The candidate of the SDP in the 2023 presidential election, Prince Adewole Adebayo, in this interview, speaks on the successes and failures of President Tinubu in the last two years. He also speaks on party politics and the change in the leadership of the NNPCL.
On May 29, President Bola Tinubu will be two years in office. What’s your assessment of the policies of his administration?
The successes or failures of this administration are the reflection of the stomachs of the people, the tension on their faces, and the number of unemployed people. The parlous state of infrastructure will show that. The fact that our currency is highly depreciated and devalued will also show that. The higher debt will show that. So, let’s just say, they are just beginning to show. They just spent two years trying to settle down. I don’t know what you want to do with the Minister of Finance and Minister of Budget and Planning because they’ve done two budgets. Their budget performance last year was too parlous. They are in the mid-20s in their performance of the budget. So, if you have 20 percent performance of your budget, it means that, at best, you deliver over 20 percent of the promises you made. So, essentially, seven and half of 10 promises they made failed. So, that is not a good start. But I have advised them, and I’ll keep advising them, that two years is enough to make a difference. In the next two years, we’ll be competing for the same position again. But, I plead with them to try to have compassion and to repurpose at least 10 percent of their budget towards direct intervention in the areas of employment, to do quick things, things that if you start you can get results in 180 days, to start working with employment, start dealing with reducing cost of food and essential commodities, and to do something about public transportation.
The CNG, which they started, is in the right direction, but they are very slow. So, they don’t have all the time in the world. They may not have more than four years. They should not be deceived. There is no guarantee of a second term. I’m even working to make sure they don’t get a second term, and I’m still here. So, there are many people like me, trying to make sure they don’t get a second term.
How are you planning to achieve your dream of stopping the second term in office of President Bola Tinubu and the APC in 2027?
First is to engage with them, to make sure that they know that we love the country. We are not against them as persons, but we are against their policies. And to take these policies one by one and to ensure that we expose these policies and the weaknesses of these policies to the Nigerian people. It is in the interest of Nigerians, in the interest of even the APC members, because there are millions of them who are suffering as well as the rest of Nigerians. Because once you leave your party headquarters, and you go into the taxi or Uber or you go to the market, or you go to school or hospital, nobody cares about your political party anymore.
We will take that campaign and talk to the Nigerian people. I believe that people who say that President Tinubu is unshakable, forget about the humanity of President Tinubu, just a human being like the rest of us. No human being can say I’m unshakable, only God is unshakable. Secondly, those who said it in the past, including PDP, say we’ll do 60 years in power, they barely did 16 years.
What’s your fate with the SDP, do you stand any chance of clinching the party’s 2027 presidential ticket?
Getting the ticket depends on the members of the SDP. They know me. People are joining my party, and we are welcoming them. You can see how active I am in welcoming them. The only little issue we have with some of them is to change the culture of where they are coming from. If you have not been in an environment where there are rules or where rules are taken seriously, you need to get used to such an environment. Some of them are doing some Boy Scouts, black market operations. We are dealing with that. We welcome them to the party. We believe that their coming will strengthen the party. I am not at all perturbed that these names that you have mentioned like Nasir El-Rufai, Vice President Atiku Abubakar, and other people are coming. In fact, I was told that even former Governor Peter Obi is coming. A lot of people are coming. We welcome them. We don’t have a problem.
Is Peter Obi joining the SDP?
Supposedly so but until somebody joins, we don’t know. But his people are coming. My National Secretary has also informed me that they are talking. They are coming. But when they come in, and we follow the rules, and we allow one person to emerge transparently, clearly, without cheating, without any criminality, without all sorts of things that Nigerians would say, oh my God, these same people have become other type of people as well. The way we did our convention in 2022, the people applauded us transparently, no court case, no crisis, and no allegations. If they can change our culture, and they don’t have to fear that, oh, if I don’t cheat, I can’t win. If I don’t bribe, I can’t win. If they follow the way we do in SDP, and we produce a good alternative to Nigerian, and the Nigerians see we are going to manifestly defeat APC and retire President Tinubu to Lagos or wherever he chooses in Nigeria, and we are going to start taking care of Nigerian people for day one.
Does the SDP have that kind of structure?
Yeah, you can say we are structure-less, but we rely on Nigerian people. We don’t have any structure based on criminality, structure based on bribery, or diversion of public funds. We rely on the structure based on the people, and the people who are working hardest for the SDP to come to power are APC because they have turned the furnace fire on the back of the Nigerian people. They are making Nigerian people suffer to get paid and when they get the pay, it cannot buy them food. They are making life tough and they are making decisions that do not favour the people. They are spending trillions on projects that are invisible. So, people are driving on roads that are not paved but they are building roads by the side and nobody can see the roads. We have a N55 trillion budget that doesn’t trickle down to the people. So, President Tinubu is working hard for us to come to power and defeat him. He is working hard to see that he will be the last APC president. So, they are working hard in that regard because they are not taking care of the people.
With the inability to form a credible coalition, don’t you think it will be very difficult to defeat Tinubu in 2027?
