The presidential candidate of the Social Democratic Party, SDP, in the 2023 elections, Prince Adewole Adebayo, gives his perspective on why Nigeria is ravaged by disunity as well as the on the challenges of corruption, poor governance and offers the way forward. He spoke with some journalists in Abuja, and The Abuja Inquirer was there. Excerpts:
What has your party, the SDP been doing since the 2023 elections?
Well, what we have been doing after the election is to let people know that the conversation continues, because while we were campaigning, part of our talking points were for the immediate electorate. Most of it was for a longer vision about the country and it wouldn’t matter who won the election or who lost the election. Some issues would not leave us. And the earlier we build consensus around those issues the better so that hopefully they will not be subject of campaign.
We are probably one of the few countries in the world that are still campaigning about corruption. Every decent person knows that corruption is not good. It’s not a political program. It is admitted by most people in the world that a corrupt society will not go anywhere. So, if we all agree about that, no one will choose a president with respect to the attitude towards corruption because all Presidents, all presidential candidates, all politicians and all leaders at different levels of our national life will agree that corruption is bad. The fact that we need to be united around certain principles, like fairness, justice, equity and rule of law, should not make them to be political programmes.
So these are the conversations we’ve been having after the election so that people can know that these are not election issues. These are basic and fundamental issues of how to define our society and how to organize ourselves. So that’s what we’ve been doing since that time.
Are you still in the SDP or in another party now? What are your political leanings, thoughts, and plans for 2027?
I joined the SDP in 1991 when I was 19 years old and even when the party was banned, I didn’t join any other party. As close as I was to those who were running the PDP in those days, I didn’t join the party even though some of them were my clients. I have relationships with some of them, and when they started this APC, I didn’t even consider it for a second.
So, basically the only party, the only political party I’ve ever joined in my life is the SDP, which I joined when I was 19 years old, and that’s where I will remain, unless the party ceases to exist, but I can’t join any other party.
There were rumours that the SDP was working for the APC or open to negotiations. What do you have to say about that?
Well, we don’t know the rumours and talk, what I know is what the SDP is doing officially. I only participate in what the SDP is doing officially, but what I find out is that people who are in political parties tend to have loyalty outside their political party. I think it’s part of the problems we try to solve by bringing more ethical leaders. But 100 percent of my own politics is done inside the SDP. And this day and time, there is no way you could have relationship with people that there won’t be evidence of it. Either they will see you with them, you will take a photo with them, they will trace their money to you or they will trace the activity to you. So, if you really want to know where somebody belongs to, other than just passing rumour or propaganda, you will know. There may be elements of people in the SDP who have sympathies for other parties but what we tend to do is when we catch them, we relegate them or expel them. But for the SDP, we know it has three different epochs.
So, sometimes when we go out, when we meet them, this is always our party, we’re all together and things like that. So, if President Tinubu and many of the people around him still have that nostalgia about SDP, that’s one epoch.
The second epoch of the SDP was when Chief Alaye came with Pat Utomi and so many of them like that, and they started and they revived the SDP. And so anywhere I go now and I say I am a leader of the SDP, Utomi is quick to say, “no, that’s my party. The position you are now, I used to be there.” So that’s the second epoch of it.
The third epoch is what we are doing now, which is the SDP of young people who don’t have the history of having occupied any office in the SDP. We just want to revive the little to the left principle of it, which incidentally coincides with chapter two for our constitution, fundamental objectives and direct principles of state policy. So its achieved little to the right, never made it to the constitution. Everything that you find in chapter two is what you will find in the SDP. It has a unique constitution. Imagine if the British were to adopt the constitution and the objective, fundamental objectives and directive principle take the manifesto of the Labour Party and ignore that of the Tory or it is a chapter in the US Constitution that takes the platform of these Democrats and didn’t take that of the Republicans. So, I see that that’s a bit otherwise I think that the SDP tends to contest election against any party that is in power or that is available, and on many occasions we have defeated them. Also, on many occasions, they defeated us.
