The presidential candidate of the Social Democratic Party (SDP) in the 2023 general election, Prince Adewole Adebayo speaks on the influx of politicians into the fold of the SDP and the ideological distinction between the current SDP and the SDP of old. Subair Mohammed writes.
You’ve described the SDP as the oldest political party in Nigeria, but its on record that the former SDP alongside the NRC were proscribed after with annulment of the June 12, 1993 election. Is the SDP of today the same as the SDP that produced the late MKO Abiola in the aborted Third Republic?
It’s the same SDP, the same characters, except those who died or those who left to go and join other parties. It was proscribed, but when you proscribed, once you have a new constitution, the proscription comes to an end. Once we’ve promulgated the 1999 constitution, you can’t proscribe again. That’s why we went to register. We registered with the same name, the same manifesto and the same slogan Abiola campaigned with. Same logo of farewell to poverty and the white horse and that horse is going to be there for a while.
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We all have our purposes and ambitions. 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 address the personal injustice they perceive. Some use it to seek political office, some are just there because they want a good country for us.
But whatever the motive of every person is, it’s a legitimate desire. What the SDP is trying to do is to be a political party that people can look at and say, this party has processes, the institutions work. So when you look at the configuration of the 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. So, everyone represents a zone or a region or a certain interest. In addition to that, they represent some ideologies. So it’s clear. So don’t let us worry.
What’s the strength of the SDP of today?
We are a popular political party. We have memberships all over the country. We have two senators, and then we have Houses of Assembly members. We have local government chairmen and we have all of that, so, the number of senators or former senators of our party, is not an issue. We’re not minimizing those who are coming in. But they’re not coming in because of their past title or whatever because we have that in abundance here. What we are trying to do is to ensure that this party has processes because society is run by institutions. And those institutions use processes and those processes are based on principles. And then you train people. When these incomers come in, there will be some culture shock because you want to show you are a big man. So, this is the kind of orientation we have in the SDP. So, when you come in, leave your ego at the door. Leave your ambition at the door. Leave all your problems at the door. There may be a member of ours who has a dispute with somebody like Tinubu or whatever. We don’t have a dispute with Tinubu. We have a dispute with their misgovernance. So, we want to focus on that. We don’t have an issue with anybody in person. If you don’t govern well, you are working against Nigerian people and their welfare and their security, and you are breaching Chapter 2 of the Constitution, and you are violating your oath of office, we are tackling you on that basis. Your personal affairs, we don’t want to know.
Also, in the last election, we would have had two governors. One, you saw what happened to us in Kogi State. Everybody saw what happened to us in Kogi State. Look at the numbers. We won on numbers. All the way, they went to the rig. They didn’t use BVAS in the local governments. Go and read the case. We are very fast at that with cases. All the Supreme Court was saying, yeah, we see the paper, but you didn’t front load. And they did not give it to us. So, we did very well. In Ekiti State, we did very well. We’re doing quite well, but we are not going to use unethical means, like go and pay voters, go and rig. We don’t do that because we’re not desperate. We’re just trying to help Nigerian people to get the benefit of their government. So, we’re not going to come and become criminals as a result of that. And I don’t want to embarrass anyone, but you will see how tough SDP is and it’s a benefit to those who are coming. It’s a very tough party because of principles. I welcome everybody, but I always tell people that when you are in SDP, don’t feel big. Don’t feel big at all because the party has processes just come in because the party recognizes talent.
You said you are not worried because you already have an advanced knowledge of why politicians picked interest in the SDP. For instance, El-Rufai, you knew why he left his party for 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 in 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 in 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.
With the influx of aggrieved politicians defecting into the Social Democratic Party (SDP), the SDP seems to be a nest for dissatisfied and internally displaced politicians, are you not worried about the antecedent of these politicians?
Well, what I can say, generally speaking, 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 as the presidential candidate of the SDP in June 2022, if you compare the convention that produced even Donald Duke, which Jerry Gana challenged, 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 wanted, the two of them were expelled; let them go and fight it out. So in my own case, 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. We are like a military school where parents send their deviant children to go and learn manners. So, when you see how our system works, you see our national chairman, he’s just 52 or 53 years old. He looks small and young, but he’s tough and he has experience. So, no matter where you are coming from, he knows what to do. Our national secretary has worked in parliament. He’s a first-class brain.
The position of the Secretary of the party is still a matter of dispute, does the SDP have a national secretary?
Dr Olu Agunloye is still our secretary. He will be our secretary for as long as his tenure. 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. But it doesn’t mean that they won’t tackle you here and there, but our processes are solid. 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.
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