The 2023 presidential candidate of the Social Democratic Party, SDP, Prince Adewole Adebayo, has labelled President Bola Tinubu administration a historic disaster, insisting that Nigeria needs a clean political break.
In this interview, he spoke on a wide range of issues, including the readiness of the opposition for the 2027 elections, performance of President Tinubu and the controversy surrounding the Electoral Act, among others. Excerpts!
The Independent National Electoral Commission, INEC, has announced the dates for the 2027 general election…do you think the opposition is actually ready for the election?
The opposition being ready is a given. What’s more important is whether the people are ready. Democracy is about the people. If you ask me whether I am ready to take over from president Bola Tinubu and govern the country better, I would yes, I am ready, even today. You can drive me to the Aso Rock Villa now and ask me to take over, you will see a better result today, not tomorrow. I am better on every front. I am better prepared, better intentioned, better programmed, surrounded by better people and with clearer vision, closer to what the constitution wants.
It is the people who need to be ready to change their government. The idea that the duty of opposition is to hold the government to account is misplaced. The primary duty to take the government to account are the different branches of government. The national assembly has a duty to oversee what the executive is doing and the judiciary is to ensure that both the legislature and executive comply with the laws of the land. It is now left for the people to hold their elected officials accountable. My job in the opposition is to form the next government as I don’t want to choose opposition as a career. I don’t want after this election, you continue to call me opposition. I want to be called president and Commander-in-Chief. I want to be in government. I don’t want to be a professional opposition.
Inter Party Advisory Council, IPAC, recently announced that it would boycott the election if an amendment is urgently not done on the electoral act, is that a right decision?
The right decision is to have a good Electoral Act. You saw me at the National Assembly being tear-gased by the government when they were in the process of passing the law. Mine is to ensure they pass a law which encourages the people to come and vote; a law which deepens democracy and which makes credibility of the election a matter of law.
That is what the government needs to do. For the political party to prepare for the election while still imploring the government to do the right thing but ultimately, it is what the Nigerian people want. It is not an issue between the government and the opposition. It is a discussion that all Nigerians need to have which is that the Electoral Act as currently passed and signed by president Tinubu, is not what Nigerians want. I think it is more about saving the regime and saving their own skin, not losing control of the electoral process to the people.
Do you support IPAC’s threat?
I think IPAC is right to say that if you are not going to make the rules fair and clear from the beginning, then they have the right to say they are not going to participate under that rule. But, I will encourage every political party to still continue to do their underground work and not be caught unawares.
Boycotting an election is a very drastic democratic tactic. Isn’t that effectively surrendering to the ruling party?
No, the assumption is that if almost all the political parties or majority of the political parties are not in government or don’t participate, then you don’t have legitimacy because you cannot self coronate and it is a drastic reaction to a drastic legislative coup d’etat which the people in power today made to ensure that the electoral system is put in controversy. This is because the more we discuss this issue of electoral law and things like that, the less time we have to discuss the content of what we are bringing to the government. The more people realise why am I participating in this thing, then, the voters tend to have some apathy towards the electoral process.
My approach to it is to say we keep agitating for the right thing to happen, we keep making sure we communicate to our law making bodies, the Senate and the House of Representatives that what they have done; that is servicing themselves and President Tinubu is not their constitutional duty. Their duty is to get feedback from their people and amend the clauses.
Are you saying the law as it stands today does not provide a level playing field?
Of course, there is no level playing field as there are a lot of boobytraps but we have a duty to still defeat the government. The duty the Nigerians have is to make sure that no member of the national assembly returns because they are the ones who surrendered the sovereignty of Nigeria to the whims of one person, so vote all of them out. And once you vote them out, you can then put patriots there.
But the immediate reaction of the IPAC is to say if you want to rig the rules, then carry the ball and play on your own. But, we are also working to see that at the end of the day the final solution to bad law is to change the lawmakers.
Will you and your party, the SDP, join the boycott if IPAC goes ahead with the threat?
That is for the SDP to make a decision when it meets at its NEC next Monday. But, what I have encouraged our people is to say that if we could hold elections under colonial government and we could hold election under the military, even the military didn’t want to go but June 12 election was held under an administration that didn’t want to go, I think we would still have to hold the election as bad as the law might be to defeat the government of the day, that is what we need to do.
Some persons who appear to be the new face of the opposition are now in the African Democratic Congress, ADC. Many people believe the opposition must be united if they must defeat the Bola Tinubu government and APC, but here, you don’t seem to agree or align with them, what is happening?
