Prince Adewole Adebayo, leader of the Social Democratic Party, SDP, and its presidential candidate in the 2023 elections in this interview talks about the new tax policy which has since become operational, assessment of President Bola Tinubu’s administration in the outgone year, the fear of Nigeria becoming a one-party state amongst other issues. Excerpts:
What’s your assessment of the year 2025?
For the people in government, it’s a year of abuse. And for the media, it’s a year of distraction. We have a list of all the problems of Nigerians. For the political class, it’s a year of removing credibility from politics. It’s 2025 in Nigeria. For the political class, it’s a year of denouncing yourself. We’re just leaving the party. Just to see this, fighting, and for Nigeria, it’s a year of international harassment.
How would a foreign country be able to come to your country? Even to insult Nigeria before or criticize Nigeria, it was a serious matter. Do you remember the postcard where the US government sent the so-called Peace Corps? And one of the Peace Corps members criticized Nigeria in the postcard that they sent home.
The entire postcard was proscribed. Because Nigerian youths came out to condemn how can you come to a country and insult Nigeria? The kind of messages we get from Mr. Trump and the US, and then the motion that we hope we can perform in social justice. When you look at all of that, it’s a year that we’ve got no way of exacting an opportunity to decide on peace or something.
Now we’re going to present 2026 budgets, and they started with constitutional impossibility, of saying that they are repealing the 2025 Appropriation Act. Why do we want an Appropriation Act that has to be repealed?
The moneys spent, is it to be regarded as stolen money, or lost money, or lost opportunity? In all of the contracts awarded, what’s wrong with those subheads? Are you going to revoke all those numbers? Clearly, we don’t have the government. We don’t have people of power. We don’t have access of money to be able to engage them and tackle them. So 2025 was a year where we beat the government without being able to tackle them. And Tinubu was appointing everyone employed on the team as well. So we want to analyze the year as the year where we introduced, or expanded, the most dangerous youth enslavement program in the country.
In a country where, under our constitution, tuition is supposed to be affordable. No one is expected, under our constitution, to take a loan to go to school. It’s one of the operations that arose in America. But in America, if you take a student loan, the professors will not be able to study. In the case of Nigeria, if you take a student loan, you’re paying interest to the government, or owing government interest.
At the state government level, almost every governor is to be found, on the average, in Abuja. Lining up to wait for Tinubu on one of these medical trips or unexplained journeys.
So, it’s the year of governors shutting down the radio stations, and bringing us to the secondary level, the sub-national level of states. About six or seven governments changed their parties to join the APC and many more are begging and spending money to join. There is no attempt to get the politicians to interpret the problems of the people and want to deal with it.
And it’s the year with the most military thing you can remember. A general was killed by so-called terrorists. You really don’t see a general being killed like that. And the other military event is Tinubu’s minister, and the Navy officer shouted at each other about a piece of land that neither belonged to them. So, it’s the year we’ve come to the conclusion that it was the year God gave to us to try to make sense of our lives and we decided not to give it to him in that year.
We are ended that year with the threats that by next year we are going to be officially living under the most bracing act of legislative treason, where the fiscal tax law passed by the National Assembly is being suspected by serious members of the National Assembly as having been tampered with either by the president or the part of the National Assembly or both of them.
So, there are so many things. It’s the year when Nigeria couldn’t meet even the most basic record.
In a few months’ time, the process for the 2027 election will officially commence and it is known you are interested. But, are you not worried that Nigeria is gradually moving to a one-party state?
I’m not worried at all because logic suggests to you that if you have one tendency elite, it’s a matter of time before they will stop pretending to be different and move into one political party. If you look at most of the political parties that have been in existence since 1998, when we started this current transition, which is now 26 years of governments, they elites are the same. Most of the political parties are the same.
They are mostly neo-liberals. The elites are uniformly corrupt. Uniformly pointless.
So you can find someone who has been in government for eight years and you were asked to summarize their political philosophy. You don’t know it. But you can find out their political philosophy when they leave office and you charge them to court. So these elites don’t understand the essence of a republic.
They don’t take the job seriously. They don’t have a sense of leadership. And they’re not contributing to anyone. Their economic philosophy is contrary to what is in the constitution even though they swear by the same constitution when they are about to resume office.
That is not the language of someone who is collecting power from the people. This is for the benefit of the people.
And returning to the people and becoming an average citizen like the rest of us. So, all of them now have summarized their aspirations and realized that Tinubu Group is the most successful in all of their career, all of the power structures and all of that. So they decided there’s no point competing with them. They just go and align with them. He is the Capon now and they just follow him.
That is what people call one-party state. But in reality, there cannot be a one-party state. Because the natural dialectics is that any union between hungry people and the overfed people cannot last. Any union between unemployed people and people who are considered unemployed cannot be together. A union of poor people and those who stole all their wealth cannot endure. So we are reaching a point where the real opposition will not come from the political class.
The real opposition will come from the Nigerian people. Because what Nigerian people need is a political party in which the Nigerian people, the ordinary person, is invested in. And is part of and is committed to. And it’s a mass movement. That is the end of the so-called one-party state.