It is difficult but not impossible and we are not letting our cat out of the bag yet. What we are saying is this, the fact that there are many people wanting to be president, I want to be president and everybody knows that, Vice President Atiku Abubakar wants to be president, Peter Obi wants to be president and there are other people who want to be president who are not talking that doesn’t make any difference.
What makes a difference is that all of you are in the same framework and if the framework is firm reasonable and decisive and at the end of the exercise, everybody comes together to pull behind the winner is going to work. What is not going to work is a coalition or whatever you call it that does not carry the people along because politicians overate themselves. What we want to do now is an alliance with Nigerian people. That has not been tried before because what APC tried before that produced President Buhari was a coalition of politicians and that is what we are telling some of our friends who are looking backward to think forward what you need to understand is that a coalition of politicians would not impress anybody anymore because the first coalition of politicians in 2015 only satisfied the politicians and left the people high and dry and poor. So, right now what the people want is not a coalition of politicians but a coalition with a clear ideology that people can identify with, clear rules for competition and we do it on time. I can guarantee you that once the intention is clear that we want to serve the Nigerian people, they will give us a chance and we are going to make President Tinubu a one-term president.
What’s your thought on the change the leadership at the NNPCL?
Well, it’s an executive prerogative because the president is the Minister of Petroleum. Even if he wasn’t, he is the Chief Executive Officer of Nigeria. So, now that he’s Minister of Petroleum, it means that he has looked at what he wants to achieve and he feels that he needs to rejig his team. I wouldn’t say I wasn’t expecting it to come. In fact, I was expecting it to come earlier with respect to the fact that Mr. Mele Kyari has survived three presidents.
So, with respect to the downstream side, I think they’ve done quite okay, especially with the pipelines, the gas pipeline, the AKK that they’re doing. So, they are most successful in the downstream. So, I think the President wants to pivot to the upstream, because I know the new NNPCL CEO, Bayo Ojulari’s records, and I think the upstream sector is probably where they want to try their luck now.
But it doesn’t mean that the change of this board could not have been done better. If I was President, I would have asked those who were on the board to resign, rather than just fire them, especially since you’ve managed to renew their mandate only recently. I don’t know what he has seen, but I thought that with what I’ve seen them achieve outwardly, especially in the last three years, I thought that would have been more honourable to have asked them to resign, rather than just fire them like that.
Would you say the new NNPCL CEO is a better choice and a fantastic decision made by the president?
For me, Ojulari is a qualified professional and I respect that, but there are hundreds of them, or let me not be uncharitable, there are dozens of them. What’s going to make a difference is not whether you have an engineering or a marketing background. What’s going to make a difference is how you relate with the chief executive. The relationship must be such that it’s virtually an independent one because the president is a politician. He has political objectives. He runs a public sector system. He can print his own money if he wants to and he can burst his budgets but, for a private sector-oriented NNPCL, you have to live within your means, you have to play by the market rules and you have to listen to professionals more than you listen to politicians. You have to do what makes sense in the long run for the shareholders, even though Nigerians are the shareholders. So, which means that there will be a philosophical conflict between what the President wants to achieve politically and what the NNPCL wants to achieve commercially and corporately.
President Tinubu recently gave specific directive to Ojulari to give him 2,000,000 barrels per day in the next two years and 5,000,000 barrels per day in the next five years. Isn’t this a banana peel?
All I can say is that I am not easily enthused by politicians giving corporate directives to a company that has its own board and its own management targets and realities. So, this automatic alacrity issue, I think, is more for the political optics. You don’t make your decision on the day you put a new CEO. Usually, there is a long-term plan. And if I hear these numbers correctly, they are not far from what the former CEO pursued. So, I think the best we can say is that the president is probably re-echoing what he has been briefed before by the former administration or the target he had with the previous administration and he is letting Mr. Ojulari know that these are the things he is aiming to achieve. But, I don’t think it’s something that he has just carved out for Ojulari. It is something that the old management also pursued. The past management has started that journey. And even on the downstream side, there have been some new arrangements with the IOCs to explore new fields and to meet the target because of the fiscal problem that Nigeria has.
If you look at our budget, we are not meeting the OPEC quota they are giving to us. I would expect three things. One, those targets look too modest. Maybe the president understands the executive and management capacity of NNPCL. They should have been at least twice that target. Secondly, how they perform also depends on the angle that the president shows to them. If the president allows them to run as corporate people, commercial people, there’s less pressure to use the golden egg of the NNPCL to finance the political programme of the government, to finance the deficit of the government, and all of that. If they allow them to work and develop their value chain, and have a proper healthy balance sheet that you will find in Petrobras and some other competitors that they might have. If you follow petroleum marketing or petroleum production or petroleum industry accounting standards where there are no opaque parts where you’re just financing politics or funding public sector programme, Ojulari will be a lucky person.
So, the bulk lies with the president because if it starts with a commercial mind, start with clear targets, but when it’s under pressure, when elections come, when you need money to fund elections, when you need to satisfy social programmes, if you start to exert pressure on Ojulari, he might become another Kyari or the earlier version of Kyari. So, the president himself, the minister of state, Senator Heineken Lokpobiri, and many of the people who are involved in the supervision of Mr. Ojulari should give him a break and should allow him to use his corporate judgment to make best decisions.
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