I don’t agree with that analysis. If your aim is to defeat Tinubu per say as one person and you don’t care about who is coming next, then you can go along that way. Nigerians are tired of bad government.
Are you willing to work with other opposition figures, because if I read your thought correctly, you squarely alluded to the former Attorney-General and Minister for Justice, Abubakar Malami, former Governor Nasir el-rufai and former Senate President, David Mark, all chieftains of the ADC?
How can you say you are against the infestation of insects but you are killing mosquitoes and cockroaches. You cannot be that hypocritical. There is a reason I am opposed irreconcilably to President Tinubu. It is not because of his name, it is because of his deeds and just belief systems and actions. These people whose names you have mentioned share exactly the same thing as Tinubu. They have been in government, acted like him or were like him in some situations.
So, my being opposed to Tinubu on certain basic principles automatically means that I am opposed to them too based on those principles. It’s nothing personal. If you say you don’t want carnivorous animals because they can eat the flesh, you cannot say I don’t like lions but Tigers are welcome. You need to be consistent. The establishment, some of their wings are in government, some of the wings are left outside of the government and effort to enter the government has failed and some of them are now forced to be in opposition but they are not opposed to the ideas of President Tinubu. They are opposed to the fact that they are not in his government.
We are talking on behalf of the Nigerian people who have been marginalised for decades now. In trying to come to power through peoples’ effort, we are not going to undercut ourselves by aligning with those; immediately they are in government, Tinubu will be laughing at them. What we are trying to do is to make you ignore all of them, focus on the Nigerian people. If the Nigerian people are interested in forming a government in line with the constitution of Nigeria and making sure that decency is returned to government and the public service is clean, transparent and corruption free and the people who are going to be in charge of our affairs will be servants of the people, then, they will go to people like us, they will boycott all of them.
President Tinubu is the mascot of failure, sending out all the failures we have in government since we returned to civilian rule. You cannot, therefore, remove him and restore those who started what he is following now. Is it rigged elections you are talking about? Election was rigged before Tinubu became president. Talking about corruption, corruption was on before he came, he just continued and amplified that. What you need to do is clear all of them at once. If you are not prepared to clear them at once, then it means you are prepared yet to liberate yourselves.
So, are you saying you are not willing to work with the ADC, for example?
As presently constituted, if I work with them, then I am a hypocrite. It means that what is driving me is personal hatred for Tinubu. It means I don’t really hate corruption, non-performance, indecency in government, bad governance because these people represent that. So, why would you now discriminate in your fight against corruption? Are you not seeing them? Are you saying a political party which can admit somebody who did an obvious fraud with AirNigeria openly in the airport, are you going to say we are blind to that? Are you going to say that if you were attorney general and you are against the rule of law and now that you are in a party and now you are leading in that party and the party is comfortable with you and put it on a high table? Are you saying we are going to talk about rapid development of Nigeria with those who were in the senate for 20 years without one single progressive law?
Are we going to say that because people are now angry with the president, we are now going to align with them when there are over 250 million Nigerians we can align with who have clean records, are patriotic, served in many capacities and are very much available and energetic.
Our political parties are not the garden of saints. Some would say if you must change the status quo, there would be people who may have seen the light and believe they could have done better. Are you looking for an association of saints?
No. I am looking for decent people who are honest.
Do you have such a political party in Nigeria?
Yes, the SDP. Come to the SDP, you will see it because we take that pledge, pledge to Nigeria my country to be faithful, loyal and honest.
So, is the SDP a party of saints?
No, it is a party of citizens who know that truth matters and if you have misbehaved in the past, that is not completely bad but you just have to admit that I have misbehaved in the past and this is what I stole from the government and I am returning it and I am saying today there shall be no more corruption. We are not saying you must be a saint, but you must be decent and honest. If you are doing restitution, or you are trying to cover up your deeds, it is your choice. Every political party doesn’t have to look like the other. If your political party is an association of disgraced people who still want to make noise or either want to use politics to cover accountability or generally feel entitled that they must be in government all the time, why should I have problems with you?
The only time we had issues with them was when they were audacious enough to say they wanted to come to the SDP and we asked them if they have seen themselves in the mirror lately? You cannot come here. Now that they are in their own party, they are fine, we are not against them.
Are you invariably saying that you are ready for 2027?
Yes, I have told my party that and I am working with my party on that. I am making sure I am going round the country to prepare the people. My presidency is in the hands of God and when Nigerians are ready there is no other magic. If the people are ready, we will come. If they are not ready, we will continue until they are ready.