So the summary of all of this is that the Nigerian people are having an opportunity to confront the elite with a political alternative. And now that they are enjoying the drama of problems in these elite classes, it is more important to pay attention to how responsive the Nigerian people are to these problems.
The one party state can’t happen. We will defeat them and we will send them out. The earlier you get it easy for the common will of Nigerian people to be expressed through election, and he loses the election and goes away, the better for him and the country.
Are you contesting in 2027 or is your party forming a coalition?
I am running and I have already told my party. My party officially knows that I will contest in 2027. I am in the process of it. There is no major political parties in Nigeria. Unless you are substituting it for the ruling party, which I can never join, and my deputy can never join.
Why?
Because I have met criminals. I have been dealing with criminals. First, you have to occupy an office. If you take an oath of office, you need to keep to it. If you were on your way to join a political party, would you join a political party where they are accusing each other of altering legislation? Would you do that?
It is obvious that you can’t claim to be patriotic and still be a member of the APC. It doesn’t work. You can’t say, I am democratic, but I also support apartheid.
There are certain things I don’t agree with. You could say, well, I like Tinubu, but I don’t care about Nigeria. So, it is not allowed. Because if you interact with politicians, they will say, oh, he is my mentor, he is my friend. You cannot be two things at the same time that are contradictory. You cannot say, I care for the rule of law, and join this government.
But you have been accused of not seeing anything good in this government?
Because I don’t see it, it doesn’t exist. This has to exist. When I woke up this morning, I didn’t see you until you arrived. So, if something good happens, I will see it. But if nothing good happens, how do I see it? So, I cannot deceive myself.
For example, they say they are reducing the inflation to 16 per cent, about the time when the price of everything has increased. So, why do you calculate your inflation?
Speaking of policy, the tax reform law is in place already. As a lawyer, what is your take on that?
First, it’s a bad law. It’s an unjust law. It’s an impractical law. It is a distraction. What is the essence of taxation? Taxation has four critical ingredients in its philosophy. One, it must be a stimulant. It must stimulate the economy. It must be taxed. When you have a tax law, it must make people want to produce so that it helps you to stimulate the economy.
Two, it must be distributive, fairly distributive. That is to say, you produce tax, it must help you to fund, to take resources from the area where it’s wasted to the area where it is useful. For example, if we had a case of homelessness, or maybe you can tax expensive homes, exorbitant homes like mine, and use the money to do affordable housing. If you have, like Ethiopia, problem of public transportation, you can tax those who bring in luxury vehicles and use the money to buy buses, and I take bus lanes. So, you could tax fabric, imported fabric, so those who are wearing expensive cloths; you can tax them and use the money to buy khaki and hat for the poor. So there must be an adjustment, that tax is a modulator.
Three, you must generate more revenue in the long run. Lastly, it must be transparent and easy to follow. You cannot create a tax law that makes someone who is selling in the market thinking of the need to hire a lawyer. If you have been following the last three months, everybody’s thinking, “oh, are they going seize my money in the bank?”
It’s either the president is not in the country mentally or he is not the country physically because he used to be an accountant. At least in the area of finance, you ought to have a bit of a clue. He used to be an auditor, I have a feeling that somehow he’s not interested.
When I went through that law, I read through it, I could easily see the trick. He’s not interested in collecting more revenue. He’s not interested in stimulating the economy. He’s interested in the fiscal singularity. Because he has achieved political singularity in his mind, where almost all the governments are in his party. So what he wants to do is achieve economic singularity, where all the businessmen are his business partners. And then achieve administrative singularity. He’s not the one who does all the business, the government collects all the taxes.
So this law is poorly written. And while you are distracted by this clause, the blue clause, the clause you forgot about? Why you say that the customs can’t collect some customs duties anymore? It’s something that we’ve been doing from pre-colonial times.
If you look at our old arrangement, the Joint Tax Board even banned states from using consultancy. Nobody should use consultancy to collect revenue because most of government revenue collection of revenue is a sovereign duty. It’s like using private people to do the job of the Navy, like they are doing some of the contract design, or using mercenaries essentially to do the work of the armed forces. And very soon they will start using vigilante and private guards to do the work of the police. It’s unconstitutional in our own country.
So this is why they are distracting everybody. It’s a bad law. It’s not going to achieve anything.
Secondly, it is a violation of criminal law to have this law because members of the National Assembly are saying that the copy which they have and deliberated upon and they have in their votes and proceedings and they gazetted; it’s not one that has been circulated now. That they have gone to import into the law provisions that National Assembly did not approve but did not deliberate upon at all. They’re determined to implement it. Why? They have no respect for the country, the people in it.
Second, they need money for election, because they want to buy everybody out. So they need that money. Three, they want you perpetually be able to be part of those who are collecting your money, even after you have voted them out of government, like they have done at the lower level before. So it doesn’t matter if they eventually vote them out of their 10-year espionage. They will still continue to cross their legs at their homes, and each time you go and pay tax or you are forced to pay tax.
