Prince Adewole Adebayo is the leader of the Social Democratic Party, SDP and its presidential candidate in the 2023 general election. The party appears to be the new bride of politicians in the country as notable names in the polity have been decamping to join it. In this interview, the lawyer turned politician, said while the party opens its doors to everyone, it is governed by processes and procedures which must be followed. Excerpts:
Is the SDP the emerging mega force or mega party ahead of 2027? Or has the SDP become the beautiful bride for disgruntled and internally displaced politicians?
Well, it is normal for people who are not satisfied with the state of affairs to try to find a remedy for them and to go to places where they think they can have a platform. So, the first set of people who are not satisfied and who have chosen the SDP are the poor masses of Nigeria because the problems in our governance impact them more than the elite when you talk of hunger, unemployment, insecurity, rising factor costs, and other social problems.
But, occasionally, when you don’t address injustice, poverty and all kinds of inequity, it will start affecting the elite little by little. What the poor can endure for 40 years when it happens to the elite for 40 days, they cannot endure it.
So everything that we have been saying about President Tinubu and the APC and even about President Buhari before Tinubu came, are happening now. And many of the chief explainers and defenders have started flocking to our side when a bit of what we have been saying started happening to them. So, we cannot now reject people from coming to us.
We’ve always been the one inviting every Nigerian who believes that the current system is not fair to come and join us in giving the people an alternative platform. So, if you come, you’re always welcome. If you become a Muslim at the age of 70, that’s when you start going to the mosque. If you become a Christian at the age of 80, that’s when you start going to church. But, we cannot criticize people’s motives for coming. A political party is a public institution, like a church, or a mosque.
We know the political antecedents of some of these people that you are opening your arms to and we know why they have suddenly found SDP as a beautiful bride; aren’t you worried?
Well, what I can say, generally, is that as a political party, we know where we are going and the people who are coming are wholeheartedly welcomed. We’re not grudgingly welcoming them. We are happy to have them because we are sure of our processes. We are sure of our systems, and we have understudied the calamities that befell parties that came before us.
We are the oldest party. We are older than APC. We are older than PDP. And we have had good experiences over time. And if you look at the convention that produced me in June 2022, if you compare the convention that produced even Donald Duke, which Jerry Gana went to challenge, and you look at the convention that produced MKO Abiola, we’ve always had very good conventions. Our conventions are not controversial.
In the case of Abiola, he won the election and they annulled it. In the case of Duke, they went to court among themselves, and the party thought that they are not doing what the party wants the two of them were expelled; let them go and fight it out. So in my own case, almost everybody, I think everybody who contested against me agreed to work with me and became directors on the campaign. So I don’t see a problem here. We have a process that works.
At the moment who is the National Secretary given the travails of Dr Olu Agunloye with the federal government and with moves against him?
He’s still our Secretary. He will be our Secretary for as long as his tenure lasts.
He has a tenure that began on June 8, 2022, and I will carry him till June 2026. So he’s our National Secretary.
You have to understand that politics is a dynamic game and there are moves. So, life is all about competition. I’m making moves to take President Tinubu’s job. He knows that. The reason I’m here is because I’m making moves to take his job. These jobs are not inherited. But when you have a legal system, you have a constitutional order, and you have institutions and processes, I think that you would probably be aiming for the national secretary’s job, but the only time you are going to get it is when the competition comes.
Remember also that the SDP is not a party of drama. So, a lot of the dramas that people are seeing are dramas that take place outside. When you come to the SDP, some of the names you are mentioning here are names that make news, and they are highly important people in our political system. But, when they come to the SDP, they are just members. Strictly speaking, there’s nothing else.
You describe the SDP as the oldest political party now, and a lot of people probably don’t understand that. Is the SDP we have now the same SDP that we had in the aborted Third Republic that produced the late MKO Abiola?
It’s the same SDP, the same characters, except those who died or those who left to go and join other parties.
I thought that SDP was proscribed alongside the NRC at that time, right?
It was proscribed, but when you proscribe, once you have a new constitution, the proscription comes to an end. Once we’ve promulgated the 1999 constitution, you can’t proscribe again.
But the 1999 constitution will not expel the SDP…
That’s why we went to register. We registered with the same name, the same manifesto and the same slogan which Abiola used to run. Same logo of farewell to poverty and the white horse and that horse is going to be there for a while. So what I see, generally speaking, is that a lot is going on. Everybody has their purpose and ambition.
Like I said, the analogy is like a church. Some people go to church to cure diseases, some go there to exercise their faith, some go there to look for a marriage partner, some go there to look for a business partner and some go there for a salary. If you work in the church as a cleaner, that’s where you work, but the church remains the same.
So there may be people who come to SDP because they want to use their platform to kind of address personal injustice they perceive. Some use it to try to come and seek political offices, some are just there because they want a good country for us. But whatever the motive of every person, it’s a legitimate desire.
What the SDP is trying to do is to be a political party that people can look at any say, this party has processes, the institutions work. So when you look at the configuration of its National Working Committee, you see people who are talking in the interest of the party and the country. They are not surrogates representing personal interests, and you cannot come and say, oh, I don’t like the youth leader. I have my bodyguard, my son or my PA. Let him become the youth leader. The party will say, no, we don’t work that way. So everyone is representing a zone or a region or some interest. In addition to that, they represent some ideology. So it’s clear. So don’t let us worry.
Nigerians are worried that when political parties like the SDP that has been crisis-free, with no unusual things happening, no allegations or counter-allegations of embezzlement and things like that, begin to open its doors and begin to swallow all manners of bids, that there is the possibility of you losing your ship and disfigure the party’s form. What is your take on this?
What I see is that it is a constitutional mandate for us to get as many Nigerians into our midst as possible. We must become the majority party. We must have more members than most political parties, and we must now make sure that the members we have, have quality. We are kind of amused about the enthusiasm and the noise in the media, but in reality, every week, for the past several years, we’ve always been winning people into the party.
You said you are not worried because you already have an advanced knowledge of why these people left where they were and made your party the destination. You know somebody like El-Rufai and you know the reasons he left the APC, don’t you?
I don’t know all of it. I’ve never been to APC before and I don’t pay attention to their noise. I pay attention to what they do in government, which is terrible. I don’t know what they did inside their party and who went to Chatham House; who greeted and who didn’t greet. I don’t know.
I have 24 hours in a day. I spent like 20 hours studying Nigeria’s problem. I don’t study drama outside. Once you are outside the government, I won’t pay attention to you again. I pay attention to those who are inside the government, their inefficiencies, their mismanagement, their laziness, and their inability to live off the office. But once they remove you from government, you are on your own in your house or inside your party, do whatever you like, I don’t follow you.
I follow almost what every Senator does. You will see that our Senators and our House of Representatives members in the National Assembly don’t do drama and they face their committee work. They brief the party. When there’s an issue, we interact with them. They just want to make sure that they infuse our ethics and our manifesto into politics. And they don’t do drama. You will never find them in any discipline, fighting anybody and all of that. So, we don’t ask them to give us money and all of that.
Will you be happy, for instance, if tomorrow you are sitting at home and you just hear that former Vice President Atiku Abubakar has dumped the PDP and is headed for the National Secretariat of your party?
I won’t be at home. He will have informed me the he will be coming. So they don’t sneak in. So, we will have a discussion if he wants to come in.