How will the SDP build a strong, sincere party with ethos and manifesto, given that most parties are just platforms for seizing power?
It is possible and it has happened. When it comes to manifesto, you have the school of politicians and governors. You can ask the director to ask your students to analyse, do a comparative analysis of manifesto and look at the SDP and juxtapose it against what the constitution says. So, the manifesto is okay for us, we are fine with the manifesto. And you also remember that our manifesto did not arise from emergency company of words put together for election. It is the product of the Centre for Democratic Studies.
The ideology is okay. What is required is democratic patience, because in my background, we are asked to do revolutionary patience. Not everybody wants to be revolutionary like me, so we say democratic patience, which is that I am running for president on ideas. I will do my best to win based on those ideas and if I win I will govern based on those ideas but if I don’t win and my time passes, another person is coming to carry that torch. That’s why, Abiola is not here but I’m running on farewell to poverty and insecurity. I’m running on the last programme; we still play the same Abiola mantra, the same jingle we’re running now in Abuja for the area councils and for Dr Obinna who is running for the Abuja Metropolitan Area Council, AMAC. He came to me and he had done all his manifesto, logo and everything. It’s following the same thing which the SDP used when Wole Adesina won this election. The first election to elect the mayor of Abuja was won by the SDP in 1992. Same thing that he used to campaign; same logo was added to the Abiola, so it continues. So, a time will come, maybe it will be in 2089, they will say SDP is 100 years old, so there will be a political party but that’s the idea so it’s not about the club gathering together and I give them money and they are running after me. This is a political party that is going to be available and the principles are well known, so that’s the party already and you can see that the party is already showing sign of discipline and discipline is getting things to run well.
And anybody who is from outside and comes to SDP to try to use SDP processes or institutions or SDP persons for qualities other than what the party is set up for, will be suspended or disciplined; the party wants to run itself.
The situation of our country is going to speak to our standing in the world and all of these things if they are the main reason you’re in politics I have no doubt that you would be patriotic and you will stay in your party and you’ll do what is right…
There are people in the party that I don’t even speak to at all. I don’t preach to them; I don’t speak to them because I know how their heart bleeds for the country. So, when they have reason to make a decision in the party, I don’t I want to disturb myself. I know that they are going to do what is right.
What is your opinion of Nigeria at 65, the journey so far?
I think that there are two journeys taking place, like a parallel universe. There’s a journey of the country as a whole, and there are individual journeys inside the country. So Nigeria, the 65 years is like someone who is on a train, maybe a train conductor, or someone who’s a cleaner on a train or someone who doesn’t work on the train. And the journey of the train is one journey. So, you look at the journey, the train started from Ido in Lagos and it’s going to Talata Marafa up North in Zamfara State. And so you see how the train is trucking along. And you can see for 65 hours, this train has not arrived in the journey that should have taken just about 12 hours. At the same time, the attendant inside the train is going from coach to coach, doing his duty. And it’s also counting whether he’s doing his own duty, how many journeys are you making around the train.
And for Nigeria, we started accidentally. Nigeria started merely as a trade zone, just like these days you have free trade zone and export processing zone; it’s a zone. It’s like the arbitrariness with which they created areas for discos. So we created Lagos disco, Ibadan disco, Benin disco, Yola disco, different discos, you know. So, that’s how Nigeria was to the Royal Niger Company. It was just a trade zone. And those trade zones were different kingdoms and communities and all of that. And somehow for the efficiency of the business, they decided to hand it over back to the British government and run it as a protectorate and part of it as a colony. And then after a while, they ran it as protectorates, you know, next to each other. In 1914, they said let’s amalgamate together. So, but 46 years later, the people who put it together just said, we’ve had enough of it, let’s see, let’s hand it over to the locals now.
