people join. And some of these people who join are joined as human beings. So, they are coming with their own tendencies. The politics, the way they know it. You expect to see some negotiation going on, some conflict going on. And secondly, you will see that the party is a party of law and order. The party is a very carefully crafted party for law and order. Every organ of the party works. In many political parties, these organs are decorative. So, if you say there’s a National Working Committee, it could be three governors sitting down on top of ‘Ghana-must-go” bags telling you what to do. In the SDP, no matter who you are, if the NWC is calling you, you better go there quickly and listen to them. If the State Working Committee is calling you, you better be careful. If the ward is calling you, you better be careful. You could see that the National Chairman of the SDP, duly elected and substantive chairman, is Shehu Musa Gabam. Nobody’s questioning that. The National Secretary, Olu Agunloye. Shehu Musa Gabam, due to the activity of the National Working Committee, over which he presides, suspended him. And he has comported himself, even though he argues vehemently that there’s no basis to suspend him, he’s not guilty of anything, and he’s been following the party constitution. But he has kept to that. So, for the past two months, he hasn’t come to the office, he’s obeying the order of the NWC. Occasionally, when the party needs him to do anything, ask him some questions, or perform any activity, he still obeys. It’s a party of law and order. But there are people, whom I have some sympathy for, who are new to the party. Who assume that, OK, if this is the National Woman Leader of the party, National Youth Leader of the party, or any official of the party, if they don’t look like they’re billionaires, you think that, OK, maybe if I promise to buy them a car, or give them some money, they’re going to overlook their authority. They won’t. And so that shock, that cultural shock is what you see. So many people, when they face discipline in the party, or they have a request and the request is not met, they will resort to what they have been used to in their previous places. But a political party that wants to grow, has to have a room to know that people are learning. We just watch them, let them do all the drama they need to do. But the SDP is not about drama at all. There’s no faction. The organs are there, and everything is intact, and if anybody is in doubt, you can go to INEC, who nominated the candidates, who is going to conduct them tomorrow, and so on and so forth. The party is in order.

Regarding Nasir El-Rufai’s recent call for voters in Kaduna to support SDP candidates despite claims of his expulsion from the SDP, how do you address the question of expelling someone who is reportedly not a member?

That question is what the National Working Committee of the party left to me. I don’t want to ban anyone. Left to me, anyone who is banned, if they are repentant, they behave well, should be accommodated. But the organs of the party have the right to make a decision regarding membership. The Supreme Court of Nigeria has decided that. What I can say generally speaking, is that as a member of the political party that obeys its own rules, if the party says this is how we go about it, I will follow the party. However, the party has sufficient organs within the party for anybody, including someone who was banned or suspended, to approach that organ of the party to make your case. For me, who is a member of the party, who wants the party to grow, anyone who says vote for SDP is my friend, whether he was in my party or not in my party, whether I was suspended or not suspended. I go around telling people to vote for SDP not because of me, but because the country needs alternative politics.

Is El-Rufai currently a member of the SDP, or is he affiliated with the ADC or another group, particularly in light of his involvement with a coalition?

Well, what I can say, and this is second-hand information, is that from party records, from what party officials are saying, that he’s not a member of the party. But if he wants to be a member of the party, I’m not against him being a member of the party. I just have to follow what the party says clearly. But the party officials will explain how the processes work. But what I can say is that this is how you know a member of a party. You will see their name in the ward register, where they come from. And at the national level, the national secretary will have overall numbers of members and their particulars. But one way or the other, it’s a voluntary organization. It’s left for the member and the party to try to work it out.

El-Rufai has described the All Progressives Congress (APC) as a failed, clannish and visionless administration that has worsened Nigeria’s socioeconomic issues. As a leader of an opposition party, do you agree with his assessment of the APC?

He’s not saying anything new. He’s saying in 2025, after many waters have crossed his own bridge, what I was saying in 2022, 2023. It’s echoing me now. I can’t charge him for copyright, but I can say welcome to the club. But we’ve been saying this for some time. And we’re saying this not out of animosity or anything. The result that we are getting from the performance of the APC for the last 10 years resembles the result we got and we’re not satisfied with under the PDP for 16 years. And if this result must change, we must change the political tendencies that are in authority. Changing your political party without changing your tendency is just a mere nomenclature.