Realistically the fear is that the party may not have the national political machinery required to compete with the APC entrenched structure in 2027…
Let the political scientists have that fear. What I can let you know is the amount of hard work that we have to do to make the party a party of the people. Remember this was the party even under the harsh conditions of the military that won the June 12 election that brought democracy to Nigeria and brought the first political martyr in MKO Abiola and brought June 12 which we all now observe as democracy day.
It is not about competing with the APC, what we need to do is to sell the party to the people. Once the people embrace the party once again, all these speculations will go by the way side. Our mind is focused on the people. When the people are ready, we will defeat any force.
Do you have the structure to face the new reality?
Our duty is to change the reality because if you continue with this reality, Nigeria will go to hell and God forbid. If we are going to change our direction, we need to change our consciousness. What the SDP is doing, we are going to where the people are, waking the people up, getting them interested in the country and ensuring that at the end of the day they can feel proud that they belong to a political party. Once that is done, you will see that the structure will be organic and will be as diverse as the country.
The 2027 election will be an election of ordinary people, do you agree?
Yes, because that is where we can make a change. If it is a big man versus big man, one gang of the elite versus another, the people will not partake because they know that if a band of tigers is struggling with a den of lions over a carcass, no other animal is going to take it out of it. But if it is the movement of the people, you see that the elite will know that their time is over.
You love Nigeria and are willing to do anything for the country, yet why are you not willing to work with Tinubu?
Because Bola Tinubu is not Nigeria. Bola Tinubu, in some way, is anti-Nigeria. Whether he means it to be anti-Nigeria or not but he is working to make the country weaker and less united.
Is it fair to refer to Tinubu as the worst president?
There are three reasons he is the worst president. One, he is the one in charge now where we have the most possible impact of bad governance. Two, he is doing it in a manner that is not just incompetent, but an organised agenda to try to personalise the country and create a Bola Tinubu singularity.
Are you angry because all the governors are now in the APC?
Those governors don’t mean anything to me because they don’t mean anything to their own people. They have just magnetised all the failures to one side. I don’t worry about that. President Bola Tinubu is disregarding the law. I just updated you he has three appropriations he signed himself, ignoring all the three.
I have been an investment lawyer in many countries. There are many motives for buying a company that is distressed. Sometimes, you buy the company, you strip the assets and you can see that many of the companies that were privatised in Nigeria, people have taken their best assets; they never revived them. They took the best assets of them and left the public with the debt.
Tinubu is just like a doctor who took over a sick patient, with the aim of the doctor for the patient to die so that he can inherit the property, that is what he is proving to be. He is worsening the case of Nigeria as he is applying dangerous methodology for the patient even though the patient’s problem is just to put him to sleep for a few hours but what he is doing is likened to somebody having a bad haircut and he then cuts off the head in order to solve a bad haircut. I don’t have anything against him in person as he has not offended me in any way but the way he is running the country.
There are three clear things you need to understand, your laws don’t matter. He does whatever he likes if it works for him politically. Two: don’t mention accountability. He wants to and he has succeeded in emasculating the other arms that are meant to make him accountable. Thirdly, he does not want the good health of the opposition. He does not want a healthy democracy. If only he just listens to many of my suggestions, including the manifesto of the SDP which he used to have with him in the past, if he reads that, because he used to be in his innocent days, a member of the party, but he is now gotten to a point where he is bigger than his own party, he dictates what goes on there. In the SDP, no matter how big you are, you can’t be bigger than the party.
So you don’t credit the Tinubu government with anything?
The only credit I can give to him is keeping himself alive despite the troubles he personally faced. Beyond keeping himself, he has not done anything for the country and it is unfortunate that trillions of public money has been passing through their hands and these monies have not reflected in the welfare of the people. Even the local government where he comes from, their life isn’t better but worse. The state he comes from, their life is not better, it is worse. The region where he comes from, their life is not better but worse. You needed to go and play the tape of what happened at Ikenne (Ogun State) at Awolowo Foundation. The President was the special guest of honour and he sent a senior member of his government to come and speak. After I spoke, he spoke and the people were yelling at them, why are you lying to us?
Do you have a feeling that this coming election might be free and fair?
These elections have to be free and fair. We have no other alternative. They may not want it to be free and fair. We, the people, have to make sure it is free and fair. We must make Nigerian people interested in it. It will be free, fair and credible when 75 percent to 80 percent of the voters show up but if you are showing up at seven percent, that’s why we are reaching out to the people, don’t let anybody discourage you.
INTERVIEW: Tinubu worst president, a disaster – Ex-presidential candidate, Adebayo