If you look at what happened in 1999, if look at the period between when Obasanjo came in 1999 and now, it’s about the same period that the independence movement started, and we got independence within that short time. Without independence, we had people that were going to parliament who did not know anywhere 25, 30 or 100 kilometers away from the hometown. There was no sense in going to parliament in Lagos coming from, maybe, somewhere around Ikom which is now the Cross River State. Even when they went to Lancaster House to negotiate independence, they went there as strangers because I remember that my uncle represented Ondo at that conference and went with the Action Group delegation. And they were going there almost like the way Ukraine is going to meet Russia in Washington or somewhere or Switzerland.
On the economic side, we’ve managed to mismanage ourselves completely because our GDP, the GDP of Nigeria today should have been the GDP of any state only, not even up to the GDP of Lagos or Oyo, or Kano, or Anambra, or Rivers so we have done poorly in our economy and there are three principal reasons for that. We’ve stolen and exported a lot of our wealth overseas and a lot of this wealth is now being frozen. Many of the people who took the wealth can’t invest well and they can’t recover a lot of the properties that they have there. So, we’ve exported our money. There are two parts of the exportation of our money. So many people will buy public servants so this money is taken away by families, friends and proxies. It is a loss to the economy. You will excuse me but our GDP is so small that a country of three million elsewhere has a bigger GDP than us.
A country of 10, 20 or at most 60 million, has better GDP than us. So, it is our money being stolen and taken overseas. And the second part of the money being stolen is the money being stolen through over-invoicing and other wastages to foreign elements who come to help them take the money.
Before you can steal $1 billion, you have to let the foreigner to whom you are stealing it to exaggerate their entitlement to $10 billion and take the money away. All they are doing with solid minerals; they just come and take all the resources away and there’s nothing anybody is doing.
So now, the second reason our economy is doing poorly is lack of opportunities. We are not employing our people because the elites are claiming money they don’t need. Oil is big enough taxation so is solid minerals. They don’t really need you as long as they have enough money to buy houses on Island, buy estates in Dubai, buy houses in the best part of Europe, London and wherever. So I thought they have that; they don’t think that that is enough but they don’t realize that for Nigeria to be a country that can take out these people, we need to be budgeting about $300 to $350 billion annually in our federal budget. While at the states will do other things; I’m talking about federal budget a lot because when I did the calculation during my first time running for president, I realised that to meet the manifesto, to meet the objectives in the constitution as enunciated in chapter two, the budget needed to be $30 billion, and I had to continuously budget that. And I look at that year, the budget was 35 billion, so I had to budget 10 times more. And I started thinking, how are you going to fund this so that I don’t look like a clown? And that’s what led me to that famous noise I was making regarding that majority of our crude oil at that time, 80 percent of the crude oil was being stolen. And then I see the amount being stolen in the solid minerals. And when you see the amount being stolen in other ways from the fiscal aspect of the taxation and all of that, I realize that you can raise that kind of money. I want to see the amount of labour that our people can generate, productivity that they can do. If you produce 10 million pairs of shoes locally, you have where to sell them. And you see all the other skills. If you farm ginger and you have ginger oil, you could make more money.
If there was a Nigerian ginger oil company, it would make more money than any business. Then you go from sector to sector like that. If you go to fisheries, you go to many aspects, ypu will make more money. So I realized that if we invested a little more in our universities, we will save all the money. Some will still go abroad because of fantasy or other reasons, but you will have net inflow of undergraduates from other countries coming to Nigeria to pay money, to attend University of Lagos and go anywhere you have schools in Nigeria; people will come. So, with all that investment being made, if we do housing, that will throw our GDP up, and people can just by virtue of having an NCE certificate and letter of employment, be given houses to buy, and they can pay for 35 years. They will buy and then they have a structured way by which they know they have to work.
So the third element why our GDP is small is because of poor recording of the GDP. Recently, we did rebasing. When Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala was minister, we did a rebasing and the GDP shot up. But a lot of people have been captured in our GDP. And now, you can build a house in many parts of Nigeria, build a house, rent the house to the tenants and collect your rent. And today, I can tell you, statistically, there will be up to 200,000 people who pay their house rent today. And I’m not sure that it will be recorded anywhere, because rent income is not recorded. Maybe some states are trying to adapt.