Can you explain what you mean by changing political tendencies, and how this impacts Nigeria’s political landscape?

There is a governing principle, which is feudalistic, that is responsible for why our democracy is not in congruence with the result. Now, that mentality where first you don’t respect the power comes from the people, you don’t respect the rule of law, you don’t want to show accountability, and you don’t want to separate money from politics. That tendency where the bigger your money, the bigger the result you get in politics. And then when you go to politics, the bigger money you need to roll over your political investment. That kind of mentality, if you have it, you can jump from APC to SDP, to ADC, to ADA, to YYY. If you carry that mentality, wherever you go, it will pollute that place. If you are in APC, you don’t even leave APC, and you decide to change your mind. For example, President Bola Tinubu doesn’t have to leave APC, he’s in government. If he decides to take a playbook, something out of the playbook of SDP, and governs properly for the Nigerian people, follows Chapter 4 of the Constitution and Chapter 2 of the Constitution combined, and decides to be accountable and to be a constitutional democrat, he doesn’t have to leave his party. Results will change. But because you have squabbles in your party, you now leave and join another party. But you don’t want to drop the tendency that caused the tension where you’re coming from. You want to now pollute the new place with that same tendency. You just change alphabets. In fact, now they are running out of alphabets to use. But what you need to do, what is going to change the life of Nigerians, is that we need a different politics.

Senator Abah Moro recently suggested that the elite, including politicians, are the root of Nigeria’s problems. How can the mindset of politicians be shifted to prioritize the electorate’s interests?

First, you need new politicians. Because recycling the old politicians, not just a matter of age and other things, is that a leopard, if you don’t like spots, then you don’t need to bring leopards. Because leopards cannot change the spots. You need to listen to new ideas and new politicians. When new politicians come with new ideas, we should not be too conservative as a society. Because a conservative society is trying to consolidate on its own progress, whether obtained lawfully, unlawfully, historically, wrongly. But when you see a conservative society, they have something they’ve achieved, something they’ve grabbed from the world, which they want to preserve. But a country with a 97 per cent poverty rate, a country that has no infrastructure, has no institution working, you cannot be conservative. You have nothing to lose. You need new ideas, you need new leadership, you need to renew yourself. And the ideologies we have, articulated or not articulated, the ideology is that politics is for the people who are in politics. And governance is for those who are in government. That’s why everybody is trying to be in government. No matter the condition set for them to be in government, they want to be in government. And when they’re not in government, their position is to struggle willingly to be in government, not to change what is going on in the government. It’s left for the Nigerian people. How many politicians in this country? The politicians in this country are now up to 2 per cent of the population. It’s not about what the 2 per cent are doing or not doing. It is what the 98 per cent want to do.

The WTO Director-General, Okonjo-Iweala, has praised President Tinubu for stabilizing the economy but emphasized the need for safety nets and job creation to address hardship. What is your take on her statement?

Her statement is correct in the paradigm of neoliberal economics. It’s like saying a doctor who mistreated 1,000 patients and they’re dropping dead by the doses has now managed to reduce the number of those who are dropping dead to like one a week. You can say you’ve stabilized the situation. It doesn’t mean that the situation is correct. It’s saying that the trauma that the APC, PDP policies threw the Nigerian people into or even the tailspin that the economy was going into has now stabilized. It’s like a pilot who ran, because he doesn’t know what he’s doing, ran into terrible weather, flying above the level given to him, facing the wrong direction, and now is flailing in the storm, has now managed to balance the aircraft. He still has to find his bearing. He still has to find his altitude. He still has to travel towards the original destination.

So what Tinubu has managed to do, President Tinubu, is that instead of burning so much money to defend the naira, instead of struggling with an inflation number that doesn’t make their own budgeting to make any sense to themselves, what he’s managed to do is that he’s managed to cleverly cover how much money the CBN is using to defend the naira to make it look like we can’t see it. And because politicians are talking about factions, this and that, nobody’s paying attention, that the CBN is burning our money, which will be used for employment, infrastructure, and all of that, is burning that money to defend the naira and keep it at a level.

