The presidential candidate of the Social Democratic Party (SDP) during the 2023 general election, Prince Adewole Adebayo, spoke with select journalists on the All Progressives Congress (APC)-led administration in the country, his foray into politics, and issues surrounding election petitions and the judiciary in Nigeria. The Guardian’s ADEWALE MOMOH was there.
What is your assessment of the year 2024?
Speaking from a personal point of view, it was a good year. Once you are alive and opportune to see the end of the year, you will agree with me that such a year is a good year.
For the country, the year 2024 was a mixed year, which means that it had lots of good news and bad news. It’s also a challenging year because of the continuation of the economy we inherited from 2023 and other social issues such as security.
We had many challenges in the year 2024. Towards the end of the year, we had tragedies in Ibadan, Okija, and Abuja during the distribution of foods. It is a very tough year for the people of Nigeria. It’s also a year where we saw the bigger impact of the policies of 2023; we saw a lot of factors rising; we saw inflation, unemployment, and a lot more.
But it’s also a good year for Nigerians because we had no serious community clashes; there was no religious unrest. What we are just facing are the normal consequences of our governance methodology and style.
Overall, I hope many families in Nigeria can say it’s a good year. But if there are families in Nigeria that say it’s not a good year for them, they have a case to make, and we sympathise with that and hope that this year will be a better year for them.
So, do you agree with President Tinubu’s statement during his recent media chat that the government is doing very well?
I don’t agree because President Tinubu is not in government but only in power. He’s slightly better than President Buhari, who was neither in government nor in power. Tinubu is in power, not in government. He’s using the power for other things, so he’s not able to know what it means to say the government is doing very well.
Tinubu missed the opportunity to set up a sound government. He has not been able to use most of the talents in the country, and even within his own party, he has not used the strongest hands, the cleverest minds, and the most agile bodies in his government. He has not used the best ideas; so he’s wasting opportunities. If he said the government is doing well, I can understand because he is not in government. In the Interior Ministry, the minister there is giving signs that he is ready to govern, but outside that, there is no sign that this government is ready to govern. So, I don’t agree with the president that his government is doing well.
But many people commended the presidential media chat…
People will commend the president. It’s the same thing you find in the family. If you have a six-year-old boy who has not been speaking, the day he calls ‘baba’ everybody will be happy because they are already losing hope that this child may not speak. But after a while the initial excitement will wear off.
The president is not a ceremonial masquerade that should speak only on new year or on October 1. He is a public servant who should give an account of his activities, who should convince the people that he is on the job, that he understands what he is doing and the effects of what he is doing for the people, and that he is aware that he is leading other people and not a sole administrator. If what he said on the first day he came to power is all he has to say several months after, I’m not impressed with that.
A presidential media chat should be a routine; it should be done regularly, and the president should answer questions on a day-to-day basis to convince the people that he understands what he is doing and that he has a vision of what he wants to do. Overall I am not impressed.
Should Nigerians be hopeful considering some of the policies of the government?
Nigerians should be hopeful at all times. Even if there is no government; even during the civil war, when people have no government, no food, and no security, they should be hopeful. You can be hopeful despite unserious leaders and bad governance. Being hopeful should not be conditional. Your hope should not come with a condition. Hope is what you need to not give up. If it happens that there is not much to hope for in a government, that government will also go.
Whatever Tinubu is doing or whatever he fails to do, he is not the only alternative. He only has a period of four years, so the hope should go beyond that. Even while he is there, policies that he is implementing are not the only policies that will be implemented. Your hope should not be invested in one individual or period.
People believe that the hardship in the country is as a result of the policy of subsidy removal and that until that policy is reversed, the hardship will continue. Do you agree with that?
That is an overstatement. Before Tinubu came, there were problems. Even under the colonial government, we have structured economic problems. During the military era, we had lots of collapsed infrastructure. Nigeria was not a paradise before Tinubu came. Anybody who takes over from Buhari is already sure to have bad luck. Goodluck almost finished everything before Buhari came; so it was a succession of issues.
Tinubu does not understand the economy at all. They don’t know about the part of the economy that can generate jobs for them. They are joking with security and they are deceiving themselves. If they know all of these, two years should have been enough to manage the bad economy they inherited from Buhari, but they worsened it. The first thing to do during inflation is not to raise it, but they did; they brought hyperinflation.
If you ask them to generate employment or reduce inflation, they will claim that they have four years and can still do it later. But when it comes to subsidies, they want to remove it on day one. Why is that the only policy they must do on day one? Why can’t they build infrastructure and generate employment on day one? It shows you that they do not understand the economy or they don’t want to understand it.
Before joining politics, what were you doing?
I was doing good citizenship and trying to obey the laws of the country. If you go as far back as 1999 to television and radio stations, you will see what I was doing. Abroad, if you come out for any political position, the media will do a background check on you and know everything. But in Nigeria, the media will ask the candidate to tell them about him or herself, and the person will tell a lot of lies.
