Nigeria’s problem is Tinubu, not APC — SDP’s Adebayo

The presidential candidate of the Social Democratic Party (SDP) in the 2023 general elections, Prince Adewole Adebayo, speaks on the state of Nigerian politics, the SDP, and coalition politics. Subair Mohammed writes…

What actually is the state of your party, the SDP?

Well, there are no factions in the SDP, but there are tendencies. And for a political party like us, we had one common tendency. Ideological convergence was already set up for us.

We’re a different party. We’re lucky, because when the party originally came into existence in 1989, before even members came into the party, we already had a path to go. Remember the NRC-SDP? This is to the left, this is to the right.

And the politicians who wanted to go to the left side of the ideological divide decided to go to the SDP. And that’s how we came up with Yar’ Adua, the senior Yar’ Adua, and so many other people like that. Eventually, we ended up with Abiola and the Farewell to Poverty and Insecurity.

So then, when the party came back after the military interregnum, and we followed that ideology. But, you know, as you look for electoral success, new people join. And some of these people who joined are came with their own tendencies. The politics, the way they know it. So you expect to see some negotiations, some conflicts going on.

And secondly, you will see that the party is a party of law and order. The party is a very carefully crafted party for law and order. Every organ of the party works.

In many political parties, these organs are decorative. So if you say there’s a National Working Committee, it could be three governors sitting down on top of a money bag, telling you what to do. In the SDP, no matter who you are, if the NWC is calling you, you better go there quickly and listen to them.

If the State Working Committee is calling you, you better be careful. If the world is calling you, you better be careful. You could see that the National Chairman of the SDP, duly elected and substantive chairman, is Shehu Musa Gabam. Nobody’s questioning that. The National Secretary, Olu Agunloye. But Gabam, due to the activity of the National Working Committee, over which he presides, suspended him.

And he has comported himself, even though he argues vehemently that there’s no basis to suspend him. He’s not guilty of anything, and he’s been following the party constitution. But he has kept to that.

So for the past two months, he hasn’t come to the office. He’s obeying the order of the NWC. Occasionally, when the party needs him to do anything, answer some questions, or perform any activity, he still obeys.

So it’s a party of law and order. But there are people whom I have some sympathy for, who are new to the party, who assume that, OK, if this is the national woman leader of the party, national youth leader of the party, or any official of the party, if they don’t look like they’re billionaires, you think that, OK, maybe if I promise to buy them a car or give them some money, they’re going to overlook their authority. They won’t.

So that shock, that cultural shock, is what you see. So many people, when they face discipline in the party, or they have a request and the request is not met, they will resort to what they have been used to in their previous places. But a political party that wants to grow has to have a room to know that people are learning.

So we just watch them, let them do all the drama they need to do. But the SDP is not about drama at all. There’s no faction, the organs are there, and everything’s intact, and if anybody’s in doubt, you can go to INEC, who nominated the candidates, who is going to conduct them tomorrow, and so on and so forth. So the part is in order.

What do you make of the internal squabbles, opposition coalition, ADC, and the caliber of politicians there?

Let me start with ADC. I have stopped thinking about them because we have had an engagement with them. They came, before they went to ADC, they were to come to SDP.

We had a robust conversation with them. They had no answer to 99 percent of our questions. And we said, thank you very much, carry whatever you’re carrying to the next bus stop. Here, you have not answered our questions correctly. We’re not dealing with you.

Doesn’t mean that we don’t share the same objective with you, that President Tinubu is not supposed to be there. And it would be a mistake for the country, even for him personally, and for any other person, to keep him beyond 2027. We agree with that.

But you haven’t answered our questions. So go on and do your own business as well. So, having left us in peace and carrying on their whatever activity to their own place, courtesy demanded that I should leave them alone.