Secondly, what are they doing? They went and rebased the statistics so that inflation, which would ordinarily be getting to 38 per cent, is somehow rigged into about 21 per cent or 22 per cent. These numbers now make them able to communicate to themselves regarding whether their policies make sense. But the Nigerian people are not involved in all of these things. We use the feedback that we get from our stomach, the feedback with energy costs, the feedback from rent, the feedback from cost of education, the feedback between the spending capacity of double-digit, triple-digit wages. If you are earning a million naira, and you can only buy two tickets for you and your wife to go and see your aging mum in the village and come back, and your salary is gone, you know that whatever WTO is saying doesn’t make sense. The last thing I want to say is that WTO is not where you get your figures for your economics. WTO is where you get your figures for trade relations. And if you look at the tariff being bandied all over the world, everybody’s giving tariff against the other, WTO is not a place where you go down for wise people.

INEC has instructed political parties to refrain from campaigning until 150 days before elections, as per the law. An APC member, Farouk Aliyu, has criticized INEC for electoral issues. What is your view on the actions of political parties and INEC’s role in this?

Two things. One, the guilty party is President Tinubu and the APC. There’s nowhere you go. It’s only APC and Tinubu. INEC says most of the parties. When you are the leader, when you are the party in government, you set the tone. When you are the leader of the country, when it comes to obeying the law, you set the tone. There’s nowhere you go you don’t see the picture of President Tinubu, some members of his family already dancing and waltzing ahead of 2027. If you are not to be caught panting as an opposition, you would give an answer. If the government was governing, our policies would be in opposition against their governing methods. But since they are campaigning, the opposition has to be in a campaign format.

Then there are so many displaced politicians who were left, who were used by President Tinubu and dumped by the highway, who are now walking all over the place, looking for political accommodation. In the process of changing parties, looking for a party to join, dissolving NWC or some party, joining their crisis, politics becomes something that is now current. Now also you know that if you were saying that before, in the last one month, we have by-elections. We’ll have to work on the by-elections as well. I don’t think any INEC can say anything about that. The key issue is that if we want to go back to regular order, the president and APC have to go to regular order. Once they go to regular order, they have to remove all those obnoxious people all over the place. And then we will now be listening to them. They’ll be briefing us about how the budget is performing, how education is performing.

With last Saturday’s by-elections, did the SDP participate following the court order directing INEC to list its candidates?

Yeah, we participated. We have been participating. We did the congresses, we did the primaries, we did the nominations. And I think there are some misunderstandings with INEC with respect to the procedure. And the party decided to go to court to get an interpretation. And I think the interpretation now has given INEC proper guidance as to what INEC needs to do. And the reports from the various constituencies, from the 12 constituencies where the elections are being held, is that INEC is giving our party officials the materials that they need to participate. Agent cards, other things.

Has INEC complied with the court order based on what you’ve observed?

Yes, we haven’t had any of the constituencies where they said they haven’t complied. They’ve given them the materials, so I believe that INEC will comply. But tomorrow, of course, will be the day we’re going to know.

What are your thoughts on the internal conflicts within opposition parties and the implications for Nigeria’s democracy? Additionally, what do you make of the opposition coalition involving the ADC and the calibre of its politicians?

Let me start with ADC. I have stopped thinking about them. Because we have had an engagement with them. They came, before they went to ADC, they were to come to SDP. We had a robust conversation with them. They had no answer to 99 per cent of our questions. And we said, thank you very much. Carry whatever you’re carrying to the next bus stop. Here, you have not answered our questions correctly. We’re not dealing with you. Doesn’t mean that we don’t share the same objective with you, that President Tinubu is not supposed to be there. And it would be a mistake for the country, even for him personally, and for any other person, to keep him beyond 2027. We agree with that. But you haven’t answered our questions. So go on and do your own business as well. So having left us in peace, and carrying their whatever activities to their own place, courtesy demanded that you leave them alone.

Maybe in the course of electioneering in future, if we see some of them that are willing to answer the question of what is wrong with Nigerian politics, it’s not to do so in person. What is wrong with Nigerian politics is the ideology for getting to power. What is wrong with Nigerian politics is not APC as an alphabet or acronym. What is wrong is the philosophy of politics, the way you fund it, the way you arrange it, what you do when you get in there, and the lack of ethics. That is the idea that no minimum ethics required to be in politics. Secondly, every party is the same. We’re not the same with them. SDP and ADC, we are poles opposite. We’re not the same with them. And I’m not saying this because there’s a person I don’t like there. We have tried to engage them intellectually, ideologically. They gave up. They couldn’t answer the question. So leave them alone.

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