So, I think we are now in the stage where the media should invest in background checks of any candidate that comes out to contest for any political position. Even if there are things a candidate wants to run away from, the media will know.
Basically, I have been a lawyer. I’ve been practicing both in Nigeria and overseas. Since 1999, there is no head of state that will say I’ve not tried to help them, and I did so without receiving salaries or contracts in return. When I saw that it was my turn to lead, that was when I came into politics to offer leadership. Those we used to assist and offer advice to now need to step back to assist and support us.
There were so many petitions in the last general election. What do you think should be done in terms of the controversy surrounding election petitions?
Firstly, there is nothing the NJC can do, because it’s not set up to interfere in right or wrong decisions in court. It is set up to deal with corruption. The way our laws are written, judges are entitled to reason with law and facts because it is a reasoning process. It can be faulty, and the judge can make an error; the judge can mishear something or make an error.
Secondly, Nigerians don’t go to the judiciary for justice in election matters. They go to the judiciary for the confirmation of the person they support. So, if the judiciary doesn’t confirm that person, it is already biased. Politics itself is a game of bias; it is not rational. Voters don’t vote for the right person; they vote for the person they like. If the election didn’t start with merit, how can it end in merit?
Lastly, elections in Nigeria are so badly conducted that there is no nature of complaints that can get you justice from the court. From the primaries, the party bribes delegates. The media who are supposed to cover the campaign follow the person who pays the most money and not the person who has the idea. Essentially, the election already has problems far before the election day.
People don’t pay attention to campaign financing where a candidate can raise money from any criminal source and spend any amount far above the legal limit. When you put any of these together, they will suggest that by the time you go to tribunal, you are only complaining about what happened on election day.
Tribunals only listen to what happened on election day, but most problems in elections happen far before the election day. That is why it is difficult to use the judiciary to resolve electoral disputes. I recommend that we should overall try to improve our election by following the law from the beginning to the end.
The people who are privileged to participate in elections should not use it for personal gain, such as selling their votes, collecting bribes, and other stuff. Also, anyone participating should understand that he or she has a right to participate but not a right to win except when you actually win. So, it’s not every election that you lose that somebody has cheated you.
Are you saying that the fact that SDP lost in the last election didn’t give you goose pimples?
I was sad that we lost the election because of the kind of government we would have brought into existence. I’m not sad for myself personally; I was sad that it’s another wasted opportunity. I knew that the way the system was being played was not a sincere system.
On October 1, 2021, in a live show in Abuja, I told them that it was a bad idea to rely on electronic transmission because INEC might just switch off the server. I said many other things that came to pass.
I knew we were going to be in trouble in 2023 when I saw the amount of money that people were spending in the primaries. SDP was one of the few parties that did not pay money to delegates; many parties paid money to delegates in dollars. I don’t know how any delegate will come to me and demand money from me.
There was one state during our primaries that someone told me the delegate from the state said they would only vote for the person who reimbursed their transportation, and I told them that I don’t want their votes; they can keep it.
I saw other political parties where they were even budgeting openly; you will know that people like that are criminals. If they can do that in their primaries, what will they do in the general election? If you look at the spending by so many of them, it’s far in excess of the spending allowed by law. So, I knew many things were going to go wrong.
When we lost the election, I knew where the problems were. I wasn’t satisfied but I knew the nature of what went wrong was not the things you can tender in court. I can only complain about the returning officer or ballot boxes, but most of the crimes were already committed before that day. In 2023, there is no justice the Supreme Court could have done because all of those who wrote petitions were liars. So, there is nothing the Supreme Court could have done.
With your type of personality, most people believe that you are in the wrong party; what is your take on this?
People have a wrong attitude because if you are trying to change the country, you should build a platform for change.
If you are trying to be in government at all, the best party to go to is APC because they have all the means and attitude about how to grab it, snatch it, and run away with it. So, if you want to be in government at all cost and you don’t care how you get there and what you do when you get there, you should go to APC.
If you have money and you want to use the money to buy anything, you should go to PDP; they can sell even the logo of the party.
But we need to change the attitude because the way our country is being run can’t bring anything sustainable. Politicians are under tension; they are investing too much in it. After the election, when I was speaking to my fellow candidates, they were talking about how much they lost. I didn’t lose up to one per cent of what I had. I even spent more money on the election of others in my party than I spent on my own because there is no way I can give you money to vote for me or to support me. I believe that by offering myself, I have done enough.
Most people will say I should have gone here or there because of my talent. But if you get to the government in a wrong way, even with your brilliance, you will look foolish. How you get to power is how you will govern. That attitude with which you campaign is what you will use to govern. If you are sitting at home and a godfather puts you there, you will not have peace till you leave because the godfather will want to dictate what you should do or not.
If you are funded by businessmen, they will want more money. You can’t ask them to pay taxes or to do their business within the law. You can’t ask bankers who gave you money to stop stealing money from their customers. You can’t select quality people because the person who gave the most money will send you a list of morons to make ministers in critical places.
(Guardian)