Maybe in the course of lecturing in the future, if we see some of them that are willing to answer the question of what is wrong with Nigerian politics, is Tinubu in person. What is wrong with Nigerian politics is the ideology for getting to power. What is wrong with Nigerian politics is not the APC, as an alphabet or acronym; what is wrong is the philosophy of politics, ranging from the way you fund it to the way you arrange it, what you do when you get in there and the lack of ethics, which is the idea that no minimum ethics is required to be in politics. Secondly, every party is not the same. We are not the same as them.

SDP and ADC, we are polar opposites. We are not the same with them. And I’m not saying this because there’s a person I don’t like there. We have tried to engage them intellectually, ideologically. They gave up. They couldn’t answer the questions. So leave them alone.

Recently, former Governor of Kaduna State, Mallam Nasir El-Rufai, called on voters in Kaduna to vote for the SDP candidates, despite claims by the SDP that he has been expelled from the party for 30 years. How do you address the question of expelling or banning someone who is reportedly not a member of your party?

That question is for the National Working Committee of the party. Left to me, I don’t want to ban anyone. Left to me, anyone who is banned, and they are repentant, they behave well, should be accommodated. But the organ of the party has the right to make a decision regarding membership; the Supreme Court of Nigeria has decided that. What I can say, generally speaking, is that as a member of the political party that obeys its own rules, if the party says this is how we go about it, I will follow the party. However, the party has sufficient organs within it for anybody, including someone who was banned or suspended, to approach that organ of the party, to make his/her case.

So, for me, who is a member of the party and who wants the party to grow, anyone who says vote for the SDP is my friend. Whether he was in my party or not in my party, whether he was suspended or not suspended. I go around telling people to vote for SDP, not because of me, but because the country needs alternative politics.

So, Is Mallam El-Rufai a member of the SDP party or ADC?

We know about him being in the coalition. Well, what I can say, and secondhand information, is that from party records, from what party officials are saying, he’s not a member of the party. But if he wants to be a member of the party, I’m not against him being a member of the party.

I just have to follow what the party says clearly. But the party officials will explain how the processes work. But what I can say is that this is how you know a member of a party.

You will see their name in the ward register, where they come from. And at the national level, the national secretary will have overall numbers of members and their particulars. But one way or the other, it is left, it’s a voluntary organization.

It’s left for the member and the party to try to work it out. And we who are inside the party have been advising one way or the other to see how.

Recently, El Rufai called the ruling APC a failed, clannish, and visionless administration that has plunged Nigeria into deeper socioeconomic misery. Do you agree with his description of APC?

He’s not saying anything new. He’s saying in 2025, after many waters have crossed his own bridge, what I have said in 2022, 2023. So it’s echoing me now.

So, I can’t charge him for copyright, but I can say welcome to the club. But we’ve been saying this for some time. And we’re saying this not out of animosity or anything.

The results that we are getting from the performance of the APC in the last 10 years resemble the unsatisfactory results we got under the PDP for 16 years. And if this result must change, we must change the political tendencies that are in authority. Changing your political party without changing your tendency is just a mere nomenclature.

Can you break it down? What do you mean by changing political tendencies?

There is a governing principle, which is feudalistic, that is responsible for why our democracy is not in congruence with the result. Now, that mentality where first you don’t respect the power comes from the people.

You don’t respect the rule of law. You don’t want to show accountability. And you don’t want to separate money from politics.

That tendency where the bigger your money, the bigger the results you get in politics. And then when you go to politics, the bigger money you need to roll over your political investment. That kind of mentality, if you have it, you can jump from APC to SDP to ADC to ADA to YYY.

If you carry that mentality, wherever you go, it will pollute that place. So if you are in APC, you don’t even leave APC, and you decide to change your mind. For example, President Tinubu doesn’t have to leave the APC.

He’s in government. If he decides to take a playbook, something out of a playbook of SDP, and govern properly for the Nigerian people, follow chapter four of the Constitution, and chapter two of the Constitution combined, and decide to be accountable and to be a constitutional democrat, he doesn’t have to leave his party. Results will change.

But because you have squabbles in your party, you now leave and join another party. But you don’t want to drop the tendency that caused the tension where you’re coming from. You want to now pollute the new place with that same tendency.

You just change alphabets. In fact, now they are running out of alphabets to use. But what you need to do, what is going to change the life of Nigerians is that we need a different politics.

How can the mindset of politicians be shifted to prioritize the interest of the electorates who elected them into power?

First, you need new politicians because recycling the old politicians, not just a matter of age or other things, is like a leopard, if you don’t like spots, then you don’t need to bring leopards because leopards cannot change the spots. So you need to listen to new ideas and new politicians. When new politicians come with new ideas, we should not be too conservative as a society because a conservative society is trying to consolidate on its own progress, whether obtained lawfully, historically, or wrongly.

But when you see a conservative society, they have something they’ve achieved, something they’ve grabbed from the world, which they want to preserve. But a country ranking with 90, 70% poverty rate, a country that has no infrastructure, has no institutions working, you cannot be conservative. You have nothing to lose.

You need new ideas, you need new leadership, you need to renew yourself. And the ideologies we have, articulated or not articulated, is the ideologies that politics is for the people who are in politics and governors is for those who are in government. That’s why everybody is trying to be in government.

No matter the condition set for them to be in government, they want to be in government. And when they’re not in government, their position is to struggle willingly to be in government, not to change what is going on in the government. So it’s left for Nigerian people.

How many politicians do we have in this country? The politicians in this country are not up to 2% of the population. So it’s not about what the 2% are doing or not doing. It is what the 98% want to do.

The WTO DG, Okonjo-Iweala has commended President Bola Tinubu for stabilizing the economy, but emphasized the need for safety nets to create more jobs and put more money in the people’s pocket to be able to address the hardship in the country. What do you make of her statement?

The statement is correct in the paradigm of neoliberal economics. So it’s like saying a doctor who mistreated 1,000 patients and they are dropping dead by the dozens, has now managed to reduce the number of those who are dropping dead to like one a week.

So you can say you stabilize the situation. It doesn’t mean that the situation is correct. It’s saying that the trauma that the APC-PDP policies threw the Nigerian people into, or even the tailspin that the economy was going into, has now stabilized.

So it’s like a pilot who ran, because he doesn’t know what he’s doing, ran into terrible weather, flew above the level given to him, faced the wrong direction, and now is flailing in the storm; he has now managed to balance the aircraft. He still has to find his bearings.

He still has to find his altitude. He still has to travel towards the original destination. So what Tinubu has managed to do, is that instead of burning so much money to defend the Naira, instead of struggling with inflation number that doesn’t make their own budgeting to make any sense to themselves, what he’s managed to do is that, he’s managed to cleverly cover how much money the CBN is using to defend the Naira, to make it look like we can’t see it.

And because politicians are talking about faction, this and that, nobody’s paying attention that the CBN is burning our money, which will have useful employment, infrastructure, and all of that, is burning that money to defend the Naira, keep it at a level. Secondly, what are they doing? They went and rebased the statistics so that inflation, which would ordinarily be getting to 38 percent, is somehow rigged into about 21 or 22 percent. So, these numbers now enable them to communicate to themselves regarding whether their policies make sense or not.

But the Nigerian people are not involved in all of these things. We use the feedback that we get from our stomach, the feedback with energy costs, the feedback from rent, the feedback from cost of education, the feedback between the spending capacity of double-digit, triple-digit wages. So if you are earning a million Naira and you can only buy two tickets for you and your wife to go and see your aging mom in the village and come back and your salary is gone, you know that whatever WTO is saying doesn’t make sense.

The last thing I want to say is that the WTO is not where you get your figures for your economics. WTO is where you get your figures for trade relations. And if you look at the tariff, being bandied all over the world, everybody’s giving tariffs against the other. WTO is not a place where you go now for wise people.

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